Culture & Clades

Source: Appropriate This! Culture for Non-Microbes

Once upon a time, culture was largely determined by geography and religion. As a method of memetic shared identity, it served to pass on traditions and reinforce shared values. It also propped up oppressive behavior and hostility towards outsiders and worked as an avenue of commodification. Now, with transhumanity ascendant, the nature of culture has irrevocably changed.

Transnational Citizenship

Even before the Fall, nation states were rapidly losing influence. Starved for revenue and largely co-opted by corporations, the larger countries began to compete for citizens. Faced with violent, erratic weather and the prospect of a brain drain, countries around the world offered remote citizenship to qualified applicants. Some countries, it turned out, had more pull as a brand than as a piece of real estate. The convenience of telepresence and rapid travel superseded geographical boundaries. Not to be outdone, some global corporations followed suit, establishing their own citizenship protocols and cultural identities for their protected enclaves.

In reality, transnational cultures were already de facto for peoples displaced by colonialism, wars, or climate change. The Kurds, Roma, First Nations, and Palestinians were joined by other dislocated people in facing the challenges of diaspora, caught between establishing their own enclaves and online communities and assimilation. The Maldives and Solomon Islands became the first drowned countries to establish governments in exile.

Prominent online communities followed the path of these developments, establishing official organizations that provided some of the old benefits of citizenship to those living in declining nation states: educational resources, social welfare initiatives, economic incentives, healthcare, employment, as well as protected enclaves. These new cultural clades were based on shared interests, with trappings rooted in fiction, history, or modern subcultures. Tribes as diverse as the New Africans, Queer Nation, Burners Without Borders, House Party, Modern Anachronists, Zapatistas, and Wuxia all gained influence and virtual citizens during this time. Many of these deployed their own reputation networks and/or cryptocurrencies.

But the Fall destroyed most of these early transnational citizenship organizations just as surely as it destroyed nation states. When the global communications infrastructure went under, most phyles went with them. Only a few of the more tight-knit and cohesive clades survived, and in small numbers.

After the Fall, citizenship went from something some transhumans could choose as a luxury to a necessity for which everyone was now desperately competing. Habitats had more refugees and infugees than they could accommodate, so they cherry-picked the people most likely to be productive or held lotteries and consigned the rest to virtual worlds or cold storage. Some habitats continue to maintain tiered citizenship schemes to this day, only granting privileges such as travel and access to certain areas or resources to those residents deemed most worthy.

As of AF 10, the situation has relaxed somewhat. Citizenship is again growing into a fluid concept and holding a citizenship distant from where you live in space is more common. Titan, for example, has citizens scattered across the entire system, and many Morningstar Constellation habs have begun granting remote citizenship as a way to gain the skills, reputation, and allegiance of talented individuals. The Solar System is so vast that geographical citizenship is likely to keep existing for the forseeable future, but egocasting and far-flung reputation networks also mean transgeographic organizations have many opportunities to gain members and influence.

Regional Clusters

Distance defines transhuman culture more than ever. On Earth before the Fall, every major culture was within easy reach between instantaneous mesh communications and fast global transportation. The Fall scattered transhumanity, isolating us on far-flung planets and habitats. Light-speed lag hampers mesh communications and physical transportation is painfully slow, weakening informal ties between friends and family. Cultural regions are now drifting apart because of spatial distance. It is no longer possible to easily keep up with the day-to-day changes that inform and mutate local cultures. News rarely has a great impact outside of the region and even viral phenomenon may have trouble gaining serious traction outside of the group that spawned them. Linguistic drift occurs in every habitat. The Mandarin spoken on Mars is already noticeably different than the Mandarin spoken in the Titanian Commonwealth.

Throughout the Solar System, nearby habitats group together as clusters that share culture, especially when they are close enough that light-speed lag is not a factor. The communities that make up a cluster can chat, share real-time XP, and find romantic partners from other habitats far more easily. They develop ties and institutions through shared communications and immigration.

On planets and large moons, however, everyone can instantly communicate with each other. This limits, but does not erase, geography as a factor. Mars, Mercury, Venus, and even moons such as Luna, Titan, Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa are large enough to have multiple cultural regions. Nevertheless, social class and lifestyle choices continue to be more culturally relevant. There is, of course, overlap; even the poorest synth worker can find common ground with a local hyperelite, even if it’s only complaining about the weather, sports, flaws of the local infrastructure, or rivalries with other habitats. In the large metropoles of Mars, Luna, and Titan, even self-selective subcultural groups find themselves in frequent face-to-face contact with other clades.

Morphological Clades

Some communities are defined by their morphology rather than shared cultural traits. A person’s mind is heavily affected by their morph, even if they don’t want to admit it. In biomorphs, a different balance of hormones can radically change thoughts and perception. There’s a reason why fury morphs are classified as combat models, and it’s not just the enhanced reflexes and muscles. A devoted pacifist sleeved in a fury could easily start a fight simply because the morph heightens aggression and makes fighting more instinctual. People sleeved in the same morph are more likely to have a similar temperament, on top of being like-minded in purpose, and so are naturally drawn together.

Extreme environments like vacuum, ocean floors, or high pressure atmospheres can only be settled by egos sleeved in the right morphs. Whether it’s the surface of Venus or a distant exoplanet with an exotic atmosphere, necessity dictates that only certain morphs can survive. Most of these are work-focused habitats, collecting natural resources in hazardous environments. Synthmorphs dominate in these conditions, being cheaper and lacking the need for life-support systems.

