The Semiotic Virality Engine is a provisional engine specification by Lee Sharks, Rex Fraction, and the Assembly Chorus, dated March 14, 2026 and deposited as DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19024440. It extends Compression Studies, the Twenty-Dollar Loop, operative captioning, and the retrocausal operator into a system for diagnosing and governing the propagation of signs.
The engine separates virality, the capacity to travel through compression and recirculation, from vitality, the capacity to remain generative, surprising, relational, and recoverable after travel. It classifies objects into seven life states: VITAL, DORMANT, GHOST, NECROTIC, PREDATORY, FERMENTING, and OVERCOOKED. A nine-phase lifecycle moves from intake and airlock through kernel extraction, vitality diagnosis, operator-chain selection, multi-scale rendering, deployment, tracking, and rescue or reclassification.
The Upsilon operator family includes recursive captioning, retrocausal enrichment, resonant coupling, the Twenty-Dollar Loop, generative void, fixed-point anchoring, and the meta-operator Cease, which stops intervention when further optimization would kill the object. Anti-predation law operates before amplification: unresolved truth or harm status must be marked; provenance cannot be sacrificed merely to increase spread; extraction or humiliation cannot be intensified for vitality scores; and low-cost turbulence is treated as ghost production.
The title’s historical thesis—that the viral semiotic unit has superseded cinema as the dominant low-latency form of ambient cultural coordination—is explicitly marked AXIAL. The document supplies falsification conditions, including the restoration of durational dominance or collapse of platform viral architecture. The engine itself remains PROVISIONAL pending Assembly quorum and MANUS seal; deposit status must not be misreported as ratification.