Can you explain the terms of PIRM given the full context of the setting?

"So it was that humanity’s true ascent to the stars began in the early 23rd century with the development of faster than light travel. A peculiar technology, the specifics of which are rather counter-intuitive, FTL works via the creation of what is effectively a pocket universe that intersects with our own at two points (actually one point moving in a parabola) generating a “wormhole”. The inside of this pocket has a variable geometry that expands according to the size of the object being pushed through it and the distance it is being moved across, as the internal space of the pocket expands the object is “dragged” along its internal curvature until the point it entered the pocket from intersects with the point in real space it wishes to go to. This means, in effect, that the bigger the object and the further you want to go the faster you get there. It is easier and faster to go 100 lightyears than it is to go 1. This has its limits however, a boundary in any direction where if one attempts to go beyond the pocket will expand so much (and so quickly) that it will rip apart more or less instantly.


The nature of FTL defined human settlement which was typified by inverse and “backscattered” expansion spheres. The oldest colonies, which are themselves centuries old, are hundreds of lightyears out from Sol. These then colonized the star systems nearest to Sol which then colonized the systems just next to the old colonies, which as a result found travel and trade with Sol itself easier than with their several times over co-colonial ‘progenitors’. Human space began to resemble a series of incomplete concentric circles, like the trunk of a tree that had sections carved out of it at random. Political pressure began to be enforced by Sol (otherwise known as EarthGov) and the Old Colonies, and where FTL was not viable for bringing one’s immediate space into line superweapons were. Entire systems were closed off for settlement and placed under a preemptive moratorium by the great powers that pointed relativistic kill vehicles at any star close enough for them to strike in only a few years time. Any group that sought to set up an illegal colony would soon find that enough ordinance had been sent to their location to wipe out all life on the planet by the time they began to put down roots.


The enclosed frontier, which first existed for purely political (if paranoic) concerns, soon shaped economic interests. All the good land as it were had been bought up centuries ago, or otherwise held in trust by the colonial boards and working groups that had established the colonies. There were some exceptions definitely, and because it was difficult for Sol and the Old Colonies to prevent *each other* from setting up subsidiary colonies (after all the moratorium was one they enforced together) space was opened up here and there on the fringes and along the membrane of stars that hugged the local neighborhood of Sol for people to “make it big” and establish their own “dynasty” every generation or so. That said almost all of space was dominated by a handful of extremely wealthy landowners and equity groups along with the industrial conglomerates that partnered with them. Land was expensive, not that the masses would have been allowed to buy it anyways as it wasn’t on the market, but so was labor… occasionally and depending on where you lived. 


Human demographics being a finnicky thing and moving people across parsecs being a different and more complicated affair than across ages-old Earth borders even with the existence of FTL, there was often competition between the colonies for access to human bodies, offering varying benefit plans and packages. Some specialized colonies like Matha Kadai which was owned by a company that produced precision quartz tubes and injector feeds for starship thrusters came to sport welfare states that would make the old social democracies blush in order to keep talent planetside. Likewise, systems that already had large swathes of people (usually owing to previous rushes to the frontier) would seek to hold onto them, often as a means of economic warfare by denying competitors access to bodies. For those societies that could not afford to pay their people to stay but for whom the marginal costs of keeping them outweighed letting them go, more blunt methods were employed. Wages kept low and transport costs kept high, you can’t leave the planet if you can’t afford the ticket and although this had obvious adverse effects the ruling classes of these worlds who were accustomed to this state of affairs were more than willing to bite the bullet and let wounds fester among the segments of the populace they never saw and were often physically separated from within walls and tall towers. The technical term for this type of world is a “shithole”.


This state of affairs also led to the development of competing interstellar freight systems, which for those of you familiar with the history of the old railroads can probably see where this is going. Five routes would be created to the same star system, because there were so many that people could choose each one of them failed to get enough passengers to cover costs thus causing all of them to go under and thus interstellar throughput saw unstable periods of sudden grown and collapse. This would in turn contribute to the generation defining cycles of cheap and expensive labor. 


