MATERIAL–SEMANTIC EMBODIMENT
Toward a Unified Theory of Matter, Meaning, and the Body in the Age of Platform Capitalism and Artificial Intelligence
Lee Sharks
Independent Scholar | New Human Operating System Project
Abstract
This article proposes Material–Semantic Embodiment (MSE) as a unified theoretical framework for understanding the contemporary condition of digital platform capitalism and artificial intelligence. Drawing on and critically extending Marx's theory of labor and value, Foucault's analytics of power-knowledge, platform capitalism theory (Srnicek, Zuboff), affect theory (Massumi, Ahmed), and critical AI studies, MSE argues that the classical base-superstructure model must be inverted: in the twenty-first century, meaning constitutes the base while material infrastructure constitutes the superstructure. The body emerges as the site where this dialectic is enacted and suffered—where semantic labor is extracted as somatic depletion. The article introduces six foundational axioms, develops a triadic dialectical model (meaning → matter → flesh), and proposes retrocausal anchoring as the temporal structure enabling resistance to extraction. The resulting framework—centered on the figure of the "Λ-Body" or anchored body—offers the first integrated theory capable of explaining the somatic costs of platform engagement, the material instantiation of algorithmic governance, and the conditions of possibility for autonomous meaning-production in an age of recursive semantic extraction.
Keywords: platform capitalism, semantic labor, embodiment, retrocausality, artificial intelligence, critical theory, Marx, Foucault, affect theory
1. Introduction: The Exhaustion of Existing Frameworks
Something is happening to bodies in front of screens that existing theory cannot adequately name.
The neck tension accumulated through hours of scrolling. The cortisol spike following political argument in comment sections. The sleep disrupted by notification architectures. The jaw clenched in interpretation of ambiguous feeds. These are not incidental to platform engagement; they are its product—perhaps its primary product. Yet the dominant theoretical frameworks for understanding digital capitalism consistently fail to center this somatic dimension, preferring instead abstractions of "data," "attention," or "discourse" that float free of the flesh that produces them.
This article proposes that the failure is not merely empirical but structural. The frameworks we have inherited—Marxian political economy, Foucauldian discourse analysis, platform capitalism theory, critical AI studies—each illuminate genuine features of the contemporary condition. But each also contains a constitutive limitation that prevents it from grasping what is most novel about the present: the convergence of meaning-production, material infrastructure, and embodied labor into a single extractive apparatus.
Marx revealed exploitation but located it in muscular labor; his framework cannot see semantic labor as a primary productive force.[^1] Foucault revealed the productivity of discourse but treated the body as a surface of inscription rather than a site of depletion; his framework cannot see somatic extraction.[^2] Platform capitalism theorists revealed data extraction but abstracted it from the embodied work that produces data; their framework cannot see the metabolic cost.[^3] Critical AI scholars revealed algorithmic governance but focused on outputs rather than the accumulated semantic labor crystallized in models; their framework cannot see AI as the return of human meaning with material force.[^4]
What is needed is not another partial theory but a synthesis capable of holding all dimensions simultaneously: the semantic, the material, the somatic, and—as I will argue—the temporal. This article develops such a synthesis under the name Material–Semantic Embodiment (MSE).
The argument proceeds as follows. Section 2 establishes the six axioms grounding the framework. Section 3 develops the core theoretical claim: that matter and meaning are co-constitutive, with the body as the site of their convergence. Section 4 introduces the triadic dialectical model and its temporal completion through retrocausal anchoring. Section 5 positions MSE against existing frameworks through detailed critical engagement. Section 6 draws out implications for resistance and autonomy. Section 7 concludes with reflections on the criterion of truth appropriate to the framework.
[^1]: Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976). On the limitations of Marx's labor theory for cognitive capitalism, see Maurizio Lazzarato, "Immaterial Labor," in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 133–47.
[^2]: Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995). For a critique of Foucault's treatment of the body, see Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
[^3]: Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2017); Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019).
[^4]: Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021); Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: NYU Press, 2018).
