An Over-Analysis Of A Facebook Group Where We All Pretend To Be Ants
As forewarning, this is going to analyse, breakdown, consider, and postulate on “A group where we all pretend to be ants in an ant colony” to a degree that will border on madness (or so I trust in myself). Of course, such a group is merely an absurdist romp, a fun little side adventure during these troubling times. But I do feel there is something to be said about over a million people deciding to behave as ants during these terrifying times —
For those who are unaware — or dare I say, uninitiated — A Group Where We All Pretend To Be Ants in an Ant Colony is exactly what it says on the tin; over one million members post pictures of ants, or people about to step on ants, or picnics, and roleplay their behaviours as if ants. Ant’s speak ostensibly in single words, capitalised, with spaces between each letter, a rather intuitive representation of how ants readily communicate by vomiting chemicals into each other’s faces. Occasionally something outside of the in-character hymenopteran discourse slips through the net, but for the most part it’s a series of pseudo-memes, jokes about T H E Q U E E N, and a strange community spirit as we all bite and scurry around in our global ant nest.
But why has a group with an inelegant title, no purpose whatsoever, filled with pictures that make your skin crawl under any other circumstance, done so well? Why have over one million ants joined this group?
Socialism?
The world is on fire. We’re seeing a distinct rise in fascist ideology, tax payer money being used neo-feudalistically to fund air liners, and selfishness rearing its head in our communities as people demand hair cuts or trips to the beach.
When I discovered the group through another friend on facebook who had joined (it appears this ant-based roleplay is ubiquitous as hundreds of my friends already participate), the consensus was that in times of crisis people flock to places with a strong community spirit. Indeed, the idea of being a part of something wholesome and proud, vast and collaborative, is very much in line with left-thinking feeling. The Group Where We Pretend To Be Ants is therefore the perfect melting pot to begin exploring, in the emotive and not the philosophical sense, what it means to be socialist.
Within the group we all work for a common goal, and share our resources and help one another through biting and scurrying and working. Work is the predominant factor here, with ants chastising other ants for not working as hard as they should. On the face of it, that could appear quite authoritarian, but ants take regular breaks by wearing silly hats or posting puns, so it seems to balance-out that work and play are pretty much 50/50 in the SimColony.
In the ant colony, the ant has to support one another through collecting food and indicating dangers. The socialist, for the most part, can do the same: funding the NHS, pointing out prejudice, chastising government; this is all W O R K, where the chastisement doesn’t come from an amorphous hatred of those not doing what their boss tells them, but whether that individual is not working hard enough to develop themselves and their community. In the case of the ant, the anger that another ant is not working is because without such the colony would die. When the fascist or Tory or right-winger blames another for lack of work, its either to continue a capitalist stealing-frenzy or out of the bootlicking delight that someone should simply be working for the sake of it; as arguments on facebook have testified for me, people believe that if you feel entitled to a home you should die. If you are homeless and — for whatever reason — lazy and entitled, you should not be given a home and should die freezing in an alleyway. Yes, to be lazy and entitled is poor form, but do you truly believe this deserves a death sentence? Should we reintroduce capital punishment for those who don’t get off their fat arses? Segue aside, the socialist idea of “why are you not working” is very much like the ants above: “why are you not helping your fellow man?” If you believe the entitled should freeze to death, imagine how we feel when you won’t even fund a hospital.
When Margaret Thatcher stated “there was no society” (although, this is often a mis-attribution, but the message still rung out) — alongside the punks announcing wild nonconformity — both left and right fell into the trap of absolute individuality. The libertarian idea of freedom — or, shall we say, The American Dream — had taken us by the blue-collars; freedom was more important than anything else. Our beliefs, even our opinions, were 100% true and impenetrable, because human beings all deserve the right to be whatever they damn well please: including paedophiles, anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers, capitalists, the list goes on. We forgot our collective responsibilities, even our own history (how many Tories are adamant Winston Churchill invented the NHS), and from this came in-fighting, transphobia, anarchy (the worst kind), off-shore bank accounts, and fake news. The ant would never have fake news. The ant would never be able to spew the wrong chemicals to trick an ant of the same colony where the food was. Human beings on the other hand needed to be “right” so much that they forgot they had to be right. If there is no society there is no need to support socialism, because it can’t exist; it’s better to look after your own lot and suffer the consequences. In that reality, anything that happens to you negatively is your own fault, and we mourn and grieve still, but without the guilt of collective responsibility.
