In this blog I discuss Reddit & the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet by Andrew Marantz (The New Yorker, 2018).

Reddit & the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

The struggle is real.

As a non-Redditor reading this article two years into the Trump era, I spent the first two sections nodding my head and tsk-tsking at Reddit’s hairy grappling with what it meant to truly “support free speech” on their platform. At the time, social media institutions like Facebook and Twitter had only recently begun their post-2016 election falls from grace.

Le sigh.

But the last part of the article is where the swashbuckling, festering humanity erupting beneath Reddit’s bare-bones interface jumps off the screen and comes alive.

It’s where everything - the good and the bad - that makes Reddit Reddit - the community, the chatter, the buzz, the pride, the smack, the hate, the love, the darkness and the light - come to life, pixel by pixel.

On April Fool’s Day 2017, “Reddit unveiled a genuine social experiment. It was called r/Place, and it was a blank square, a thousand pixels by a thousand pixels. In the beginning, all million pixels were white. Once the experiment started, anyone could change a single pixel, anywhere on the grid, to one of sixteen colors.”

The author proceeds to bring to life the immediate “cultish intensity” of Redditors immediately conspiring to take over large swaths of pixels on the squares to their own pursuits and self-interests.

“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.”

The author vividly describes the camaraderie and banditry of Redditors capturing and coloring pixels together all together and one-by-one to form something greater than itself. Even for just one fleeting moment.

“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 … 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.”