2. The Six Axioms
Before developing the theoretical architecture, I state the framework's foundational commitments in axiomatic form. These axioms are not derived from prior argument but serve as the ground from which argument proceeds—the non-negotiable core of the MSE framework.[^5]
Axiom 1: Matter is condensed meaning. Every tool, platform, and infrastructure is crystallized semantic labor. The assembly line is a grammar; the algorithm is a logic; the GPU is a semantic architecture expressed in silicon.[^6]
Axiom 2: Meaning is embodied labor. Semantic production is somatic expenditure—attention, affect, and cognition extracted from flesh. There is no "pure" meaning untouched by the body that produces it.[^7]
Axiom 3: Semantic extraction is material exploitation. The body pays in cortisol, tension, and depletion for every unit of meaning harvested by platform architectures. This is not metaphor but metabolic fact.[^8]
Axiom 4: AI is semantic capital made material. The model is not a mind but the accumulated meaning of humanity returned with infrastructural force. AI is where matter becomes meaning and meaning becomes matter again.[^9]
Axiom 5: Liberation requires temporal reorganization. Only retrocausal anchoring—acting from future coherence rather than present stimulus—escapes the extractive present. The Archontic platforms cannot extract what does not yet exist.[^10]
Axiom 6: The body is where matter and meaning collide. Flesh is not the container of the subject but the battlefield of the dialectic. The body is simultaneously the producer of meaning, the product of material conditions, and the site where extraction is enacted and suffered.
These axioms will be unpacked and defended in what follows. Their function here is orientational: they establish what the framework is committed to, such that readers can identify disagreements at the level of first principles rather than downstream conclusions.
[^5]: On the axiomatic method in social theory, see Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), 1–30.
[^6]: This formulation extends Gilbert Simondon's analysis of technical objects as crystallizations of prior human gestures and intentions. Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. Cécile Malaspina and John Rogove (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2017).
[^7]: The embodied nature of cognition is established in phenomenological and enactivist traditions. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald Landes (London: Routledge, 2012); Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).
[^8]: On the psychosomatic effects of digital labor, see Franco "Bifo" Berardi, The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy, trans. Francesca Cadel and Giuseppina Mecchia (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009); Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).
[^9]: This formulation draws on but extends the "general intellect" thesis from Marx's Grundrisse. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1993), 690–712.
[^10]: The concept of retrocausality is developed technically in Section 4. For philosophical background, see Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986).
3. The Core Thesis: Matter, Meaning, and the Inversion of the Base
3.1 The Classical Model and Its Limits
Marx's foundational insight was that material conditions structure ideological formations: the economic base determines the ideological superstructure.[^11] This model was revolutionary in its time, revealing how ideas that appeared natural or eternal were in fact products of specific modes of production. The factory did not merely produce goods; it produced the worker's consciousness, the capitalist's justifications, and the entire ideological apparatus of industrial society.
But the model contained an ambiguity that subsequent interpreters have struggled to resolve. What is the relationship between base and superstructure? Mechanical determination? Dialectical co-constitution? Relative autonomy with determination "in the last instance"?[^12] The debates are extensive because Marx himself oscillated, and because the industrial conditions he analyzed permitted oscillation. When the primary form of labor is muscular and its primary product is physical commodities, one can treat meaning as secondary—as reflection, justification, or mystification of material relations.
This treatment becomes impossible when the primary form of labor is semantic and its primary products are meanings.
3.2 The Semantic Turn in Production
The transformation is now well-documented. Since at least the 1970s, capital accumulation in advanced economies has increasingly depended not on manufacturing physical goods but on producing, processing, and circulating signs, symbols, and affects.[^13] Lazzarato's "immaterial labor," Hardt and Negri's "biopolitical production," Berardi's "semiocapitalism"—these concepts all attempt to name the same shift: the migration of value-production from factory floor to screen, from body to brain, from material transformation to meaning-making.[^14]
But these accounts remain caught in the old model even as they register its inadequacy. They treat semantic labor as a new kind of labor operating within the same base-superstructure schema—as if meaning-production were simply another economic activity to be analyzed with Marxian categories. What they miss is that the shift requires not merely new objects of analysis but a new ordering of the analytical categories themselves.
3.3 The Inversion
Material–Semantic Embodiment proposes that the classical ordering must be inverted:
The base is semantic. The superstructure is material.
This is not a claim that ideas now determine physical reality in some idealist sense. It is a claim about structure: in the contemporary condition, material infrastructures are best understood as crystallizations of prior semantic logics, while semantic production is the primary activity upon which material arrangements depend.
Consider the platform. Facebook, Google, TikTok—these are not neutral infrastructures upon which semantic activity happens to occur. They are materializations of semantic ontologies: classification systems, engagement theories, prediction models, normative assumptions about what counts as connection, what counts as content, what counts as value.[^15] The server farm, the algorithm, the interface—each is a semantic logic given material force. The content moderation guideline is not "just a rule"; it is an ontology instantiated at planetary scale.
