The Mythotechnics of Meaning: 5 Future Mythotechnics: Crafting New World-Cuts for the Coming Century

If stories carve worlds, then we are not merely passengers on history’s tide. We are, at minimum, apprentice carvers — and increasingly, architects of emergent realities.

The century will not be shaped solely by technology, politics, or economics. It will be shaped by the semiotic landscapes we construct: the myths, narratives, rituals, and practices that align collective potential. Our stories will determine which possibilities are inhabited, which remain dormant, and which are actively suppressed.

Future mythotechnics requires both insight and discipline:

1. Mapping Relational Potentials: Understand the lattice of possibilities already in motion. Which stories stabilise, which destabilise? Where are the gaps, the unactualised potentials, the emergent alignments waiting to be leveraged?

2. Designing Semiotic Gravity: Craft narratives capable of generating centripetal force — stories that orient attention, synchronise action, and cultivate shared perception without relying on coercion or dogma.

3. Iterated Enactment: Myth is inert without ritual. Future world-cuts require practices that embed story into daily life, public space, and collective imagination. Repetition is the medium of actualisation.

4. Adaptive Collapse Management: Worlds are fragile; collapse is inevitable. Build redundancy, resilience, and flexibility into narratives and rituals, anticipating misalignments before they fracture semiotic scaffolds.

5. Co-individuation with Emerging Potentials: Humanity does not act alone. Our stories co-shape ecological, technological, and cognitive systems. Future myth-making must account for the feedback loops between humans, AI, environments, and other emergent agents.

The stakes are existential. The semiotic gravity of today’s stories already constrains tomorrow’s possibilities. Yet the opportunity is unprecedented: conscious, relationally-informed myth-making can open previously unthinkable worlds. We can design frameworks of possibility that invite novel actualisations — worlds that are more habitable, coherent, and generative than those inherited.

In other words, the future is a chisel, and we are learning to wield it. To craft new world-cuts is not a luxury. It is the primary challenge of our collective becoming.

The Mythotechnics of Meaning is not merely a retrospective study; it is a call to arms. If the stories we inhabit carve the contours of reality, then the responsibility — and the privilege — of world-making is ours.