Because there’s nothing smarter than a dumb ant.
Just as ants leave pheromone trails so other ants in the colony can recognize food sources, writers online leave trails in the forms of posts, comments, trackbacks, and pings so other writers can recognize promising leads, paths to travel, and places to avoid. We writers, the ants of the internet, follow our self interests by seeking writing paths to follow or blaze, but take us all together and patterns of swarms, colonies, and new cities begin to emerge . . . .
Hey Robert,
I was just reading this interview on Salon with William Gibson, author of Neuromancer and coiner of the phrase “cyberspace.”
http://www.salon.com/weekly/gibson2961014.html
And I thought of your Writing for Ants page mainly because of this passage…
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That’s drawn from a kind of roadside tradition in the south, of putting weird stuff in your front yard?
Yes. Folk art. A lot of it is what the French call “art brut” — a technical term.
When I started writing, I was influenced in some ways by an American film theorist named Manny Farber, who wrote a book called “Negative Space.” Farber made a distinction, which had a huge impact on me at the time, between what he called termite art and some other kind of art. The other kind of art was sort of the art of the academy, where you took a big slab and carved it out into something. With termite art, he said, you just start with a big slab and drill into it from every conceivable angle and the holes start connecting.
He made this wonderful argument that all the great stuff in American B movies that he liked was termite art. I think I had that running in the back of my head when I started writing fiction. And I was thinking the other day when I was looking at Web sites and following links around — man, this is some kind of mega-termite art.
Or even termite space.
Yeah — it’s termite space.
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Anyway, thought you might like the interview.