When we were discussing the Levy and Lanier writings in class and Levy mentions an ant colony as an example of what collective intelligence is not, my mind immediately started thinking about A Bug's Life.
In A Bug's Life our hero is Flik, a lovable ant who has new ideas but is ignored by others because he is a klutz and kind of eccentric. Levy says that the ant colony as a whole is intelligent but the individual is dumb. This is the case with the ant colony in A Bug's Life. Flik however is intelligent and he has ideas that will improve the efficiency of the ant's food collection but of course he is ignored. In this way he represents the technology that Levy mentions early on that was the downfall of communism.
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| Pictured: The downfall of communism |
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| The face of communism |
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| An individual AKA fool |
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| I'm guessing Flik had never seen or heard what a warrior looked like |
Hopper: You let one ant stand up to us, then they all might stand up! Those puny little ants outnumber us a hundred to one and if they ever figure that out there goes our way of life! It's not about food, it's about keeping those ants in line. That's why we're going back! Does anybody else wanna stay?
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Hopper: Let this be a lesson to all you ants! Ideas are very dangerous things! You are mindless, soil-shoving losers, put on this Earth to serve us!
Flik: You're wrong, Hopper. Ants are not meant to serve grasshoppers. I've seen these ants do great things, and year after year they somehow manage to pick food for themselves *and* you. So-so who is the weaker species? Ants don't serve grasshoppers! It's *you* who need *us*! We're a lot stronger than you say we are... And you know it, don't you?
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The movie ends with Hopper getting eaten by a bird and the ants are free of the grasshopper's oppression. The ants also learn about individuality and begin to embrace each others differences, especially Flik's because he's the most different of them all. Levy talks about how the ant colony is the opposite of the collective knowledge. In this case the ants take Flik's ideas and inventions and they all use them and make harvesting more efficient. So they all live happily ever after.
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| The End |
I'm open to suggestions on how I can make this post better and make my analysis more finely tuned.
Oh yeah both quotes are taken from one of my favorite websites IMDb.com.
Kyle - Very interesting tie-in to the Levy piece. A few suggestions - you begin the post by relating the movie to Levy and new media. As a reader, I expected you to circle back and end the post by telling us about the implications of Flik's revolution for new media, etc.
ReplyDeleteAdditionally, I think you could have condensed your summary of the plot a bit. Most readers will have seen A Bug's Life. For those who have not, a sentence or two summarizing the plot, with a link to a fuller summary on IMDB, would be a good way of keeping your post focused.
Nice experiment - it works well both in terms of your use of images and quotes and in terms of your attempt to tie the reading into a pop-culture text.
lol You've got it backwards. The grasshoppers are the bourgeoisie and the ants are the proletariat. The grasshoppers claim that they are entitled (private property) to the ants' food whereas the ants believe their food is held collectively.
ReplyDeleteActually it's more a primitive feudal type of exploitation since the grasshoppers do not own the means of production. They just collect it by force, claiming they protect the ants from their ennemies.
ReplyDelete