A really great radiolab on the subject is their episode on Emergence: http://www.radiolab.org/story/91500-emergence/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/91500-emergen

A really great radiolab on the subject is their episode on Emergence: http://www.radiolab.org/story/91500-emergence/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/91500-emergence/ That's what /r/place was like in the first few hours, where people saw a pattern and just laid their pixel down to continue it, which is how you got things like a blue line (accelerating as time went on) and the blue corner. You as a contributor don't know what you're building, but as a group you build something. Later as communities started planning and running scripts, it became much less "improv"-y.