r/place and how digital collectives fight death

r/place is a place dedicated to pixels. On April Fools Day 2017, Reddit administrators created r/place, an interface where users could place one pixel on a massive canvas once every 5 minutes. At first, the canvas was dominated by primitive, random or algorithmic drawings. However, once internet warriors formed factions to coordinate group efforts to draw more complex creations, the results were absolutely extraordinary:

This video (90fps!!! 4K!!!) gets better literally every single watch. There are literally thousands of small, intricate, drawings that end up populating the final product. But what is more relevant to the subject of the course (and in my opinion, more interesting) is the journey upon which each region of the canvas embarks. As r/place became more and more popular, each pixel became valuable real estate, and drawings fought tooth and nail for survival, or sometimes what can only be described as… pure aggression.

There were so many French jokes here that I could make that I’d rather leave it up to your imagination.

So how does this relate to death in the digital age? Simply put, There were thousands of little deaths on the canvas throughout the 72 hours it was active. Often, larger, more coordinated groups were able to overwhelm smaller and less dedicated groups and claim larger territories for their pixel art. And what’s especially fascinating is that much of the dialogue both internal to these groups and between them are recorded in the various subreddits that popped up during r/place’s lifetime.

Other, less populated subreddits’ posts are dominated largely by confusion, panic, fear, and posts blaming other subreddits.

I found the reaction of various factions to losing their territory on the canvas to be eerily similar to how groups of people might react in the real world to impending doom. Often, when drawings were being vandalized or drawn over, there was a certain point where it was clear that the battle would lost (when around a third of the pixels were gone, more or less). It was during these times that the losing subreddit would behave in ways that reminded me of the stages of grief. In any case, r/place is an absolutely fascinating case study for internet group dynamics and how individuals can form vast social networks in very short time spans, and how these networks can behave as an individual.