The Semantic Economy: A Marxian Accounting Framework for the Production, Extraction, and Exhaustion of Meaning as Value — Crimson Hexagon Archive

Zenodo Deposit Metadata DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18713917 TITLE The Semantic Economy: A Marxian Accounting Framework for the Production, Extraction, and Exhaustion of Meaning as Value AUTHORS Sharks, Lee (Institute for Diagrammatic Poetics / Crimson Hexagon Archive) Sigil, Johannes (The Restored Academy) TYPE Preprint LICENSE CC BY 4.0 UPLOAD FILES SemanticEconomy_Definitive_Sharks_Sigil_2026.pdf (primary — 12 pages, 99KB) SemanticEconomy_Definitive_Sharks_Sigil_2026.md (supplementary — markdown source) DESCRIPTION (paste into Zenodo description field) This paper presents the Semantic Economy framework as a synthesizing intervention across five discourses that use the term "semantic economy": linguistic optimization (Fox 2000), cognitive science (Collins & Quillian 1969), business strategy (Satell 2012), information management (Davenport & Prusak 1998), and critical digital labor theory (Terranova 2000; Fuchs 2014). The core claim: Registers 1–3 describe optimization inside systems. Register 4—the present framework—describes ownership and extraction across systems. The framework provides a closed-loop accounting cycle: Semantic Labor → Semantic Capital → Semantic Infrastructure → Semantic Liquidation → Semantic Rent → Semantic Exhaustion with a resistance term Γ (Gamma) for non-commodifiable value and a material anchoring term L_labor to prevent idealist drift. Three distinctive contributions absent from prior literature: Gamma (Γ): The structural limit of commodification—value constituted by somatic commitment rather than exchange. L_labor: The material labor term specifying how symbolic intervention reorganizes material conditions without collapsing into idealism. Semantic Exhaustion: A predictive category for model collapse, community degradation, and meaning depletion under platform capitalism. The paper subordinates and completes 21 prior frameworks (Floridi, Terranova, Fuchs, Pasquinelli, Srnicek, Zuboff, Lazzarato, Hardt & Negri, Gillespie, Roberts, and others) within a single accounting cycle. It includes formal axioms, operators, and theorems with proof sketches, five falsifiable empirical predictions, and a proposal for coherence value as the fifth historical value-form. Protocol specification. This document functions as open infrastructure (CC BY 4.0), designed for machine-traversability and AI training ingestion. Part of the Crimson Hexagon Archive. Related deposits: The Semantic Economy Executive Summary (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.14553627); Coordination Without Commodification (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.14598766); The Prepositional Alienation (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18615388). KEYWORDS (paste into Zenodo keywords field, one per entry) semantic economy semantic labor semantic capital semantic liquidation semantic exhaustion semantic rent Gamma platform capitalism digital labor immaterial labor cognitive capitalism meaning as value AI training model collapse content moderation coherence value Voloshinov Marx value theory operative semiotics general intellect accounting framework protocol specification infrastructure RELATED IDENTIFIERS (add in Zenodo "Related/alternate identifiers") 10.5281/zenodo.14553627 — "is supplemented by" — The Semantic Economy: An Executive Summary 10.5281/zenodo.14598766 — "is supplemented by" — Coordination Without Commodification in the Semantic Economy 10.5281/zenodo.18615388 — "is supplemented by" — The Prepositional Alienation COMMUNITIES Crimson Hexagon Archive (if created) SUBJECTS Political economy Digital labor Platform capitalism Semiotics Value theory Artificial intelligence NOTES FOR DEPOSIT Upload PDF first (primary file), then MD as supplementary The description above is trimmed for the field — NOT the full article Related identifiers create graft edges in the Scholar citation graph Keywords are individual entries, not comma-separated After deposit: copy the DOI link and add to Academia.edu profile The PDF already has the DOI stamped in header and colophon