Nobody should be on Facebook and yet sometimes, unfortunately for me, I am. Earlier this week, a suggested group caught my eye. It’s called “A group where we all pretend to be ants in an ant colony.” Suddenly this was the only thing I cared about.
To join, I had to answer a few questions.
Have you watched A Bug’s Life? Yes, I have. As a kid, I also played the Gameboy game in which you assemble a machine for Flik to improve his harvest yield as he evades Hopper, the evil grasshopper, which I just realized was voiced by Kevin Spacey (yikes).
Who contributed most to Ant history? The options were Marie Antoinette, Antman, Our Queen, and Susan B. Anthony. I chose Our Queen.
Next, I read the rules. The first couple were about basic etiquette (antiquette).
Rule 4. The words “The Queen” must always be capitalized. That jived with me. One could argue that I have too much respect for authority, that I was born to become a single synapsing neuron serving the grander hive mind.
Rule 5. There shall be no antarchy. Yes, agreed. Guy Fawkes I ant not.
Rule 6. Your Ant Name is just your name with Ant in front of it. Please only refer to each other by their Ant Names. Seemed reasonable. I am Ant Emma. (I am also, in real life, an Aunt Emma. Fun!)
Rule 8. We’re all just here to have fun, please keep human politics out of the group. At this time, we are removing all posts and comments regarding Covid-19. This. Sounded. Like. Utopia. An episode of Mad Men taught me that for the Greeks, “utopia” has two meanings: the good place, and the place that cannot be. I was really hoping for the former.
I crossed my fingers and asked to join. Within the hour, I was in. I can’t share much about the inner sanctum because Rule 10 is to respect every ant’s privacy (What’s shared in the group should stay in the group). But I think I can relay the basics, which is that this collection of now 1,000,000 people (!) are spending a lot of their day pretending to be ants, ants that can verbalize thoughts and enjoy typing in all-caps with a single space between each letter. An ex-ant-ple of a popular post:
Q U E E N D E M A N D A C E N S U S.
S T A T E Y O U R N A M E A N D O C C U P A T I O N.
Most ants/people/ants spend their time praising The Queen and virtually slurping or chomping on melon, cookies, and garbage. I learned that ants have a limited number of modes. They either S I P, M A R C H, B U I L D, or B I T E. Too much of the group’s time, this ant could argue, seemed to be spent ogling the bootylicious ant body form. Someone photoshopped a picture of Ant Hathaway. A genius came up with My Chemical Romants. Another someone posted a photo of liquid ant bait with the caption, “I cannot read but it sure does smell nice.” Her comrades shouted in despair: R U N! D A N G E R! P O I S O N!
One ant posted that his family had left him. Ant is sad, he wrote. Ant is depressed.
S Y M P A T H I Z E wrote a fellow ant.
L O V E wrote another.
H U G wrote a third.
By that point, after 30 minutes of scrolling, I had ab-ant-oned (abandoned) any sense of detached coolness, any semblance of irony, that I originally held for the group. Here’s a person who, for all I know, could be peering through a kaleidoscope of human sadness, whose way of processing that sadness was to post in a cosplay-adjacent Facebook group. Or he could be messing with everyone. That’s just as likely.
But either way, the other ants acknowledged his hurt. They came when he called. Or, more accurately, they came when he chirped.