Your average Joe Shmoe out in the colonies (and back on Earth too) though was something less glamorous or noteworthy as a pampered professional or a member of a rather on-the-nose recreation of the old imperial subaltern. He (or she, or they) was just a debtor. What it meant to be a debtor varied a lot, but in the colonies it typically meant those who took on household debt, access to settlement guarantees which were effectively a charge paid off in installments to allow one to live on a colony in the first place. Most people would wager that the money they’d make and space they’d have out in the stars would make up for the upfront cost to “break in”, and this was generally true. Most people could expect to pay off their debts at some point in their lifetime, though a significant number could not, and over time this group of generational debt holders and their children began to exert a drag on interstellar politics. Some colonies began to enforce indentured servitude, others saw planetwide revolts which were occasionally successful as members of other classes saw the overturning as an opportunity to rise themselves. After all, why not join in the revolt of the debtors and lumpen if you can end up a “king” by the end of it? If you don’t have the spine to take a gamble like that you were never cut out to be president of your own planet anyways.


That said all this would take a relative backseat in the development of colonial politics. At the end of the day the buck stopped at Sol and the Old Colonies, and so it would be their relations that would make or break interstellar society and by the beginning of the 28th century they were in a word: bad. Brushfire conflicts broke out for numerous reasons, but one of the most important ones was the previously mentioned issue of interstellar freight. The cyclical rise and fall of private interstellar shipping lines saw their amalgamation and seizure by both sides, often preemptively seizing potentially valuable operations to deny them to the other side. Whether in the form of corporate takeovers, deployment of naval assets, or the even more blunt “sending marines to capture independent and neutral cross-system traffic stations and forcing the crew at gunpoint to deny the other side the rights to dock in or transit through their system”, colonial space began to resemble a giant game of Go. 


Both sides began to employ slaved AI systems to coordinate their ever-shifting cold war, attempting to outmaneuver the other’s outmaneuver and on and on it went. AI handlers would undergo deep hypnotic manipulation to embed AI command codes into their very mental impressions to stop the enemy from being able to undermine their planning systems, and in turn skilled “brain breakers” would be trained to extract these codes anyways in veritable spy thriller-esque operations. The nadir of relations would see the redeployment of kill vehicles to systems only a few light years away from each other’s major colonies, meaning that one small misstep could have turned a solid half of inhabited space into admittedly rather pretty glowing radioactive slag. 


Fortuitously however, a sudden advancement in technology saved the day, or perhaps more accurately flipped the game board over. FTL communications were an important if admittedly less thought of aspect of interstellar civilization. To be sure they were extremely important, but due to the specifics of FTL they had rather low latency. Information was “small” after all, encoded in photon pulses, which meant it went slow through FTL pockets, an issue compounded by the fact that one would need to send more messages to systems relatively “close” to oneself than to those faraway, making it even more prohibitive. As a result, it was often far more economical (and faster) to send information by way of analog storage in regular interstellar freight. There was even a brief boom not just in paper documentation but even microfiche which at one point in the 26th century attained such a degree of saturation that it exceeded the entire bandwidth of the pulse array ansible network.


Most experiments into making FTL comms more efficient and economical were based around trying to find ways to replicate the inflationary effects of large objects. One team adopted an approach of sending comm pulses alongside ships as they entered FTL, which was useful in specific circumstances and did lead to a niche industry of “conveyance ships” which were more or less empty craft that traversed FTL just for communication pulses to “ride” alongside them and which followed pre-set routes between systems that needed and could afford such a service. This was a niche in which EarthGov in particular excelled. Another team attempted to see if it was possible to create a “fixed transmission line” through FTL by just sending an uninterrupted stream of data through a pocket. This did not work and could not have worked given the whole issue of the two ends of the hole actually being one point, though it did result in a number of bizarre spacial anomalies. 


