220,000 Reddit users got involved in an experiment: “There is an empty canvas. You may place a tile upon it, but you must wait to place another. Individually, you can create something. Together you can create something more.” Each user could only change 1 pixel, every 5 minutes. if you wanted to achieve anything at scale, good or bad, you would have to co-operate.

 

"Place had been active for about twenty minutes when I stopped by, and Wardle was huddled over his laptop, frantically refreshing dozens of tabs. So far, the square was mostly blank, with a few stray dots blinking in and out of existence. But redditors were making plans in the comments and, in true Reddit fashion, clinging to those plans with cultish intensity. The Blue Empire was conspiring to turn the whole square blue; the Red Empire vowed to make it red; already, they were on a war footing. Other groups planned elaborate messages, fractal patterns, and references to various memes. A multi-partisan group—leftists, Trump supporters, patriotic libertarians, and pre-political teen-agers—decided to draw an American flag in the center of the square. They congregated at r/AmericanFlagInPlace, where they hashed out the exact dimensions, the shapes of the stars and stripes, and strategies for repelling invaders. Meanwhile, a group of nihilists at r/BlackVoid prepared to blot out whatever the other groups created."

 

"Toward the end, the square was a dense, colorful tapestry, chaotic and strangely captivating. It was a collage of hundreds of incongruous images: logos of colleges, sports teams, bands, and video-game companies; a transcribed monologue from “Star Wars”; likenesses of He-Man, David Bowie, the “Mona Lisa,” and a former Prime Minister of Finland. In the final hours, shortly before the experiment ended and the image was frozen for posterity, BlackVoid launched a surprise attack on the American flag. A dark fissure tore at the bottom of the flag, then overtook the whole thing. For a few minutes, the center was engulfed in darkness. Then a broad coalition rallied to beat back the Void; the stars and stripes regained their form, and, in the end, the flag was still there."

 

"Place is what happens when you give the internet a blank canvas, a hive mind spewing its collective conscience onto a pixelated piece of Reddit real estate. Studying the mesmerizing timelapse of its creation offers a lesson in diplomacy and democracy, in creation and destruction, in war and peace. And of course, no representation of web culture would be complete without a Rickroll: If you look closely you will find a QR code in the top-left corner, which leads to the video for Rick Astley's 1987 hit Never Gonna Give You Up.

 

It was, in its essence, nothing more than a coloring-in contest. But what Place captured was the internet in all its wonderful and horrific glory, for those 72 hours in April 2017."