20. The Universal Background Filter

The Universal Background Filter for SNS Profile Picture

A service that turns your social media profile picture into an animation of the flags of the world, in preparation for terrorism

renamed to

A service that turns your social media profile picture into an animation of the flags of the world, in the hope of world peace

A web app that creates your SNS profile picture that contains ALL the national flags in the world. No terrorism, and pray for peace.

A service for peace that generates a profile picture in which the flags of every country in the world are animated behind your photograph.

Added 2020/4/10: with the coronavirus crisis, the time has come to pray for world peace in earnest.

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After the Paris attacks of 2015, Facebook offered a service that put the French flag behind your profile picture to show your condolences. It drew a stream of criticism: it is not only Paris; we should pray for peace in the whole world. I think that is entirely right. So I made an application that prays for peace by putting, literally, the flags of every country in the world behind your profile picture.

I think of peace in every country in the world, not just France or Belgium. But is that not the same as not thinking much about any country at all? Looking at the profile picture I actually made, and use on Facebook, hardly any flag can be seen. It shows that caring about everything equally is a very thin feeling. It is a thin picture indeed, and it suits me well.

...To be generous, one aim of terrorism is to provoke us into overreacting, so declaring in advance that we care about all countries may at least express an intention not to play along.

To try it:

Click here to try it now.

The service is currently stopped. If you would like to try it, please see the GitHub page below.

Note: while it is working the browser freezes for about a minute. Please be patient. If you enter an e-mail address, the result will be sent to you even if the browser times out.

(The server goes down often, so if it is unavailable I would be grateful if you let me know at @qurihara.)

It works in a desktop browser or on Android. It does not work on iOS because file downloads do not work well there. For various reasons it communicates on port 3000. It also makes an animated GIF, but that is not served because it is heavy.

Source code: https://github.com/qurihara/NationalFlagIcon

Slides explaining it