Can the Internet be Kind?

Robias Hess
Josh Wardle recently found fame as the creator of But before Wordle, Wardle has had a long career trying to foster online communities that promote collaboration, play and kindness rather than division and hate which he worried was the eventual fate of all online spaces. In a recent profile of Wardle for the New Yorker, Andrew Marantz explores Wardle's various attempts and failures at reaching his ideal of the perfect online collaborative community.

Wardle’s [first] experiment was called Place: a blank canvas, a thousand white pixels by a thousand white pixels, which Reddit users could digitally deface in any way they pleased. I was on assignment for this magazine, reporting a story about Reddit, where Wardle then worked as a product manager. The central question of my story was also the central question of Wardle’s work, if not of the Internet itself: Can online spaces be designed so that the benefits of frictionless mass participation outweigh the costs?

He had designed Place with a time constraint—each participant could change the color of one pixel every five minutes, no more—which would, he hoped, encourage collaboration. Other than that, there were essentially no rules. When such unbounded experiments go well, we tend to describe them using words like “democracy” and “freedom”; when they don’t, we more often invoke “entropy” or “mayhem.” Wardle, urgently refreshing tabs on his laptop, was clearly nervous, but he stuck to his talking points: the Internet is full of creativity and teamwork; give people more tools to interact and they will, on balance, use those tools wisely. Already, one of the top comments on Place read, “I give this an hour until swastikas.”

In the beginning of Place, there weren’t yet swastikas. There was, however, an even more elemental form of digital graffiti—a bright-red cartoon phallus, right in the middle of the square. Rather than scrubbing or censoring the graffiti, he tried a nudge: instead of starting in the center, new users would be dropped in at random. This encouraged people to make new drawings in different sectors of the canvas, giving successive visitors a wider variety of projects to choose from. Eventually the naughty doodlers got bored and moved on. The center of the square was overtaken by a blue line, a Finnish flag, an apple tree, and finally an American flag, which kept being snuffed out by digital vandals and then flickering back to life. Place, like any of Wardle’s experiments, didn’t yield a single, unambiguous conclusion—that the Internet is only about collaboration, say, or only about mutually assured destruction. Like any good art project, it raised more questions than it answered.