Apr 2, 2022
Internet Masterpiece, Made by Thousands, Still Being Created
Thank you, Reddit
There’s a lot of pressure to make a business of yourself. Whether that’s your face, your words, your editing skills, your coaching skills, your funny skills, your podcast skills — it’s all about how you can utilize the changing tech around you to make yourself known a little more than the next person.
It’s an individual sport, and it stresses me out.
Which is why when something like r/place comes along in all it’s collaborative, messy, beautiful glory (that would make any design agency jealous) it gives me an immense sense of relief.
What a fucking masterpiece.
Currently there are 1.7 million members and 252,000 people involved in this process. You can place one pixel at a time, at least 5 minutes spaced apart.
Instructions
Go to Reddit (on desktop likely easier), go into the menu, and click that box thing on the right next to the camera.
- Select color
- Select checkmark
- Place your pixel
- Wait 5 minutes
This may sound simple. But there’s so much going on here.
Each of these people are placing one pixel. Because this is a live process, mini-wars are being carried out on the canvas as symbols are being created by one community and destroyed by the other. The symbols coming together represent groups — whether that’s countries, communities, reality tv show fans, movie fans.
This is just… so much culture and history to this moment that it’s making me so giddy. I think it’s speaking to a new dawn of the age of the internet, one that we’ve been in awhile now but haven’t seen so clearly:
What would have taken an individual years to create we are creating in minutes — it is beautiful, ugly, fantastic and everything the internet (and life) is.
Look at what masterpieces we can make together, one pixel at a time.
