After the apocalypse, when humans are scant or have disappeared from this earth altogether, the cones will remain. They will lie in wayward sites left for purposes unknown and long since defunct. They will be sending their orange signal with no one to receive the message. To descry this future, you do not have to wait until doomsday. There are cones all around us that give a premonition of the world to come.
One is knocked over and kicked to the side of the curb. Another is in a ditch. A third is bent awkwardly, as if deflated. A cone that was supposedly once orange is now black, on a desert trail miles from any road or car or human. Others stand vigilantly vertical and continue to flare their bright orange warning, though there is nothing around them: no traffic, no obstacles, no objects. They remain purposeless while exuding purpose. Other cones of various sizes and coral hues huddle in corners and in parking lots signaling nothing, biding time for unknown durations.
In attending to cones, we see a human language system gone awry. You know what an orange cone means: be aware. Something is happening. Perhaps there is construction on the road ahead or a pothole on a footpath. However, when these guardians of safety are stuck in a tree, abandoned in an empty lot, or languishing in an overgrown meadow, it tells us that the system has faltered. Try as it might to say something, the cone submerged in a canal is no longer sending its intended message. Instead, the slimy hunk of petrochemicals tells us not just that language has glitched, but that things are not as they should be. If these rogue markers signal anything, they portend meaning gone sideways, feral, nomadic.
These feral cones are a mirror to our own unruliness, a sign of existential dilemma, an icon of loneliness and of dutifulness beyond any duty. They are more than we ever intended. And less.
Ron Broglio is the author of Animal Revolution and Surface Encounters: thinking with animals and art, among other books. He serves as the Director of the Humanities Institute at Arizona State University, and led a seminar at SoRA in the summer of 2026 on Animal Phenomenology.