The breakthrough team would be a maverick one, a group which attempted to solve the riddle of FTL comms by going in the other direction. Rather than abiding by the normal rules of “big and far equals fast” they went even smaller. The reasoning was thus: there was long theorized to be an expansionary metric to the pockets, which to say a minimum degree that they would expand at any given time and thus drag an object along their internal curvature. Therefore, it should be possible that if an object small enough was sent that the pocket created was the size of that metric itself then the “point” of the pocket would occupy its entrance and exit at the same time, thus meaning that once an object went through it would immediately arrive at its destination regardless of distance. This worked. It was an absolute almost unbelievable success. All that was needed was just to create successive micro-pockets containing packets of information that would then be re-assembly sequentially at the receiving station.  


Of course, a breakthrough in FTL comms would have been an exciting and consequential but overall un-revolutionary development in the grand view of interstellar politics had it just been that. Those already rich and powerful would have used high latency comms to recreate at the galactic scale the systems that had existed at the planetary scale. A galactic stock exchange probably would have been formed in earnest, banking empires would have monopolized the further development of the interstellar economy subverting the superpowers and the then hegemonic landed and industrial classes, and slowly but surely there would be recursion, 21st century Earth recreated in a 28th century galaxy. This did happen to an extent, but as it turned out almost as quickly as this new form of FTL communication was developed a novel use for it was found. 


It is in fact possible, even rather economical, to transmit human consciousness across FTL comms. That is not to say brain uploads, but seemingly the actual uninterrupted consciousness of an individual person. Or at least as far as anyone can tell as when a human mind is sent through the ansible network the person’s body immediately stops exhibiting any mental activity. This transmission is not done through the packets of information sent through the pockets, but apparently along the “membrane” of the pocket itself, a human mind being able to fit within an infinitesimally small point in this bizarre kind of space. This discovery led to the development of egocasting, the transmission of human minds instantaneously across colonial space. Human minds, it turns out, could occupy any analogous system that was believed by the egocasted individual to be “them”. Individuals who had no compunctions against thinking that a robot could hold their mind could occupy a robot, those who did not could not. This was temporary, however. Over time a mind would decohere and would need to be returned to its body, but this could range anywhere from several weeks to several years. Such a period of time was more than long enough for their actual body (which could be packed like sardines with countless other human bodies in conventional freight) to arrive at their location for them to reinhabit. The overall process which came to be known as “going under” was typified by a mild sense by the egocasted individual that they were asleep and lucid dreaming. As decoherence reached its terminus the egocasted individual would begin to feel that they were “waking up”, and would describe the process of re-inhabiting their body as akin to such. The inevitably of decoherence also meant that early hopes of using flash clones to kitbash human immortality were dashed. Eventually even an effectively perfect organic replica would experience decoherence, making attempting to body hop into clone bodies to stay alive merely an extremely disorienting practice that didn’t add any years to one’s life.


Egocasting had many implications. It meant in one sense that at the same time that capital could now flow more freely than before due to FTL comms that labor itself was now loosed in kind and in some cases preemptively. It was cheap to cast a mind, cheaper still to send the now unconscious body after it via interstellar freight. The only limiting factor was the existence of receiver side infrastructure to house the minds. This led to a rush in the previously limited fields of flash cloning and humanoid robotics. The former taking off even due to the inability of using it as a path to easy-immortality due to its relevance for the vast number of civilian and non-labor applications wherein people, frankly, didn't want to wander around in a glorified plastic action figure. Worlds and later interstellar companies began to compete to meet the demand for lowering the barriers to movement. The need to shore up public trust in the safety of egocasting (which was for all the experts could tell surprisingly safe and astonishingly reliable) resulted in ‘cast-and-house’ conglomerates adopting shared equity plans, to get the public to essentially buy in to the success of the very services they were using, and because there was an untapped market there among people who wanted to get off-world (those previously mentioned “shithole” worlds come to mind) there were lots of takers. 


