The r/place Uprising and a Glimpse Into the Metaverse
In an age where private firms such as Facebook/Meta and Venture Capital (VC) funds fight to craft the ‘metaverse’ in their image, the Reddit community shows the internet will take its course.
It’s the 2nd of April, 2022. 9 P.M. Eastern Time. An inconvenience for many outside of the time zone, as they must coordinate with their U.S. counterparts for an effort that requires complete focus.
“What if we time our 5 minutes? If the majority of us place our pixels at the same time, we’ll have a higher likelihood of having an impact on the board”. The agenda for those participating is sabotaging another community effort to write GENSHIN and make the words spell GAYSHIT instead.
If there ever were a moment to describe to someone foreign the absurdity of the internet and what it’s all about, then perhaps this would be the perfect citation.
The Rules
The rules are simple: Each user can contribute one pixel every 5 minutes. Although in some cases, users might even have to wait 20 minutes before they can contribute their next pixel.
As you can imagine, it requires the coordinated effort of at least several thousand users to form a picture. Communities had to be meticulous. You have to ensure you don’t screw up the picture by incorrectly placing the pixel (sorry Canada).
The r/place Uprising
Let’s see how it all unfolded.
Communities Gathered to Discuss Their War Plans
Carefully placing pixels to draw the image right required careful coordination. Many subreddits rose to the challenge.
It had the best of us spending hours to keep everything in order.
There were a lot of moments that can’t be explained in words.
Shoutout to Among Us, gotta be one of my favorite genders.
Be careful, OP.
Great art was produced
There was a lot of Nationalism going around
Surprisingly, Turkey won at occupying the most space on the canvas. However, the U.S. (as always) wasn’t happy and had to interfere.
Sadly, Canada became the butt of the joke when the Canadian community struggled to properly draw the maple leaf on its flag.
However, in all honesty, some bullies actively sabotaged their effort when it became a running meme.
But the taunts kept coming.
Many would say the nationalism in the subreddit went a bit too far (or did it?).
R/Place, Decentralization & the Fight for The Internet
The metaverse found its origins when the internet was still in its infancy. A science fiction novel titled ‘Snow Crash’ envisioned a ‘second digital life’ where humans could interact as programmable avatars. Although in spirit, Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 Simulacra and Simulation (the inspiration for The Matrix) also presented the thesis for such an inevitable reality.
But whatever the history, the concept still was not polluted by Big Tech, Wall Street, or any other equivalent power. However, today, because we have the infrastructure to look beyond thought, companies are racing to ensure they remain the internet’s gatekeepers.
The only problem is that this contradicts the internet community’s philosophy. Although the mass public remains somewhat divided on the ‘crypto space, the vast majority agree that decentralization of the internet is the way forward. Whether through Web 3.0, Bitcoin, or any equivalent system, the goal remains to remove power from centralized authorities.
Final Thoughts
After successfully scrolling through the entire post, there’s an important point to take away from all of this. Most of the people who participated in this entire event certainly weren’t doing it to prove the validity of the infrastructure. Simply put, the goal wasn’t to prove Reddit had a real-life use case. That was already a given.
Most people just wanted to have some fun on the internet. The end-user experience was possible because the infrastructure (say the internet, language, a platform, etc.) had already evolved over the years for people to get used to them and have them fade into the background.
So whatever version of metaverse we see in the future, it won’t exist just because people want to prove the metaverse can be a thing.
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