Made this yesterday just because.
Wasn’t my original idea but I enjoyed this stopping point. Could be used for some promotional graphics. Will still touch back with a different version that’s closer to my original idea if I think it’s worth sharing. Thoughts? Feedback?
What do the ants mean?
Ants cohesively work together to build complex civilizations by delegating tasks, working in groups, and acting selflessly. Every iteration of creative output that Public Assembly releases and/or work that is inspired by Public Assembly is a new tunnel that we carve into the future of our world.
We’re trying to build an alternative to what exists now, not for glory but because it’s what we’re supposed to do and it hasn’t been done yet. For us, the selflessness is a choice, whereas for ants, it’s a lack of brain function lol. There is a similarity there though. A certain nature of necessity exists in both the survival of a colony for the ants and for us, an alternative to the current future which humans are headed towards.
When you think of the ant as a resilient and fascinating bug that’s always stepped on for no reason or fried by a magnifying glass simply for a little kids’ amusement it also becomes something potentially relatable. I myself feel alienated from many parts of pop culture, traditional education, and society values as a whole. That feeling and this project makes me want to help build an infrastructure where people who feel like outsiders are celebrated and encouraged to pursue their passions as an alternative to the traditional education route.
Making a connection to an article I saw today while red pilling myself and going down a research rabbit hole.
We like the ants.
Anti-rivalry is a term invented by the economist Steven Weber which has been popularized lately in certain subcultures of sense-making. To be anti-rivalrous is, in essence, to reward good faith and excellence rather scarcity and dog-eat-dog competition. To consume an anti-rivalrous product or idea is to increase its value for yourself and others.
To illustrate: a rivalrous product like Coca-Cola produces little sustainable value but a lot of addiction, thirst, and scarcity — in the same way Facebook and Instagram provide salient but addictive information like bad nutrition. We get a dopamine hit when we are ‘liked’ and are depressed when we don’t get the attention we think we deserve, and this creates social rivalry that keeps us on a level of childish narcissism.We exhaust our attention this way, just as we exhaust resources through over-extraction.
An anti-rivalrous production shared freely has a very different outcome. Whether it’s a good story, a brilliant computer code, or an intelligent conversation, it will often increase truth value, knowledge, and creativity rather than exhausting the existing resources.