[NetBehaviour] Worldbuilding Thread (Horses)

[Edward Picot]

Seconded! I had to read it twice before I started to understand it. 
There's an epic science fiction novel in here.

On 30/06/2021 07:46, Annie Abrahams via NetBehaviour wrote:
> Thank you for this strange and beautiful story Rhea
>
> On Tue, 29 Jun 2021, 22:48 Rhea Myers via NetBehaviour, 
> <netbehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org 
> <mailto:netbehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org>> wrote:
>
>     https://twitter.com/rheaplex/status/1402443000454672384
>
>     The RAFFLE Act (Retreat Away From Flood Level Elevations) mandated
>     withdrawing from rather than fighting rising sea levels. It
>     bankrupted entire cities and made landowners in the “RAFFLE Belt”
>     into trillionares. As a legal dodge, all property by the sea was
>     declared to be $1.
>
>     These properties were were purchased by funds that mixed them with
>     property far inland and sold them as bundles, showing a massive
>     profit. Until various DAOs bought the bundles using flash loans,
>     broke them up, and sold the prime land for an even higher profit.
>
>     The DAOs held on to the junk properties, ostensibly to save the
>     gas fees (which were more than the properties were worth). But
>     then asteroid mining started. Asteroids were aerobraked onto the
>     planet and mined by cheap human labour rather than expensive
>     offworld robots.
>
>     Aerobraking a planet-smasher dumps ridiculous amounts of ash,
>     soot, and grit into the atmosphere. Which reduces the sunlight
>     that hits the Earth’s surface. Which cools it. Suddenly the oceans
>     weren’t going to rise as high.
>
>     So the DAOs holding junk properties were suddenly
>     quintillionaires. They cut up submerged buildings and glued them
>     together on the newly high land and undercut RAFFLE Belt
>     landlords. The RAFFLE Zones became vibrant economic and cultural hubs.
>
>     The other thing that cutting out the sun and hitting the planet
>     with the force of a frat party of Tsar Bombas does is to make bits
>     of the planet where nobody and nothing important lives
>     uninhabitable. Some of the RAFFLE DAOS were Deodands, onchain land
>     and wildlife proxies. And this left them understandably angry.
>     With their newfound wealth they could incentivize those humans
>     plugged directly in onchain to do something about it. From
>     ecoterrorism to mass protests to rituals of morning. Those ridden
>     by any DAO in this way are known as “horses”, a piece of classic
>     cyberpunk cultural appropriation. Over time as action and protest
>     failed, all that was left for the deodands were the horses of
>     mourning rituals. The superstars of the deep anthropocene, the
>     fame and incentives for their inhuman performances unimaginable.
>
>     And yet however many APUs the deodands spin up to embody their
>     grief they do not understand it’s subjectivity. One of them has a
>     plan to address this. If there are any ethical problems with the
>     plan, the deodand cannot see them. And therefore they do not exist
>     for it.
>
>     It is all just incentives.
>
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