This feels like a really useful framing. It meshes with other fake frameworks I sometimes use, but the emphasis on the web pulling you back in if you don’t break with it hard enough feels true and important.
If anyone remembers the r/place experiment Reddit did, similar dynamics were extremely apparent. (In brief, /r/place was a blank 1000x1000 pixel canvas, where anyone with a Reddit account could place one colored pixel anywhere they wanted every 5 minutes.) It was actually really hard to randomly vandalize anything, because wrong pixels looked out of place and would be fixed pretty fast. The only things that worked were:
1) Building a new pattern in a neutral location (which might eventually grow big enough to challenge existing patterns), or
2) Nudging a pattern into a different nearby attractor.
You didn’t see coherent images dissolving into noise, because bystanders would fix things too fast. But you did see things like adding genitalia to Charizard, or changing the text “PC MASTER RACE” to “PC MASTURBATE”, because those could start as relatively minor changes that bystanders might decide to help with.
The most skillful application of this I saw was when some people working on the powerful “Rainbow Road” pattern didn’t want to overwrite the Where’s Waldo image. They decided to try to send the road through a “portal”. You can see it happen between 0:35 and 0:45 in the timelapse. A small team coordinated on Discord to build an entrance and exit portal, with a little bit of rainbow coming out of each, in exactly the right spot that the “hivemind” would naturally run into it. This worked amazingly well, and the hivemind moved to continuing the rainbow from the other end of the portal pretty much effortlessly.
The lesson I draw is that if you want to break out of a script, you can’t just act illegibly and hope that will work. You need to put in the work to create or appropriate a script of your own.
This feels like a really useful framing. It meshes with other fake frameworks I sometimes use, but the emphasis on the web pulling you back in if you don’t break with it hard enough feels true and important.
If anyone remembers the r/place experiment Reddit did, similar dynamics were extremely apparent. (In brief, /r/place was a blank 1000x1000 pixel canvas, where anyone with a Reddit account could place one colored pixel anywhere they wanted every 5 minutes.) It was actually really hard to randomly vandalize anything, because wrong pixels looked out of place and would be fixed pretty fast. The only things that worked were:
1) Building a new pattern in a neutral location (which might eventually grow big enough to challenge existing patterns), or
2) Nudging a pattern into a different nearby attractor.
You didn’t see coherent images dissolving into noise, because bystanders would fix things too fast. But you did see things like adding genitalia to Charizard, or changing the text “PC MASTER RACE” to “PC MASTURBATE”, because those could start as relatively minor changes that bystanders might decide to help with.
The most skillful application of this I saw was when some people working on the powerful “Rainbow Road” pattern didn’t want to overwrite the Where’s Waldo image. They decided to try to send the road through a “portal”. You can see it happen between 0:35 and 0:45 in the timelapse. A small team coordinated on Discord to build an entrance and exit portal, with a little bit of rainbow coming out of each, in exactly the right spot that the “hivemind” would naturally run into it. This worked amazingly well, and the hivemind moved to continuing the rainbow from the other end of the portal pretty much effortlessly.
The lesson I draw is that if you want to break out of a script, you can’t just act illegibly and hope that will work. You need to put in the work to create or appropriate a script of your own.