For 72 hours beginning on April 1st, Reddit enabled its users to construct a work of art one pixel at a time, and we wound up with this:
I’m not alone in thinking the whole exercise was absolutely fascinating. Many different analyses of the event have been written, and some of them are pretty impressive. Several users have written impressive histories from their own faction’s point of view. A wiki and remarkably comprehensive atlas have been created, and apparently the whole affair is even being used to teach conflict management in classrooms.
I’d been reading a lot of Slate Star Codex these last few months, and – as with immersion in any particular worldview – it’s had a pretty significant effect on how I think about many different moments and trends I’ve observed in my own life. But r/Place was something special- it seemed to be the perfect confluence of all these phenomena in one glorious microcosm of humanity.
To the extent that r/Place can be considered an experimental environment, I believe Scott Alexander’s insights into the nature of humanity, society, and existence in general are found to be correct. Having not been disproven under experimental conditions, these observations deserve to ascend from hypothesis to theory (pending replication, of course).
I thought about writing a formally structured lab report on all this, but wound up making a silly music video instead.
It was generally well received, and got about 6,000 views. Pretty good, I daresay, for having been released two weeks after the event in question, considering the internet’s collective attention span.
There’s certainly precedent for attempting to demonstrate the validity of a rationalist axiom using an unconventional experimental environment. Alexander himself referred to the board game Diplomacy as a “game theory laboratory,” using his specific experiences with some recent playthroughs to illustrate various postulates about trust, negotiation, religion, etc. A game of Diplomacy though is an environment with at most 7 agents, and it attempts to simulate international relations in a structured turn-based environment with universal predetermined win conditions. I believe that r/Place, with its hundreds of thousands of participants each with their own shifting ill-defined objectives is an even better microcosm for such geopolitical analysis, especially considering that its fundamental structure is competition over finite territory.
In Diplomacy, each player is not only the absolute dictator of their respective nation, but also has unilateral control over all its forces. In the real world, as in r/Place, leaders exert control only to the extent that they can motivate others to take action aligning with that leader’s plans. In many cases, two factions would officially agree on a proposed peaceful compromise, but remain utterly incapable of getting their volunteer rank-and-file users to cooperate. 
That makes the several instances of successful cooperation all the more impressive. In one case, the Bulgarians agreed to share space with the rubiks cube enthusiasts on the condition that they change the visible faces of their cube to match the colors of Bulgaria’s flag. In another, r/Goodboye won the favor the expansionist Dutch by equipping their second doggo with a handsome set of clogs.
There was certainly no higher authority to appeal to if agreements were broken, and – just as in Diplomacy – fairweather allies quickly abandoned agreements when the opportunity arose.
Importantly, the members of these many factions support them entirely voluntarily. Any user could align with any subreddit or movement within r/Place (or indeed, several at once), and clans’ territorial expansion is indicative not only of the size of their userbase, but of those users’ relative enthusiasm for their various chosen enterprises. r/Place then is a strikingly well-realized archipelago of atomic communitarianism, as each sect accumulates adherents in proportion to their representation of those users’ priorities. In a particularly on-the-nose illustration of territorial claim based on political ideology, r/thefarleftside was formed as a coalition of groups supporting leftist politics and… redness.
The Blue Corner had enough troubles of their own, however. You’re unlikely to find a better illustration of the Motte and Bailey doctrine than their broad early expansion and subsequent retreat to more humble but defensible territory when inevitably challenged.
But there was one phenomenon in r/Place that illustrated Alexander’s core philosophy more than any other. Its story has rightfully ascended to the highest planes of r/Place’s mythology, and has most informed the narrative arc I retroactively constructed around r/Place’s multivarious dramas in the lyrics of my song.
The Void.
The Void is, of course, an avatar for that most fearsome foe introduced to us in Alexander’s opus, Moloch. It consumes tirelessly, unmaking all created things, rending all color and form into homogenous darkness. This is humanity’s ultimate adversary. Call it Moloch, Azazoth, Gnon, or simply Entropy. The ultimate fate of all things, to be overcome only by an even greater coordinating force. And, perhaps, not even then.
The crucial difference, of course, is that within r/Place, The Void was really just another faction, spreading by means of the deliberate cooperation of hundreds of individuals. Their manifesto reads “Every good needs a villain… every forest needs a fire.”
Real people, who have chosen to worship Moloch. Is anything more terrifying? Personally, I was reminded of the Dark Zealots in Doctor Strange.
Doctor… we don’t seek to rule this world. We seek to save it… to hand it over to Dormammu, who is the intent of all evolution… the why of all existence.
I’m unreasonably fond of Doctor Strange. It’s the epic story of a handsome goatee’d genius fighting to protect the world from an incomprehensible entity of unprecedented power called forth by shortsighted fanatics who foolheartedly believe they could subordinate it to their own ends, willfully ignorant of the inevitability of its extermination of humanity through sheer indifference in the singleminded execution of its own unfathomable aims.
In the end, as merely another player in the game, the Void was wiped out through the coordinated meanness of everyone else, and its residue is barely visible on the final canvas.
But, really, what is so “final” about the image that has now become so famous?
The experiment concluded abruptly and without notice. Few groups or regions are without imperfection, and scores of disputes remain unresolved.
I believe that the many attempts to “clean up” the final canvas are misguided; they’re all based on the assumption that every disagreement would be resolved according to the preference of whatever trend currently dominates. The grandeur of r/Place arose from its chaos, a churning kaleidoscope endlessly making and remaking itself anew.
But it was right that it should end. Had r/Place progressed indefinitely, users would have eventually lost interest and the canvas would be overrun by automation. We need not imagine what sordid future lay beyond, because a clone of the project opened shortly after the original’s closure, and the few humans who carried over were quickly overcome by unchecked scripted bonnets.
To end r/Place with dignity was the merciful choice. But we must remember that the timing was arbitrary because it was unforeseen. There is no best final image, no perfect border to be drawn between every contested region. The eventual picture is merely a snapshot in time of an ongoing project. Very like this present moment in our own world. We, in every instant, live amidst countless factions and ideologies struggling for power, each with their own goals and schemes, living and dying as they create, protect, and destroy. Our civilization wending toward but never reaching some elusive ideal cultural equilibrium.
Our world is not subject to the user apathy that would have eventually doomed r/Place, because each succeeding generation of humans has risen to the occasion to face their own unique challenges. And I do not believe the robots will win, as long as goatee’d heroes walk among us. On the whole, though human nature has changed so little in the last ten thousand years, things really are getting better.
So if r/Place is a microcosm of our own world, the evidence suggests that we will – haphazardly and imperfectly, but continuously – self-organize in favor of niceness, community and civilization.
This crucial moral- that coordination can overcome chaos, that humans can defeat Moloch by sheer dint of learning to get along, is the most important lesson r/Place can teach us, and I did my best to drive it home in decreasingly subtle terms over the course of my song:
Will we create something great, or give in to anomie…Collaboration is fun! On that we all can agree…The moral of the story is when all is said and doneFinding ways to work together is just more fun…Life isn’t me versus you, it’s us both against entropyAnd everybody can thrive if we pursue harmonyThis is the ultimate showdown of ultimate destiny.
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