The Group Where We Pretend To Be Ants is the palliative to such a strange ideology. In that world, we have to work together. If a spider comes to eat us, we have to build a bridge to escape. If the food runs out, we have to look for more. There is no scenario where — if the food does run out — we all starve because no one is responsible for the food running out. As ants, we are as socialist as we can be.
But, as the below article suggests, sometimes politics can surreptitiously hit us through the back door. And not always the politics we believe ourselves to be aligned to.
Fascism?
The implication, in the history of the bootlicker, is that through a sexual practice the politics can begin to seep through. It’s only a potentiality, but unconsciously if we begin to accept authority as wrote, right-wing ideology can infect us, leaving us vulnerable to other ideas that are far more dangerous than they are helpful. It is apparent in working class communities still believing the billionaire will save them, like a peasant of the medieval period thinking their king will one day offer them a castle. Propaganda, fake news, and skewed statistics are enough to sway even the humblest, kindest individual to a way of thinking that denies the rights of others. So what does this have to do with ants?
Before I continue, I by no means — with the link above — wish to insinuate that just because you’re queer and into some kinky shit that you’re going to become a fascist; the difference between bootlicker the kink, and bootlicker the Keir Starmer needs to be held very cut and dry. I only reference the article on the basis that, if cultures — and lets say here society in the broadest sense — can entertain an idea that seems innocuous, can it also open a doorway to other ideologies that are less innocent? In another way, just because you enjoy bootlicking the kink does not mean you are a fascist, but have some fascists found their avenues through something as seemingly peaceful as, say, a facebook group about ants?
As easy as it would be for me to just announce, willy-nilly, that a facebook group about pretending to be ants is a socialist paradigm, I have to say that a space where everyone is an identical looking insect speaking identically only for the purposes of one Queen (and you can bet your bottom dollar I am no royalist) is a little frightening to say the least. Do you think ants appreciate taxes for the greater good, or does all the wealth get accumulated by ‘the colony’, which is essentially ‘the queen’? Do you think a species with a caste system where gender is integral would have trans rights? (I did warn you that I was going to go too deep into this). Do you think that ant colonies have a conception of direct action, or is everyone going to Stalin’s funeral?
Again, I am not saying that the people who made the group are transphobic anarcho-capitalists (or socialism on acid transformed into true unabashed dangerous communism). But my question is, if 1.1m people are not flocking to this group for a sense of community, a sense of helping one another, then is it that, on some subconscious level, we do actually want to all be identityless pawns in some queens great game?
It isn’t entirely true that identity is lost. First and foremost, everyone still has their profile picture, name, etc. It is just a roleplay after all. But secondly people will often post a picture of ‘their ant’ — often with a moustache, or a trilby hat, or some other affectation — followed by the idiom “F E L T C U T E”. And the comments are a combination of insectoid flirtation, general appreciation, or the commonplace W O R K. In which case, the individual still flourishes even in a colony of identical looking ants, but I can’t help but consider the alternative. All great dictators create the illusion of identity whilst you take away your own freedoms. The Queen — who incidentally is never seen or questioned, Orwell anyone? — is followed magnanimously; Boris Johnson hasn’t been seen in office in such a long time, and people still follow him without question.
Again, I have to reiterate, I am not trying to say that just because I saw you type B I T E today that I think you’re a closet fascist of any kind (or, once again, that gay culture is actually a conspiracy to hide modern day Stalinists and Hitler Youth); but rather that our media, and the way we interact with one another in fictional spaces, can often be an indicator of what is happening back in real-life society. Coined the Strinati Mirror Cycle — or so I was told in GCSE Media — the idea is that our art and our culture reflects our society, and our society reflects our art and our culture. In a simpler method, we make fictions that are like the world around us, but the world around us changes depending on what we devour and consume. In this case, the world turned into a topsy-turvy nightmare of radical politics, disease, and disinformation campaigns, and so we all became ants for the day. And the ant colony, as much as it may emulate the community we long for whilst we’re isolated and alone, is not necessarily the best metaphor for such. Perhaps, sneaking through the back door, is our need for someone to just take charge. Time and time again, we’ve seen countries lean on despots and dictators when things get scary and difficult, because like a kid that’s grazed their knee, we just want mummy to make it better; but now, mummy is a queen ant, and that queen ant is absolute.
Absurdism?
There is however a whole other reason we’re devolving into scurrying invertebrates. Good ol’ fashioned absurdity.
