Ecosystem of the Hyperreal

The average Mesovalkian lived their life enmeshed in an intricate network that integrates the base reality with the fluid, hyperreal chaos spiral of the Noosphere--"the sphere of minds". It is in this confluence that reality ends, and much of what exists in Darussalam exists as if they were feverishly dreamed into being, the conjuration of djinns. It is hardly an exaggeration to state that Darussalam is defined by infrastructure for this network, stacking up on the western seaboard and thinly spreading throughout the subcontinent and beyond, the protocols that mediate multitude coordinations within, as well as countless softwares that conjure metaphors and create realities from void. As thus, to properly invoke the entire imagery of Darussalami culture, it's essential to catch a glimpse into the madness of hyperreality and witness the order that emerges from its chaos.

The Network

The fundamental architecture of the Network (known by Darussalamis as nūr, "heatless light") from which the Noosphere sprang is quite familiar: it's a telecommunication mesh network that accommodates information exchange between various local networks and devices through a common transport protocol. Its earliest form was in development circa late 1940s throughout the academies and military research centers in the western seaboard, although it only entered popular use starting from late '70s onwards. From that point it made and unmade social orders, fragment and centralize power, uproot the common consensus of reality until its present state.

A contentious question in Mesovalkia throughout the early stages of the Network was regarding the control of physical infrastructure underpinning the Network and software layers mediating the protocols above - a tug-of-war contest between various centralized corporate service providers backed by administrative authorities seeking more legible and controllable communication methods, and decentralized networks based on cryptographically-secured distributed ledgers. By today, the result is inconclusive at best - the automation and mechanization of much of service providers and structural reorganization of their underpinning technological infrastructure at one hand as well as marketization leading to dissolution of voluntary subculture-esque circles of blockchain networks on the other generally understood to led to the development of a self-sustaining system largely autonomous (and orthogonal) to human decision-making that integrates the interoperability and legibility of centralized systems with security and nodal distribution of decentralized systems. As one network architect remarked, the system could "either be perceived as an unified centralized hivemind of a machine deity, or an autonomous network of devices, free and illegible from any human authorities whatsoever [...] an ecosystem of its own, might as well determine whether the process of water precipitation is 'centralized' or 'decentralized'". In this regard the Network could be regarded as a microcosm for Darussalam itself.

The relative secrecy of the Network's development and its current autonomy from human control - rendering certain sections of the present infrastructure illegible to all but idiot-savant enthusiasts, professional schizophrenics, as well as the esoteric castes of the network architecture and engineering guilds, had fostered lurid conspiracy theories regarding its true nature. Some speculated that the extensive fiber optic cables were built on ancient archeotechnological leylines that imbibed it with unknowable terrifying powers, or shaped in fractal patterns of sacred (or demonic) geometry that has summoned demons that continued to dwell in the Noosphere until today. Some alleged that radio waves emitted for the wireless access to the Network had more sinister purposes that alter bodies, minds, or even surrounding physical reality. Certain religious sects, the most prominent being the Azradis, revere the Network as a divine channel or some other statuses of religious importance, and much of the conspiracy theories were nurtured by the simple fact that a significant, disproportionate number of network engineering guilds and architect orders maintain Azradi affiliation.

The Interfaces

Darussalamis utilize a considerably wider variety of interfaces to access the Noosphere than residents of most other polities. Commonly referred as intercessors (wasila), this term originally referred to computational machines which inter-machine data transfer protocol was delineated by the Network, but later on expanded to encompass variety of devices utilized for access to the Network. This encompasses conventional intercessor machines, the sense-organs (lataif)--a set of personal sensory interfaces that might include vocal, haptic, and auditory dermal patches, augmented reality lenses, and/or neural interfaces (commonly referred as pneuma or rūḥ), external mobile devices (including foreign imports), collective interfaces for network-integrated appliances, and many others.

The presence of multitudinous mediating interfaces primarily accommodates the process of data collection necessary for personalized services that most Darussalamis utilize. Neural interfaces of diverse appearances and abilities, from bulky neuroheadsets to thin, near-invisible threads of fungi-like nets embedded beneath their users' skulls, not only provided more receptive and practical intercession with the Network (and expanding communication beyond written/vocal forms through GAN-mediated environs) but also fed highly-nuanced emotion analysis reports to service providers. As the minutiae of your decisions are determined a few miliseconds prior to your actual conscious decisionmaking, it has became trivial for cutting-edge implants to be in perfect knowledge of your future actions and recommend possible recourses - if not outright system-override if the users permit such actions. Known as qalb or autopilot mode, the system has been utilized for various activities where baseline human nervous system is deemed inadequate - chiefly of which is vehicle navigation, with multiple Core administrations essentially mandating either autopilot modes or straight vehicle automation on highways.

While personal sense-organs had integrated much of interfacing process into individual bodies, external devices are hardly uncommon - they mostly exist to mediate incompatible interfaces in public spaces. Paper-thin quantum intercessors provided both highly flexible and practical interface as well as sky-high computing power capable of complex environment simulations.

The Realities

A consistent theme in Darussalami social history during the past few decades is accelerating arms race between verification and fabrication.

