Breaking the Curse ⛓️💥
Broken Chain ⛓️💥: An emoji for emancipation, broken block-chains, breaking streaks, and dead urls
There are exactly two countries in the world that have no official National Day: the United Kingdom and Denmark. There's an old joke about this, that the United Kingdom doesn't need its own national day because it's indirectly responsible for so many other countries' national independence days 😂😂😂. In that spirit I suppose we also have them to thank for a new emoji in our keyboards: the broken chain ⛓️💥⛓️💥⛓️💥
The first thing people associate with this emoji is literal, physical shackles. These are the ones broken despite a system that binds us. Dating back to ancient history (metal chains have been in use since 225 B.C.) broken chains are used globally to commemorate Emancipation Days, Abolition Days, and Independence Days. As of March 2024, broken chain emoji (and a few others 🐦🔥🙂↕️🙂↔️🍋🟩🍄🟫) began popping up in Android and iOS environments thanks to the Unicode Standard.
But chains are not always physical. They can be the limitations we set on ourselves, the stereotypes others place on us, the assumptions that society makes about us. We break shackles that are symbolic, systemic, and personal — they are as real as any physical chains.
Broken chains are used to reference everything from military procedure (as in: “don’t break rank”), in poetry, inspirational posters, slang (as in: extremely good), protest signs and yes even in proverbs (We’ve all met *that* team captain keen to quote, “You’re only as strong as your weakest link”.) A search for “freedom” in Google Images suggests broken chains are a familiar metaphor for freedom. Even Gemini and Chat GPT can agree that “one of the the three most common symbols for freedom” includes “broken chain”.
And here-in lies the strength of this emoji: it is ubiquitous and contains multitudes. It doesn’t have to collect dust in your emoji junk drawer because it illustrates common, complicated, abstract concepts we all wrestle with at some point in our life:
Your origins (⛓️💥 = snapped bonds)
Strength (⛓️💥 = release, both mentally and physically)
Relationships (⛓️💥 = end of a friendship)
Oppression (⛓️💥 = freedom)
Shared Destiny (⛓️💥 = breaking a cycle)
Interconnectivity (⛓️💥 = disconnected)
Perhaps I’m a bit of a romantic for thinking that a broken chain emoji ⛓️💥 reminds us that each broken link is a struggle turned victory. Much love to all of you fighting the good fight for today and future generations. For the rest of you breaking chain letters or linking to dead blogs … this one is for you too ⛓️💥
This article been updated to include the new emoji included in the Unicode 15.1 release.