WPlace is a desktop app that takes its cue from Reddit’s r/place, a sporadic experiment where users placed pixels on a small blank canvas every few minutes. On Wplace, anyone can sign up to add coloured pixels to a world map – each user able to place one every 30 seconds. By internet standards one pixel every 30 seconds is glacial, and that is part of what makes it so powerful. In just a few weeks since its launch tens, if not, hundreds of thousands of drawings have appeared.

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No algorithm, no leaders, but on Wplace, collective actions emerge organically. A movement stays visible only because people choose to maintain it, adding pixels, repairing any damage caused by others drawing over it. In that sense it works like any protest camp or memorial in the physical world: it survives only if people tend it. And here, those people are scattered across continents, bound not by geography but by a shared refusal to let what they care about disappear from view.

There are no published demographics, but based on the cultural references, Wplace skews younger; the users here are fluent in Gen-Z memes, images, in-jokes, and collaborative play as political language. This fluency makes it possible to organise in ways that feel illegible to older generations, who often dismiss online protest as less real, even as many of the same adults have either turned a blind eye to, or voted for and upheld laws and politicians that have made in-person protest riskier than ever. Outsiders may dismiss it as trivial but for many young people the online world is public life.

The digital world in 2025 belongs to generations who have inherited the impossible: an unstoppable climate crisis, housing they cannot afford, and the rise of fascism. Dissent has become harder to practise, hemmed in by hostile laws, constant surveillance, and an ever-shrinking right to protest in many countries. Just last week in the UK 466 people were arrested at a peaceful protest for the group Palestine Action. In the real world we are asking young people to choose between caring and being criminalised. So we should not be surprised that they turn to the spaces they can access safely, to do what they can.