Cultures and Subcultures
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Cultures and Subcultures |
Galactic society is not uniform everywhere, nor does each archailect empire have a monopoly on distinctive culture. Across the vast expanses of known space are cultures, subcultures, and phyles that do not necessarily owe allegiance to any of the main sephirotics or polities. Like races and clades, cultures and subcultures develop autonomously, evolve in isolation, even evolve into daughter cultures. Cultures perpetuate memetically, sometimes based on ties of race or religion or political or transapient allegiance, at other times crossing every known boundary in assertion of their own distinctiveness. Some cultures are found in only a single habitat, others are distributed almost throughout known space. Some form distinct and unique phyles, others can barely be distinguished from the background noise of galactic civilization as a whole
Like a religion, a philosophy, or an ideology, a culture is a distinct memetic complex, carried down through generations as tradition and acceptable ways of doing things. While some cultures are stable, others evolve with dazzling rapidity, sometimes passing through entire evolutionary cycles in what to a nearbaseline sapient may be mere minutes or hours (this is especially true of some transapient cultures). The number of distinct cultures, subcultures, clans, and tribes in the terragen bubble cannot be estimated with certainty (especially since the boundaries between similar cultures may often be fluid), but must surely number in the hundreds of billions, with the majority incorporating perhaps only a few dozen or a few hundred sentients, and a few having membership of many billions.
The following lists only a very few of the diverse cultures and subcultures that exist within Terragen space.
Factotums - Generic term for degenerate discarded, obsolete or homeless vecs
Fastlifers - subculture dedicated to short and eventful lives
Fastman Augmented biont sociotype which uses ultratech and even transapientech to avoid having to partake food
Hider Cultures - individuals, societies, clades, and civilizations that prefer to hide from the rest of the Terragen sphere, for whatever reason
Kassians - Not a race or clade, so much as a dispersed ideological movement, who maintain that genemods (except to correct invariably terminal metabolic disorders,) should be eschewed completely, by Humans and other "naturally-evolved/adapted" species, and that production of new sophont bionts should only be through means initially afforded by Nature
Leavers - those groups who chose to leave Terragen space altogether and set off to unexplored parts of the Galaxy
Ludds - individuals, cultures, societies and clades that reject advanced technology and ai governance, whether for romantic or ideological reasons
Mechanism - the opposite belief to Bioism
Mortalists - the Mortalists are defined by eir rejection of and opposition to artificial immortality treatments which allow an otherwise mortal being to cheat death indefinitely
Prims - societies and clades that refuse to have anything to do with any but stone-age technology or the equivalent. Includes a huge number of neo-primitivist, romanticist, and some shamanic-based groups
Reapers - Semi-secret society arising as a variation of the Deathparlour phenomenon. Reapers are found across a wide variety of polities and locals in the Civilized Galaxy although their level of acceptance is usually, although not always, low
Wup - popular sectretionpunk culture-group including a number of clades
