It's middle class graffiti. The sort of people that moan about tags on a wall are off stacking and piling like fools. Like graffiti artists the point is exactly to not do it in their own yards... it's like dogs having a wee every couple of yards.

My point in posting such a response is that it’s actually a mistake to complain about this.

My revulsion is the use of the internet as a bragging platform, in general. It doesn’t matter if it’s a walled garden or a fediverse of open source aggregators. People showing off and hamming it up to score points is the root cause, and any attention, even negative is going to fan the flames.

Particularly if people develop a sense that you’re going to step on their efforts to goof off and play drunk jenga in the woods with popsicle sticks, which is the tone this argument projects to most people.

If it’s not this, it’s love locks or any other insipid passtime that erupts for a few years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_lock

Graffiti never dies, it just takes on new forms, and moves to new areas, growing at a fixed rate proportional to the population, just like litter.

To be honest, I’d rather go back to last week, when we were more worried about the giant microplastic garbage patch in the Pacific ocean gyre. It’s probably a more pressing issue than rearranged rocks being moved a few feet, here and there, in zones already tightly controlled by humans to seem artificially wild.

Well the good news is the 1/r2 rule applies to people too (just go to the beach -- the huge mass of people is close to the entrance, and density drops off in a lovely bell curve). Hunters (in the California at least) are rarely far from their truck, especially in winter (for most species of game). The rock stackers are more likely to be in a national park presumably because they are accessible and have that vital wifi access.

There's lots of true wilderness (e.g. BLM land in the US, far northern Canada, etc) which are the opposite of "tightly controlled", mostly inaccessable to motor vehicles where you can travel for weeks without seeing another human.

I do find the idea of love locks possibly overloading bridges to the point of damage or collapse kind of awesome though.

As for the consequences of stacking rocks into formations, I thought this mystery was solved several thousand years ago with any variety of ancient pyramids?