On the one hand, if we take this to be a socialist paradigm, we are as Gregor Samsa waking up alien in the world (if you wish to read it that way), or if we take Ionesco’s transformative route, we’re as the Rhinoceros destroying the town. Either way we are transforming away from our original selves. We have been regularly told that normal will not be returning to our day-to-day lives (thank fucking god) and what better way to accept the oncoming storm of “the new normal” than to embrace the absurd and transform kafkaesque into a colony of insects trying to make sense of the rubble.
The true great absurdist, Albert Camus, is forgotten as a humanist. It is easy to imagine these philosophies, especially with texts like The Stranger, as hollow, but Camus believed solely in the human in the face of absurdity. Like Sartre’s viscosité, reality is a dangerous animal, where even the bus becomes alien to you; to retain your humanism, for Camus and other absurdists, is to retain your kindness in the face of this madness.
That may be a gross oversimplification of absurdism, Camus, and his humanitarianism, but whilst we turn into ants, we must consider if we wish to become the alien beetle Kafka, or the fascistic stubborn mammal of Ionesco. During times of great political turmoil, art uncovers avenues that are strange and bizarre. Surrealism, Dadaism, Absurdism; queer punk to Genesis P Orridge — it is the artists job, in these chaotic times, to remind the population of absurdity. Because we accept so much pain and suffering as just a part of life, when really it is the actions of a desperate, evil few; and this is an absurd world to live within, to believe money and gender and politics are as real as birds and trees and the air we breathe. And so, to combat the dangers of normality, we return to absurdism, and we shoot the man on the beach to rid ourselves of the normality.
Indeed, too many of us are reading The Plague, but the doctors there strive to save everyone in the face of an invisible threat (dare I use the term) that is as alien and absurd as politicians hoping the homeless will freeze to death; what better way to compute our inner chaos than to become as the ant colony. It is ridiculous, hilarious, pointless, and empty; and yet it is the natural answer to an isolationist world where we’re constantly gaslit that “the virus isn’t prejudiced”.
It would be easy of me to say that the group is representative of socialism. It would equally be too easy to say that a colony of ants without individuality is the product of a world leaning into right-wing destruction. However, the only thing that truly can be said is that the colony is our immune response to not just covid-19, but the disease of a world we no longer recognise. And from that absurdity I hope we build a nest that retains our human values, our kindness, and our absurd struggle for meaning.
B I T E !
So we must B I T E !
I have, for the most part, only really spoken of the British ants of the global colony. But we can see from the persecution of Muslims in India, being asked to drink bleach in America, the destruction of the Amazon in Brazil, and countless other countries lost to strange ideologues, that the need for the colony is not local; truly it is a global endeavour by the socialist — or whatever equivalency you feel appropriate, as I am certain 1.1m are not all socialist and must comprise a great multitude of politics— to fix the horrors and iniquities of the world. In that chaos, when we have no power other than being a keyboard warrior (like myself), to queuing appropriately outside Tesco Extra, or to share memes until we can indeed rise up and storm our despots, we have elected to become ants. What better metaphor for a patient, awaiting force of community, waiting for the day the human steps too close so we can B I T E, than the ant?
As I have shared above for my English readers — from Blog 1201, written by a good friend with a great political eye — it is apparent we need to begin to strategise in the face of Blairites, moderate politics, and forgotten principle. Indeed, the world is a meaningless blur of absurdity, but this does not mean we have to lose our belief in community. We can extend our hand to the right-winger gas-lit by propaganda, but only for so long; there comes a point where we must decide on a side and fight for a better world for all, whether that is through protest, petition, direct action, or straight up law-breaking.
We flocked to the ant colony to find peace-of-mind; we needed something concrete, and caring. Cute pictures, flowers from low angles, shared piles of sugar — these are indeed beautiful as a palliative to the world, but if we are to truly be absurdists, we must translate these meaningless actions into something meaningful, even if that meaning is just to be kind.
It would be too easy to fall into old patterns. Our media and our politicians want us to become the kind of ant that follows rule blindly, when we could be the kind of ant that builds a community of vulnerability.
Do you wish to be the ant that hoards sugar for one Q U E E N you have never seen, or do you wish to be the ant that helps your fellow ants cross the road?
I’ll stop now. I’ve gone a bit mad writing this. Just be kind to each other. Let’s make the ant thing worthwhile.
B I T E
S C U R R Y
R E V O L T