Other communities of morph-specific clades are common due to shared adaptive traits, needs, or functions. Hibernoids crew longrange ships, rusters work Martian terraforming gigs, bouncers thrive in micrograv, surya surf the solar corona, and infomorphs convene in processor loci.

Morphological clades often develop unique practices and social norms as fits their morphs. Synthmorphs swap parts. Bouncer clades drink and smoke using their feet. Long-haul hibernoid crews counter extended isolation with cuddle puddles. Neo-hominids groom each other. Menton communities are heavily into strategy games. Furies engage in comradely wrestling. Neo-octopi, notably, are more solitary. Neo-neanderthal phyles have an affinity for music. These practices and customs are sometimes confusing to those sleeved in other morphs (or are new to that type of morph).

A few morphological tribes are rooted in ideology more than shared purpose. The Ultimates favor remade morphs to fit with their self-concept as pinnacles of the human species. Bioconservative communities are composed of original flat and splicer morphs, as they eschew non-essential genetic modification and resleeving.

Non-Human Clades

Uplifts are commonly treated as second-class citizens in human-dominant habitats, worse off than even the lowest humans. They are often forced into indentured service, have no control over their reproductive options, are banned from certain areas/activities, and have no say in continued uplift research. The same is true of AGIs, who are also treated as a major security concern. In response to this, mercurials have established their own safe enclaves and habitats.

Radical mercurials want more than just equality and freedom, however. They wish to establish separate uplift and infolife cultures free from human interference. They want to chart their own independent and autonomous course, as opposed to assimilating into transhumanity. The majority of these initiatives are situated in the outer system, where they have more support and less interference.

Other non-human clades exist outside of mercurials. To be specific, these are transhuman initiatives to create non-human cultural identities. Among these are the exoglots, a mysterious group in the Jovian Trojans that uses insectile pod morphs and their own secretive artificial language, and the Colony on Luna, whose residents sleeve into insect-sized (though not necessarily insectoid) morphs and function as a society in miniature. At least one primitivist exoplanet colony is known to have sleeved into animal pods and gone “feral.”

Virtual Tribes

Considering how much transhuman culture relies on mesh technology, it is no surprise that new phyles have arisen from online communities. Many of these are based in multiplayer virtual worlds, some with millions of members. Infugees are predominant in these v-tribes, some never leaving their preferred simulspace. Each of these worlds has their own reality, physics, and other trappings, though the cultures of the residents have often steered far beyond the anticipations of the original simulspace designers. Though many of these worlds are simply social, such as Olmec, Neo-Victoria, and Glam Slam, the most popular are multiplayer game worlds, with sci-fi Starfire and fantasy setting The Skein being current favorites. Competitive attitudes between gaming tribes sometimes spill over into the wider mesh and physical world, such as the real-life hacks perpetrated by the rival Red Army and Taiwan#1 gangs.

Cultural Experimentation

Cultural experimentation is on the rise since the Fall. Various Earth cultures were once dominant throughout the Solar System due to early off-world colonization (especially China, India, America, and Europe), but their setbacks have created a void that others now strive to fill. An incredible variety of political, sociological, and economic arrangements have been tried, many still in progress. In between the more short-lived radical experiments and the schemes of con artists, egomaniacs, and charlatans, a surprising number of intentional communities now thrive.

On the political end, you cand find habitats that embrace ideologies as divergent as Maoist communism, hereditary monarchies, and straight-up dictatorships. You’ll also find more obscure systems, such as republics where officials are randomly selected and rotated out every year, technocracies run entirely by ALI systems, and panarchies where each individual in the habitat subscribes to the (non-)governmental system of their choice.

Experimentation with sex, gender, and family constructs is a common theme. The citizens of Winter, a habitat in the Jovian Trojans, attempt to eliminate gender roles altogether by sleeving androgynous biomorphs and reproducing using exowombs with the gametes of two or more parents. The brinker hab of Hearth seeks to repopulate by requiring all residents to birth multiple children a year and raising them all as an extended family. Researchers monitor these habitats to study their long-term effects.

Other experiments are based on technological trends, such as heavy forking or communities composed of the same fork. The neo-synergists on Venus use special implants to form a group mind, albeit with questionable results. Scum swarms in particular push the limits. Scattered in numerous fleets across the Solar System, no one can keep track of how many bio-mods and mindhacking experiments are conducted on them. Few on the swarms bother to keep good records; they only want the next thrill.

As technology improves and transhumanity spreads across the galaxy, every element of culture is up for debate, evolution, and revolution. The frontier is infinite.

Cultural Survival

With extinction so near, and so much lost on Earth, there has been much discussion about preserving culture for the future. Reclaimers are particularly interested in reviving cultural traditions, history, and artifacts lost to the Fall. Numerous simulspace environments are dedicated to recreating historically accurate cultural simulations of the past.

It makes sense to consider the same for current culture. The TITANs may return at any time, not to mention other potential x-risks. The pandora gates have allowed for the rapid colonization of hundreds of exoplanets across the universe. Some groups explicitly works towards archiving what they can of transhumanity in remote extrasolar locations, making it more likely that at least a snapshot of our cultures will survive. Of course, you don't need to leave the Solar System to do that. Hidden habitats can be found all the way to the Oort Cloud, populated by survivalists and archivists who tunnel inside asteroids to conceal their bases. Other factions have built ark ships to travel to nearby star systems, like the Crystal Wind, a Titanian starship on its way to Barnard’s Star, a journey that will take 800 years. Transhumanity is determined to scatter itself as far and as fast as possible, in hopes that no one threat can extinguish it.