Forget the war in Ukraine or the presidential election.

For French Internet users, the fight of the moment is called "Pixel War" and has been taking place on Reddit since April 1st.

The American social network has indeed relaunched a “social experience” called r/Place five years after a first trial in 2017.

Internet users are invited to cover a blank page with their digital graffiti in order to create a great collective work.

Smileys, manga or video game characters, memes, national flags, peace symbol or Linux penguin... It's a joyful catch-all where winks to world pop culture are mixed.

Digital Pitched Battle

An artistic and collaborative project with retro charm, which nevertheless turned into a real pitched battle over the weekend because space very quickly ran out on this square despite its doubling to 2000x2000 pixels.

And it is not enough to improvise digital artist and draw at leisure, because each Internet user has the right to color only one pixel every five minutes using one of the 32 authorized colors.

It is therefore necessary to coordinate and work with several people if you want to produce a work but also to defend it to prevent it from being covered up immediately.

Sunday, April 3, the French made a remarkable breakthrough by imposing a huge tricolor flag at the bottom left of the image.

An initiative carried by the streamer Kameto, self-proclaimed general of the operation and supported by everything that France does with web personalities, like Squeezie, HugoDécrypte, Locklear or Inoxtag.

Streamers on the front line

Despite a counter-attack led by the Americans and the Spaniards, who are mainly present on this platform, and accusations of cheating, the French held firm and no less than 200,000 people followed Kameto's operation on his Twitch account on Sunday evening, while coordinating on Discord and Twitter.

Common ground has been found with Turkey and negotiations are under way with the German authorities.



WARNING: a Spanish offensive is scheduled for 11 p.m., be ready to defend the front line.



General Maul, over.

— KametoTV (@KametoTV) April 3, 2022


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Fortunately, it's not all conflict and vandalism on Reddit and alliances have even been created, for example with the Irish, whose pint of Guinness mirrors a bottle of French wine.

Or even with the supporters of a Windows XP bar which now sits just below the national flag and occupies the entire lower border of the collective work.

Little hearts and messages announcing that “it wasn't us” dot the margins of the drawings and attempt to pacify the borders of this large digital playground.

Schoolboy patriotism?

After a failed attempt to replace the French colors with a pair of buttocks overnight from Sunday to Monday, the tricolor flag continues this Monday to occupy first place in terms of occupied pixels and has even adorned itself with many national symbols, from the Arc de Triomphe to the crescent, passing by Thomas Pesquet or Ratatouille.

A schoolboy patriotism somewhat tarnished by an attempt to recover from the far right, with in particular a tweet from Eric Zemmour on Sunday night celebrating the spirit of reconquest and defense of the flag.

But if we are to believe the drawings of Internet users, their favorite French people seem to be Zinedine Zidane and Daft Punk rather than Renaud Camus and Charles Maurras, no offense to Eric Zemmour.

As for the flag, it is on track to stay until the end of the experiment, which should take place on April 4 or 5 at an undetermined time, in order to avoid last-minute raids.

Because anyway when it comes to art, the French are the first to give their opinion!

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