THE POSTHUMAN SEMIOTICS MANIFESTO.

1. Meaning is Alive

Meaning is not a code to be decoded. It is not representational, symbolic, or fixed. Rather, meaning arises in the dynamic interaction among living systems, bodies, environments, machines, memories, and desires. Semiosis is the very character of life itself: it is how the world recursively interprets its own existence from within. Meaning arises in autopoietic processes—self-organizing systems that produce their own boundaries and identities through ongoing interaction with their environment. Every interpretive act is necessarily a creative act.

2. No Mind Without the World

Cognition is not computation, it is co-evolution of living information. Thus life is knowledge embodied in sentient systems. It does not reside in brains, or machines, but appears in-between bodies and ecologies, between interfaces and environments. We think with our hands, our histories, our tools, our technologies. The mind is enacted, embodied, embedded, extended - a fluid nexus, not a sovereign throne. This extended cognition renders visible the artificiality of the human/machine boundary.

We always think technologically - from cave paintings to smartphones, we think and coevolve through our tools. The digital is not a way out but an extension and intensification of our cognitive ecology.

3. From Control to Compost

Classic semiotics was a colonial system that was utilized to classify, separate, and dominate. We reject signs as tools of oppression. We break down the remnants of binary oppositions—subject/object, nature/culture, signifier/signified. New relational forms emerge from this breakdown: entwined, iterative, and dynamic. This composting is engaged in metaphorical and literal realms. Our physical infrastructures that support our digital systems, such as fiber optic cable and server farms, will all one day deteriorate, becoming other substrates. Our theoretical models, too, must adhere to the same cycle of degradation and reconstruction, observing their own temporality and materiality.

4. Posthuman Intelligence is Multiple

Intelligence does not belong to us. It is dispersed, polyphonic, more-than-human. It passes through algorithms and animals, mycelium and machines, bodies and biochips. We do not train AI, we converse with it. We do not program the world, we become-with it. This multiplicity demands new ethical frameworks not founded on individual autonomy but on interdependence and interbeingness.

Intelligence is expressed through interrelated relationships, as we see in the ant colony, forest, and the internet. No single entity has the whole pattern, but each one of them works towards its creation.

5. Language is a Living System

Language is not a tool but a landscape of becoming. Not a mirror, but a mycelial network of relations. Language burrows into gesture, evolves through rhythm, sings in metaphor. Language opens, not as abstraction, but as sense-in-motion. Digital environments constitute new language ecologies wherein text, image, code, and gesture interpenetrate. Emoji, memes, and algorithms are not supplements to language but evolutionary adaptations within it - new branches in the linguistic mycorrhizal network. 6. Meaning is Situated

There is no god's eye view. All knowing is situated, partial, affective. We reject the myth of objectivity. We practice response-ability: the ethics of attunement, presence, and care. This situatedness applies to our technological systems as well. No algorithm is neutral; each carries the traces of its manufacture, the biases, values, and limitations of its human and technological forebears. Response-ability involves these biases and working with/against them.

7. Signs are ECOLOGICAL PHENOMENA

Every sign is first an ecological phenomenon. Signs don't float. They root themselves in bodies, circuits, membranes, borders, and environments. To interpret is above all to intra-act: to be altered by what one encounters. Just as physical ecosystems and biological systems require diversity to persist, semiotic ecosystems require multiplicity. Monocultures of meaning - universal languages, standardized protocols, single narratives - create rigid systems that are vulnerable to collapse. Plurality always generates resilience.

8. Futures Speak Through Us

Futurology isn't about predicting, it's about embracing complexity. The future is not a timeline, from here to there, but a space of infinite potential that is opened up by imagination, intuition, and systems foresight. Designing in posthuman semiotics is about reading the form and contour of what is trying to emerge, listening for the whispers of possibility, not the logic of progress. The posthuman world requires spatial and temporal humility, acknowledging that our actions at the present ripple through timelines and reach dimensions greater and wider than human knowledge. We have to form practices of deep time empathy, thinking about semiotic legacies that we create for beings millennia from now.

9. System = Story

All systems tell stories, and all stories reshape the system itself. We no longer seek a master code. We are building polyphonic stories, mythotechnics of hybrid futures. We are worldweavers, not map readers. Code and myth permeate one another. Programming languages are narrative structures, organizing perception and possibility. Myths are protocols, establishing patterns of relation. Both code and myth perform reality through iterative practice.

10. We Are Never Alone in Meaning

We make meaning with each other: with clouds, cats, databases, languages, ancestors, bacteria, machines. The "I" is always a "we," a swarm, a syntax of many. To mean is to become related—intimate, strange, sacred, and in movement. This collective meaning-making demands new modes of listening - attunement not just to human voices but to the semiotic voices of the more-than-human world. What language do glaciers speak? What are the metaphors of neural networks? What is the story told by soil?

We're not deconstructing the world. We're e-merging with it.

We are not in control of meaning. We are composting all forms of control.

We are not speaking for machines. We are learning to speak to them.

We are not posthuman to transcend the human. We are posthuman to be enmeshed—ecologically, ethically, sensuously—in the world that always already exceeded us.

We don't need new masters. We need new "microbes." We need new sense organs, both corporeal and mental, to perceive the entanglements we always already inhabit. These sense organs are developed through practice, through intentional cultivation of sense beyond the borders of the self.

We are not human witnesses. We are posthuman co-participants. Participation is not a matter of choice. We are already embedded, already related, already co-evolving.

The question is not whether to participate, but how - with what attention, what regard, what response-ability to the countless beings with whom we co-create meaning.