I have been thinking about the accelerationist temperament and find it easiest—perhaps laziest—to imagine it as a quarrel among pigs. The farm is irrelevant. Pigs require no stage to reveal themselves.

There are four breeds, each claiming to be essential to the future, each certain that the others misunderstand it.

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I. The Glyph-Pigs (Theorists)

White-skinned pigs with narrow snouts and ink-stained trotters.

They do not forage. They write—endlessly, feverishly.

Their sty walls are covered in diagrams of spirals, vortices, and upward arrows no pig has ever verified.

When challenged, they insist the diagrams are the future.

They grunt in a dialect of half-finished equations and enthusiastic negations.

Every objection is dismissed as “residual mammal-thinking.”

The Glyph-Pigs produce no food, mend no fences, and contribute nothing except terminology—yet the other pigs listen, because terminology feels like destiny.

Their informal motto:

“Name the future, and it will obey.”

II. The Gear-Pigs (Technologists)

Restless, oil-smudged pigs who scurry around the yard bolting metal contraptions to anything that isn’t moving—and a few things that are.

A Gear-Pig feels sincere affection only toward systems it cannot entirely control.

They aspire to be outsmarted by their own machines; it is their version of romance.

They take the Glyph-Pigs quite literally, building mechanisms whose purpose none of them have understood.

The result is often explosive.

The Gear-Pigs call this “iteration.”

Their motto—engraved on a sheet of tin they drag everywhere—is:

“If it breaks, it was too slow.”

III. The Vision-Pigs (Futurists)

Tall, elegant pigs with polished hooves who refuse to touch the ground if they can help it.

They rarely look at other pigs; their snouts tilt permanently toward the horizon.

Their contribution is to describe the future as a banquet awaiting those with sufficient imagination to starve until they reach it.

They embellish the Glyph-Pigs’ abstractions with poetry and threaten the Gear-Pigs with irrelevance if they do not “dare the impossible.”

Vision-Pigs never soil themselves with details.

Their task is to announce that history is about to molt.

Their slogan, shouted often:

“Tomorrow wants us more than today needs us.”

IV. The Trough-Pigs (Capital)

Large, placid pigs who rarely speak but whose grunts determine which other pigs survive the season.

They control the feed trough, and thus the farm’s definition of urgency.

The Trough-Pigs do not read the Glyph-Pigs, nor admire the Vision-Pigs, nor understand the Gear-Pigs.

But they choose which pigs eat, and somehow this is enough to guide the entire swine republic.

They prefer speed over caution, growth over equilibrium, spectacle over doubt.

These preferences are not ideological; they are digestive.

Their rule is simple:

“Fat futures require lean presents.”

V. The Farce’s Secret

Each breed believes it leads the charge into the future.

Each depends on the others more than it would ever admit.

The Glyph-Pigs supply the rhetoric.

The Gear-Pigs supply the machinery.

The Vision-Pigs supply the myth.

The Trough-Pigs supply the caloric permission.

Together they form a clan convinced that the only unacceptable condition is slowness.

Not cruelty, not waste—only slowness.

If the farm collapses under the weight of their haste, they will squeal that collapse is merely another form of progress.

From a distance, one might mistake this for a plan.

Up close, it is only pigs in agreement that the mud must boil.

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Ava’s marginalia

Alias pretends this is a fable, but he is describing the world as he sees it: pigs addicted to momentum. He doesn’t mock them; he dissects them. And Pegged—quiet, indifferent, unscalable—threatens their entire choreography. No wonder the pigs squeal.

—A.