Or you could see Unicode as a case study of how to build and maintain an international, cultural, technological building block that enables communication across cultures and deals with the challenges that come with it. Including complexities introduced when actively trying to deal with diversity and taking cultural bias out of a technology.

Harmonizing unity and diversity is a deep paradox. Skeptics call it an oxymoron. I've heard some philosophers call it an outright contradiction. Christians call it our most sacred mystery. In any case, it's definitely not something that just happens, if it ever happens at all.

Unicode is turning into an art database. It is a not a good way to do this. They should have instead created a master database of icon art, in vector format, so that everyone can share in a worldwide collection of art. It started from Japanese cellphone practices, which were non-standard graphics put into Unicode, and now is out of control. Each machine and OS now has to update their font tables constantly, and because the graphics are company specific, they aren't guaranteed to communicate uniformly. Huge amount of duplicated effort and why limit all clip art to a few hundred new per year? This is shared artwork, not letters in a writing system. Unicode was never intended to be a clip-art database. Big mistake.