I had plans for the week-end. Ambitious plans. I was going to do my taxes. Win the war against spider mites. Reorganize my “tmp” folder.
Then someone tweeted about r/place. It was a timelapse of the first twenty four hours, in one minute:
Reddit gave Redditors a blank canvas and a rule: each Redditor can place one pixel every 5 minutes. I hadn’t followed very closely the first time, when they did it on April 1st 2017. This time, the place would be open for pixels until April 4.
The timelapse showed gigantic flags fighting for space on the place, with Ukraine quickly gobbling up a huge swath of space, and Germany establishing a slightly less huge but prominent stripe on the bottom, and all kinds of smaller art sprouting on the banners. There was an American flag getting regularly attacked by green monsters and faceless pixel clouds of various colors. Occasionally, void attacks would send big sprawling tentacles destroying everything on their path with a manic grinning face.
I’ve always been fascinated by decentralized units working towards a shared goal. Arthur sent me this awesome Attenborough clip about termites:
I am such a fan of Attenborough.
Another one I used to think about was the battle between Jack and Oogie Boogie at the end of the Nightmare before Christmas. Jack doesn’t kill all the critters that Oogie Boogie is made of; instead, he pulls a thread to get the containing sack to unravel. The bugs scatter around, unable to cooperate and act as a coherent villain any more:
Jonathan Haidt just wrote a piece in the Atlantic about how humans might be headed that way by tugging at the threads themselves. And there are our own cells too, how do they add up to an entity? Except when some revolt and start cancers. Or when it’s necessary to sever the connections between right and left brain to make epilepsy more manageable, and now you have something a bit akin to two brains in one. You show a spoon to the right brain and ask what it is, the person answers “I have no idea” while their left hand rummages through a box and hands you a spoon. Even within the confines of our own body, we’re not just our own cells, more like a village that carries a much, much wider variety of bacteria proteins than our own.
Back to the first week-end of April 2022. Redditors are now deep in a race to self-organize. I looked around a bit, and it was already a fascinating ecosystem. There were old subreddits resurrected from the 2017 r/place, bent on not falling into the same traps. R/placefrance wanted to get Asterix in there this time, and was negotiating alliances with the Czechs to get it there. Coordination discords were popping up everywhere.
And there was OSU. Not Ohio State University — an old rhythm game with a pink bubble. No, I had never heard of it before either, but they quickly became one of my favorite Reddit factions. Last year they got wiped out from the final map, so they devised a plan this year of assigning a guardian to every single pixel of their logo in a huge spreadsheet (spoiler: this year's endgame was different so plan was moot).
The twitch streamers barged in, sending their hundreds of viewers on attack crusades, opposed by fierce defenders of opposing streamers:
The bot vs. non-bot question was a recurring debate. Mostly, people were awed at the mere dedication and unity of the streamers’ audiences.
The level of organization and sheer determination to rebuild in some factions was a thing to behold. OSU’s organization by birth months to assign sectors to defend on the logo, their dedication to diplomacy with smaller factions and loyalty, earned it many a meme.
France was organized by birthday season. Kameto, one of the key French streamers, would call out each season wave, every minute, so that the four seasons could cover the 5 minute interval — as a pixel war between French streamers and an alliance of Spanish streamers and xQc ended up attracting a lot of the attention on the last day, and, again, all kinds of theories about whether or not the French were using bots.
It all ended in a whiteout, where people could only place white pixels. The French made a last attempt at writing FRA in big white letters, xQc and other foes tried to thwart them, various people made all faces on the place art shed white tears, and soon it was all over.
There was palpable sadness, a genuine sense that something beautiful had ended. It reminded me of the gaping hole and sense of an emotional unmooring that sets in after a meaningful endeavor is over, a performance capping off months of practice and rehearsals, when everyone goes home missing the rudder that had steadied them.
In just a few days, with the simplest of rules, r/place had given birth to a rich culture. It had its rituals and shared private jokes, like Canada never quite managing to draw their leaf and regularly turning into Banana; its villains, like xQc and his purple void, that some Redditors welcomed as a cruel but necessary destructive force to allow for richer creation to take place; its heroes, the larger communities defending the smaller ones against attacks; its geography and carefully documented art. And its many epic stories and sub narratives, from amogi finding a million ways to colonize the canvas, sometimes obviously, sometimes in a kind of symbiotic invasion, to French baguettes cropping up everywhere and censoring uncovered breasts.
What I loved most about r/place, though, was that it gave people a real place of community, some people for whom the “in real life” communities don’t work so well, people who get told by extroverted normies to get out more and stop wearing pajamas and being awkward. I got teary eyed reading some of the posts on r/place after it had ended:
"This event made me feel like a part of the world for the first time, like a part of a truly global community working together towards the common goal (for the most part). Back to my lonesome cave now it is." “It was such a lovely experience. Everyone came together in one way or another and now it’s done. Maybe I’ll see you around. Until next time at r/place” (from here)
“I have a young daughter. During this project between classes, meals, sleeping, just about any time she had she wanted to add her dot to the project. Now it really hurt her watching people mess with the Canadian flag, but she persisted. One red dot at a time, she worked tirelessly to try to fix the flag.
When the white took over, her tiny little heart nearly broke. So today she and I spent a few HOURS after school looking at and appreciating all the little pieces of art that made r/place.
She loved seeing mom and dads hockey teams, she was bummed her beloved Winnipeg Jets weren't represented (I'm going to take another peak and see if we missed it), she knew mom's rainbow flag right away, she chuckled every time she found an amungus, she squealed at the Lego logo, she ran to get big sister every time she found a character from My Little Pony, there was A LOT of talk about Minecraft, we learned about the world's flags, we talked about bullies (yeah you know what I'm talking about) and why they might find joy in destruction of people's hard work and their inability to share. […] Anyways, a million thanks from me to all of you. A million more thanks from my daughter. This has been more than just something we shared as a community, but something I get to share with my girl as well. Sometimes it's really hard to connect with someone on the spectrum, but I think this is one thing we will continue to enjoy together ❤️” (from a heartfelt post from a mother connecting with her daughter on r/place and the many posts from the aftermath).
So many moments and little details on r/place gave people hope, that elusive hope that humans can sometimes find ways to connect, come together, and do awesome things — if it works on a pixel map, it could work for other things, too?
The full timelapse:
Notes and links:
Jonathan Haidt’s piece, a twitter thread on it
Iconic events on R/place, a reasonable top 10 by a Twitter user
Canada / Banana:
https://www.reddit.com/r/place/comments/tw9xn9/timelapse_of_canada_struggling_to_make_a_leaf_for/