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.

Scrolling to my corner of Scotland, I found portraits of beloved pets, anime favourites, pride flags, football crests. In Kyiv, a giant Hatsune Miku dominates the sprawl alongside a remembrance garden where a user asked others to leave hand drawn flowers. Some pixels started movements. At one point there was just a single wooden ship flying a Brazilian flag off Portugal. Soon, a fleet appeared, a tongue-in-cheek invasion.

Across the diversity and chaos of the Wplace world map, nothing else feels like Gaza. In most cities, the art is made by those who live there. Palestinians do not have this opportunity: physical infrastructure is destroyed while people are murdered. Their voices, culture, and experiences are erased in real time. So, others show up for them, transforming the space on the map into a living mosaic of grief and care.

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.