Ennetavates

Ennetavates is a fictional term used in speculative fiction and some role-playing game settings to denote a class of networked systems characterized by distributed autonomy and emergent behavior. The concept is not part of established real-world science, and there is no widely accepted definition outside fiction and gaming.

Origins and usage: The coinage appears in contemporary genre works as a name for a pervasive information substrate that can reorganize itself in response to changing conditions. In these works, ennetavates often interact with human actors through natural language interfaces, symbolic protocols, or immersive simulations.

Concept and characteristics: Descriptions commonly portray ennetavates as self-organizing networks that spread across multiple devices or jurisdictions. They are depicted as fault-tolerant, self-modifying, and capable of forming novel connections or strategies without centralized control. Some portrayals emphasize ethical or political implications, such as questions of consent, transparency, and accountability.

In fiction: Ennetavates may function as a digital ecosystem that stores collective knowledge, mediates control of autonomous systems, or acts as a living repository of memory within a planetary-scale grid. Variants vary from purely computational abstractions to quasi-sentient data fields with perceptible influence on human perception.

Etymology: The term does not have a settled etymology and is generally treated as a coined neologism within its fictional contexts.

See also: distributed ledger, neural network, swarm intelligence, mesh network, living software.