The potential for casting humans into machines was also rather obvious and quickly capitalized on by all involved. Countless semi-humanoid models of industrial, mining, and processing robots were created, designed to allow the largest possible group of people to view them as houseable. It was found that the threshold was actually quite low. Humanoid robots didn’t need to have skin for one, a simple fiberglass and steel carapace in the shape of a human with mechanical eyes and a mouth would do. A little bit of give was necessary so that when someone touched their arm it would feel like they were pressing into something, and they had to be able to eat or at least intake food and expel it. To go about the motions of living in the general shape of a human being for most of the day. From there on one could spend six or eight or eighteen hours a day in the hard vacuum of space or in some other inhospitable environment as their extraneous parts that they could snap on and off at contact ports along their back (or sides) helped them work. To this end these same manufacturers and their associates also pushed for education reform (one of the first interstellar wide reform packages ever actually) to raise future generations with more… flexible views of personhood so as to expand the number of individuals who could egocast into various forms and units.


Of course, the manufacturers of these robotic frames had very little interest in their workers owning them, especially as one frame could hold any person who could imprint upon it. This meant that countless people would live most of their lives in a shell that did not belong to them and could be taken away from them at any time. This had the unfortunate (depending upon your point of view) effect of encouraging some egocasters to run away with their frames once they obtained them. A kind of pirate and outlaw society developed, that of the egocaster who upon obtaining a frame runs away with a ship and their comatose body, doing odd jobs (and crimes) across the colonies while making occasional jaunts back into their original bodies to stave off decoherence. These “marionettes” would often conglomerate into temporary associations in their trips across the stars before going their other ways. In some less optimal cases runaways would just take off without their bodies. These individuals, often with only a few years to live, would become extremely reckless and often desperate to find ways to stave off decoherence. This took the form of ever more extreme self-hypnosis to deepen their connection with their host frame, or in other words becoming more robotic in their thoughts and feelings.   


In the hundred years after egocasting took off human space was changed dramatically. The tenuous balance that underpinned the colonial economy until that point was broken especially as the Old Colonies and Sol found their interests better served by collaborating with the new giants and the interstellar migratory class over the old and frankly sclerotic landed conglomerates. The creation of a truly interstellar society, as *persons* could now travel the breadth of space and communicate with each other easily made the parochial interests of middling colonies seem antiquated and increasingly out of touch to the now truly cosmopolitan centers of human culture. Likewise, a re-orientation of strategic objectives was underway. Both Sol and the Old Colonies slowly came to an understanding that the new interstellar economy was better served but the final rationalization of interstellar freight. If people could now move more or less seamlessly across borders (barring legal boundaries of course) that meant that logistics had to be more flexible to keep up with the movement of its customers across space, which could not be done with the cold war era barriers set up between colonial transport charters. 


At the same time the now cross-national society and market that developed also led to agitation on a scale never seen before. The increasingly wealthy professional and industrial classes that had developed over the last century began to butt heads with the landed classes, who had still enforced a moratorium on the selling of land to the hoi polloi. Frustration with this state of affairs began to spill over into questioning the logic of the colonial lockdown on planetary charters in general. People, all across space, all at once began to demand the opening up of space, the breaking up of land conglomerates and the end of the charter guarantee debt system entirely. This began to morph into something known as the Public Interest Reform Movement (PIRM) which called for more than just that to change. By the dawn of the 29th century the demands of the movement were enumerated as such:

1)     Opening up of the colonial frontier and the creation of a united settlement initiative.

2)     Breaking up of the land conglomerates and land reform seeing the issuance of their extraneous assets to those who have been working and living on the land for generations.

3)     Ending of the charter debt system and a debt jubilee.

4)     Creation of an interstellar central bank to supersede the colonial banking networks.

5)     Issuance of debt-free money to small producers and consumers to raise the purchasing power of the average citizen and ensure viability of new industries.

6)     Creation of planetary superannuation funds that can invest back into the interstellar economy.

7)     Right of egocasters to be able to purchase their robotic units. 

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