Pixel War

A story about the terminally online

I don’t remember what I had been looking for on Reddit, but I believe I had signed up feeling that on this particular social media platform, the internet might not yet be completely under the yoke of algorithmic totalitarianism. I hoped I could escape my comfort zone, meet new people and find the strangest strangers, incels, conspiracy theorists, cyberpunks or Wikipedians. I told myself it would be a change of air. The forum had its own codes I had trouble wrapping my head around and it took me a little while to understand the rules of this world. But nothing could have prepared me for the moment I stumbled upon the Reddit thread « /place ». There, I found a community tearing each other to shreds, in a battle known as the Pixel War.

So far, there have been three editions of the event, in 2017, 2022 and 2023, with more than ten million players. Each edition followed the same rules: as soon as the webpage has loaded, your screen displays a large, blank board four million pixels wide. Users can populate that canvas over the span of a few days, by clicking the pixel they want to fill, picking a color out of the available options and then dropping it on the map. They can only fill another pixel by refreshing the page. Players try to create images and icons with those pixels, either by staying in a preferred area of the map or undoing the work of others. Many of them team up to prove that there’s no better strategy than collaboration: with only a few seconds to seize power, they coordinate to collectively engrave their dots on enemy zones, then step back and try to reassure themselves that, in the end, whether the map looks like a monumental fresco or like rotten fruit, when the countdown of the Pixel War runs out, this is just a game.

There’s no better strategy than collaboration.

Which, of course, it isn’t, really. Since the start of the first edition, the Pixel War has been a battleground for the struggles between various communities, whether linked to a fanbase, to a video game, or — as is the way of the world — to cultural identities and nationalities. That is how queers suddenly found themselves getting slaughtered — seeing their pixels replaced at full speed — by a Baltic horde, while the Fortnite community was besieged by NFT scammers. It should also be said that the Pixel War grew into an event with major mediatic stakes, as far-right politicians pretended to follow the movements on the front lines and publicly took pride in seeing their people dominate the map with the largest flag. The far-right politician Éric Zemmour, for instance, posted in the run-up to the 2022 French elections on his social media channels that the Pixel War was a good example of patriotism.