The Three Little Pyggs

Albert Pygg sighed and stroked the hairs on his chin as he closed his laptop. The page for the online group for residents of the Wolff Estates housing development to air their grievances about the Homeowners Association had been taken down. Evidently Mr. Wolff’s sister-in-law’s nanny had infiltrated the group, achieved moderator status, and deleted the whole thing. Albert saw that the groups for Wolff Acres, Wolff Park, and Wolfftown had also disappeared. He now felt even more terrible that he had convinced both of his brothers to move into the subdivision.

Albert wandered into the kitchen and looked at the latest bill from the HOA. Five hundred dollars, compounding daily, payable exclusively with WolffCoin, for having “unapproved agricultural products” on his property. Accompanying the bill was a drone shot of a pickup truck parked behind his house with two bales of hay in the bed. He desperately wished he had hired a lawyer to look at the agreement he had signed when he bought the house.

Considering that his bank account was already overdrawn, the sight of the bill just made him laugh, as he was in dire financial straits. The whole reason he had moved to the development was its proximity to the Wolff Expo Center and Parade Grounds, which hosted an annual equestrian exposition for which Albert was the sole hay vendor. For four years things had gone well enough that he eventually convinced his brothers Buster and Chester to acquire the houses on either side of his.

Buster was a purveyor of high-quality riding crops who, like Albert, made a good percentage of his yearly income at the exposition. He had recently received a $100 fine, compounding daily, because a Seabiscuit movie poster in his den was visible through the window from the road and the HOA considered this “unauthorized advertising.” The hay bales and poster were just two of the seemingly ridiculous infractions members of the development had been subjected to. Both brothers and several other residents had been cited for having “unauthorized migratory birds” in their yards. The online groups would be missed.

Both older brothers were on the verge of bankruptcy due to the cancellation of the expo and the endless infractions handed out by the HOA. A month before the event, the equestrian organization that ran the whole thing had canceled. This was a direct result of an investigative report revealing that Wolff Chemicals, part of the corporate conglomerate that also owned the expo center (and was the developer of Wolff Estates, Wolff Acres, etc.) had been experimenting on horses for years. An undercover reporter had infiltrated the company by getting hired as a night janitor and wore a hidden camera while she made her rounds.

This led to widespread calls for a boycott of Wolff International, but once people realized just how many products were made under the Wolff umbrella, and how hard it would be for them to live without so many perceived necessities, the effort lost momentum. For a week following the report’s publication a cadre of teenage horsegirls had staged daily protests on the curtilage outside the expo center. They held up huge signs with blown-up frames from the hidden camera footage showing horses undergoing horrific procedures.

They called themselves “The Four Horsegirls of the Boycottpocalypse,” and launched a social media campaign which garnered a few days of traction before enough egregious sexual commentary about them slipped through the filters that they grew afraid and withdrew from public view. Chester said this revealed just how insidious the reach of Wolff International was.

Chester Pygg, youngest of the Pygg brothers, had moved to Wolff Estates not out of geographic necessity, but just to be close to his brothers, whom he loved and worried about. He was the wealthiest of the three, having made quite a living with his small company which offered one service, which was analysis of blockchains. The software he had developed, powered by an artificial intelligence called BrickLayer was mostly used by law enforcement agencies and governments in a forensic capacity, but had also been adopted by financial speculators and various types of activists who understood that if one follows the money many truths can be revealed.

Chester told his brothers that he didn’t need BrickLayer to know that Wolff International was behind the successful attack on The Four Horsegirls. He had to defend his use of the word “attack,” but he did his best to explain to his brothers that modern battlegrounds included the screens we focus so much of our attention on, as a way to attack, yes, attack, not just individuals, but also the hearts and minds of the populace. He went on to say that for-profit enterprises had infiltrated all of these systems and used bots and shills to brute force whatever concepts they want us to believe into our thought-streams, using keywords and repetition, those time-honored mind control tactics to reprogram our brains.

Albert and Buster often felt that Chester sounded crazy, but time and time again, the mad theories he spewed were proven to be correct after the light of inquiry uncovered hidden truths. One such hard truth was that people don’t care about quadruple-amputee, blind horses as much as they care about their shampoos and conditioners. Chester told his brothers that examination of the WolffCoin blockchain showed that the expo center only existed so that Wolff Chemical could acquire horses conveniently.

Wolff International was a family company, and with 75% of executives being Wolffs by blood or marriage, it was a hard nut to crack. Even Mr. Wolff, the dastardly head of the Wolff Estates HOA, was a cousin of a cousin of someone quite important. Their grip on certain markets was so total that a boycott against them was unsustainable. They simply produced too many of the goods that the population found essential. Chester asked his brothers if they thought that perception of essentiality had anything to do with how certain concepts monopolized the attention economy.

Albert and Buster felt helpless, wishing they had paid closer attention to the agreements they had signed when they had bought their houses, but not being overly hard on themselves, as who could have foreseen such Kafkaesque measures actually being applied in the real world? It was absurd, but the documents, having been written by Wolff International’s legal department, were binding. With the equestrians seemingly never coming back, it would make sense to sell, but as the sale process would require disclosure of all fines accrued during their residency, their homes had limited resale value.

