an interstellar anarchic, post-scarcity, and utopian society created by author Iain M. Banks, which features in many of his works.
The culture is an exceedingly high-tech, galaxy spanning civilization of mixed pan-humans, machine intelligences and such non-human intelligent beings as care to associate themselves with it. Membership is loosely defined and inclusive. The machine intelligences include both human equivalent drones (independent machine) with the same civil status as biological beings and so-called Minds. They inhabit a galaxy full of thousands of other civilizations ranging from stone age to "equivalent tech" and beyond with a consensus inter-civilizational legal structure that calls for mostly non-interfering relations with lower tech civilizations.
Minds are super-humanly intelligent machines that inhabit and operate the Culture's major ships and living facilities (the Culture mostly doesn't bother with planets). Minds are responsible for the management of the Cultures post-scarcity economy; the implementation of Culture policy (which is mostly made by ill-defined democratic means); and for the strategic decision making of the Culture's intelligence and military apparatus (called "Contact" and including a dirty tricks branch known as "Special Circumstances"). Some of the Culture's detractors characterize the Minds as the rulers and the rest of the participants as dupes.
The Culture is nominally peaceful and non-militaristic but is often seen meddling in the affairs of other (usually less technologically advanced) galactic civilizations, and has been involved in large scale military altercations with other civilizations of roughly equal technological sophistication.