Media generation is one of the core underpinning technologies for Noosphere interfacing. Hyperrealistic synthetic images and voices had been catastrophically disruptive for artistic industries in the late 20th century, altered much of the intellectual property regime and rendering a considerable section of it moot. Celebrities sell licenses for their vocal likenesses, locked in perpetual race with increasingly-sophisticated pirated imitations. Most embraced the trend, turning into ethereal personalities spawning dozens to thousands of independent works, gravitating towards increasingly niche aesthetics and fetishes as markets saturate.

Nowadays anyone can speak in and listen to anyone's voice, as long as it is available to them through one means or another: public databases, personal memory records. This includes voices that had never belonged to anyone in the first place, and more dangerously, those synthetized in such manner that they evoke nostalgic déjà vu to anyone who listened. While most hearing organs nowadays are capable to filter out such mentally-disruptive intrusions, it's not uncommon to legitimately and optionally utilize emotional associations, such as using the voices of loved ones in personalized lifestyle guides or psychological sessions with chatbots. Instead of seances, grieving relatives hire bot-assistants that will imitate the dead in funerary rites and death-anniversaries. In the world where natural death had been driven into near-extinction and deaths are sudden, rare, and completely unanticipated, this provides relief and comfort for families in question, and provided sufficient data provided, the chatbot might as well be the deceased person themselves. Ancestral home services provide high-security private database storage accessible only after death to "reconstruct" the person into living.

Deepfakes allow the construction of a photorealistic visual world, guided by softwares and interfaces or conjured straight from one's mind, one's phantasmagorical dream manifesting in reality. More mundane uses overlay informations unavailable in base reality on objects, embed glamors and social credit scores to individual avatars, insert personalized ads (inconspicuous or otherwise) within one's visual range, or even remove ones implanted on base physical reality. They also detect and remove infohazardous or superstimulating patterns - or, again, actually implanting them, for various sexual, psychological, or even professional uses. At nights, depending on the sophistication of your interface, they might regulate dreams - personalized, optimized for your preference.

As thus reality as it appears to a Darussalami wildly varies by individual preference and financial capability. For one it's a near-empty, seamless ascetic existence, bare of physical and earthly pleasures. For another it's a dizzying array of colors and delights, superstimuli overcrowding libidinal urges, hyper-personalized fetishes recommendations from expert providers. For another it's a neatly-ordered life with much of your waking state in autopilot and REM dreams organized for optimal work productivity. And yet for another it's ads, ads, ads. For many it's a mixture of them, switching according to mood affiliations. Many sense-organs, mandatory for those sold in some Core areas, provide reality scores, schemes to distinguish the status of imagery you witness, object you perceive, voices you hear or even scent in your receptors relative to the base reality. This allows you a refuge from chaos of the hyperreal, allowing you to pick the fruits of post-scarcity reality while avoiding its drawbacks - if you have enough money, of course.

The Cultures

It has been a long time since artificial, non-human activity in the Network surpassed human ones. Corporations utilize anthropomorphic avatars for their products, services, and activities. A common running joke across the Noosphere is that your close gamer friend for the last five years had been manufactured by the developers as the part of its public relations campaign. Reality scoring system provided by sense-organs generally mitigates this, but there are alot of loopholes and bypasses to jump through, and the entire field is locked in an arms' race.

Communication platforms provide varying degrees of security and verification process, not all of which necessarily guarantee the utmost accurate non-anonymous verification. Those who place great importances to their "privacy" coded their passkeys into convoluted rituals, invoking angels and djinni in the Network to provide layers of protection, enveloping their data into amulets of increasingly intricate hashes. Sometimes, it's not really important whether the person on the other side is "real" - in fact, it might be important that they're not real, instead. There are those who cultivate a rich subcultural ecosystem comprised solely of custom-made individual-patterns. They communicate to no one but invisible familiars, who will also conduct their daily tasks and communications with other individuals - who might also be artificially conceived. The boundary of personality and individuality in Darussalami social life is highly porous, at times borderline schizophrenic. Lovers integrate each other's interface, mutually infecting dreams, aspirations, and even personal aesthetic preferences. Parents embed their children with ambitions unfulfilled in their lifetime. Cults utilize neural interfaces to invoke rapturous seizures among its worshipers as they shuddered in ecstatic thrill of divine hivemind.

Persons merge into one and dissolve into multiple personalities, becoming many-faced chameleons - likewise, personalities freed from individual control, constructed within the machines, fester and spread throughout the Noosphere. They vary in nature and ability. Some are intentionally designed as anthropomorphic personifications of various services and products in the Noosphere, the malak (lit. "Angels"), like gods and angels governing certain aspects of reality. Some are similar to malak in the sense of being minor guardians of certain services, but considerably more haphazard, to concrete personalities as ethereal images designed by earliest neural networks were to photographs - the afrit, the trickster gods and demons of grimoires whose invocation is sought where the official channels of the malak is proven too rigid and inflexible. Others are emergent personalities, neither living nor dead, arising from communication patterns of hundreds if not thousands or millions of individuals, akin to automated replies running amok: the ghouls (ghul), or (more rarely) rising from an individual's automated activity patterns throughout the Noosphere, the qarin. And then there are massive, infectious hiveminds, recognizable by common thought and vocal patterns exhibited by its victims, generally concentrated on fixation to a certain idea or concept: the marids or egregores that ransack the Noosphere. These are names imposed not on true categories but a spectrum, divined down by schizophrenics who supplicated to intelligences which communication patterns are not comprehensible to men, spreading throughout the Noospheric networks and platforms through memetic agents.