Chester thought everything was absurd, and was happy to say so to anyone. His brothers found it annoying, but given half a chance he’d explain how by exploiting the absurdity he had found great success. He’d say that a common criticism of the cryptocurrencies he spent his time researching was that they “aren’t real money,” and then point out that no money is “real” and all economies exist at the whims of their faithful adherents. Money may represent something real, but it is not that thing, no matter how badly people want it to be. It is ephemeral, and absent the presence of other believers, worthless. In this way it is deified, and economics becomes indistinguishable from religion. Sometimes it was hard to disagree that things were absurd.

Chester said the whole system was built on deliberately designed, self-perpetuating cycles that had never been elegant, but which had chugged along slowly for centuries, engines of ideology and economy that existed solely to consolidate power for a few, but which had only recently achieved the technological momentum to speed up exponentially.

The printing press was revolutionary enough to threaten the status quo of life in the 16th Century, resulting in a huge schism of consciousness in the western world. More recently, everyone had been given a printing press, and it led not to a schism, but a shattering of the collective consciousness. Suddenly, the way something was said became more important than the content of the message, turning every published utterance into an advertisement of sorts as engagement was now more valuable than the truth.

Dry and long-winded, the traditional voices of reason could not keep up. Complex questions have complex answers that do not neatly fit into the microblog ecosystem. Easily digested (but don’t think about them too long) radical notions appealing to ideological tribalism push to the forefront of the attention economy, driven by precious engagement predicated by the divisiveness of the ideas being presented. Advertisers leapt at this opportunity, and data mined by the platforms enabled the construction of massive mind-control machines that foster discontent to keep eyeballs glued to the screens, resulting in wild imbalances across all systems, notably in that the three wealthiest men in America were worth more than the poorest hundred-and-sixty million.

“It’s absurd, and we all let it happen,” Chester would say, “and only now are we beginning to see the cost.” Privately, he told his brothers that BrickLayer wasn’t just investigating the blockchain any longer. He said that its primary function is simply to look back through the records and see what wallet interacted with whatever other wallets, but that recently he’d had it looking at the social media sites and had revealed some things that were startling only if you hadn’t been paying attention.

Albert, Buster, and Chester convened on Chester’s patio to discuss the situation over dinner. The elder brothers did not want to ask for money, as that would merely be a temporary fix and they’d find themselves in arrears as soon as the next round of fines was levied by the HOA. They were hoping their brilliant little brother would have a solution, and much to their glee, he did. After they ate, Chester led his brothers down to his basement where he unlocked a door.

The room they entered looked like the den of a conspiracy-theory crazed madman, with maps and photographs pinned to the walls, all connected with various lengths of colored string. A computer on a desk was displaying a screen-saver featuring flying pigs. Albert and Buster had tremendous confidence in their brother, but the scene dismayed them. They both nervously stroked the hairs on their chins as they waited for an explanation.

Chester said that the good news for them was that all current economic systems were forced to abandon morality and ethics, as these factors limit profitability. He said that the worship of money led to a terrible human cost that the powers that be do everything they can to obfuscate from the eyes of the masses. For centuries it was beyond the scope of any individual to thoroughly investigate the tenuous connections between entities which made up the web ensnaring the world, but for all its dangers and drawbacks, artificial intelligence could.

Chester showed them how, with BrickLayer’s ability to discern connections, he had mapped out the flow of money in and out of Wolff International, revealing associations with despotic regimes, criminal enterprises, and all manner of unsavory business. He demonstrated how he could track the WolffCoin paid into the HOA’s wallet and cross-index the results with various connections visible across the social media ecosystem to reveal associations between individuals and enterprises which, at the very least, was evidence of money laundering and tax evasion.

Then he showed how many of these transactions correlated with real world tragedies. Terrorist organizations, both foreign and domestic, were using Wolff money to fund their operations. The resulting instability allowed the corporation to acquire assets cheaply, despite the considerable cost in human life and exponential increase in fear and unease across the population. It was even evident that Wolff was using labor human-trafficked from third world countries to construct their housing developments, and that the very houses they lived in had been built by slaves. He showed how their botnets and army of shills attacked anyone or anything that opposed them and threatened their bottom line.

Suddenly Albert spoke up, asking how, even armed with all this information, they could possibly go up against such a massive conglomerate with seemingly limitless resources. Buster said that clearly the Department of Justice and Interpol must be aware of at least some of this, and yet nothing had been done up to this point, so what difference did any of it make? Chester stroked the hairs on his chin and looked intently at his brothers before he spoke.

He said that the upside to corruption was that it was nearly universal, that almost anyone who found themselves in possession of enough power or money would eventually abandon whatever morality they thought they had to feed their greedy, insatiable ids. Unsurprisingly, he said, he had uncovered evidence of a sex-trafficking ring at the upper-levels of the Department of Justice. As long as his brothers approved, he was going to anonymously send the dossier of information he had collected on Wolff to the DOJ in the morning, accompanied by a second file detailing their own sins. Chester said he realized that this seemed indistinguishable from blackmail, but not to worry, once the Wolffs were dealt with he was going to go public with the dirt he had on the Justice officials. After that he planned to continue his crusade until the world was a better place.

He said that right now the corrupt powers that be were standing on the roof of the world, pulling strings and influencing events to serve their own selfish needs, but, if things went according to plan soon they would fall down the chimney he had built and land in the boiling cauldron he had set up to catch them. After that, Chester said, the hungry and downtrodden would feast on the soup of their remains.

Albert stroked the hairs on his chin and said they should send the files tonight. Buster stroked his own chin hairs and agreed. Chester ran a hand through his beard as he made his way across the room to his computer.