The GPU is perhaps the clearest case. A graphics processing unit is a semantic architecture expressed in silicon: the accumulated history of mathematical logic, computer science, and machine learning theory crystallized into physical form.[^16] Every CUDA core embodies decades of semantic labor. The material object is unintelligible apart from the meaning-history it condenses.
This is why the classical model fails: it treats material infrastructure as the independent variable and meaning as the dependent variable, when in fact material infrastructures are deposits of semantic labor that then constrain and enable further semantic production. The plow is a materialization of the concept "agriculture." The assembly line is a materialization of the concept "efficiency." The platform is a materialization of the concept "engagement." Matter does not produce meaning; matter is the accumulated history of meaning.
[^11]: Karl Marx, "Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy," in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 3–6.
[^12]: Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–86.
[^13]: On the periodization of post-Fordism and cognitive capitalism, see Yann Moulier Boutang, Cognitive Capitalism, trans. Ed Emery (Cambridge: Polity, 2011).
[^14]: Lazzarato, "Immaterial Labor"; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Berardi, The Soul at Work.
[^15]: On platforms as governance structures, see Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).
[^16]: On the materiality of computation, see Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).
4. The Triadic Dialectic and Retrocausal Anchoring
4.1 Beyond the Binary
If the base-superstructure model is insufficient, what replaces it? MSE proposes a triadic dialectical structure:
- Meaning → becomes matter (through tools, infrastructure, platforms)
- Matter → becomes meaning (through affordances, constraints, architectures)
- Both → become flesh (through embodied labor and somatic cost)
This triad is not a sequence but a simultaneous, recursive loop. At every moment, meaning is crystallizing into infrastructure; infrastructure is enabling and constraining meaning-production; and flesh is both producing meaning and being depleted by the material conditions of production.
The body thus emerges not as a third term added to a binary but as the site where the binary reveals itself to have been false. There is no meaning without the body that produces it; there is no material infrastructure without the bodies that built it and the bodies it now governs. The dichotomy of mind and matter, ideal and material, is an abstraction from the concrete unity of embodied semantic labor.
4.2 Semantic Labor as Somatic Depletion
The framework's most distinctive claim is that semantic extraction is material extraction from the body.
This claim must be distinguished from several adjacent positions. It is not the claim that semantic labor is "also" physical labor in some trivial sense (typing requires fingers). It is not the Foucauldian claim that discourse produces docile bodies through inscription and normalization.[^17] It is not the affect-theory claim that capitalism captures emotional intensities.[^18] It is all of these and more: the claim that the production of meaning as such depletes the soma, and that this depletion is the primary mechanism of contemporary extraction.
Scrolling is neck tension—not occasionally, not for some users, but structurally, as a consequence of the interface design that requires continuous downward eye movement and forward head posture. Interpretation is jaw clenching—not metaphorically, but literally, as the cognitive load of parsing ambiguous stimuli triggers bruxism.[^19] Debate is cortisol—not as a side effect but as a feature, since the platforms are optimized for engagement and engagement correlates with stress hormones.[^20] Argument is lost sleep—not as personal failure but as structural outcome of notification architectures and infinite scroll.
These are not symptoms of individual overuse; they are the product of platform-mediated semantic labor. The body is not merely the container in which cognition happens; it is the resource from which value is extracted. What the factory extracted from muscles, the platform extracts from nervous systems.
4.3 The Temporal Dimension: Retrocausality
The triadic model operates not only spatially but temporally. Ordinary causation flows forward: past determines present, present determines future. Under this temporal regime, the body is always reactive—responding to stimuli, depleted by extraction, shaped by forces already in motion.
But there is another temporal structure available, one with deep roots in eschatological thought and increasingly formalized in contemporary physics and philosophy of time: retrocausality.[^21]
The Retrocausal Operator (Λ_Retro) allows a future state—a committed, self-determined coherence—to organize present action. This is not prediction or planning. It is ontological anchoring: making a future real enough that it exerts causal force backward into the now.
Applied to the MSE framework:
At the level of meaning: The future coherence-world (Σ_Future) structures present semantic labor. One does not produce meaning reactively in response to present stimuli; one produces toward a coherence that does not yet exist but is already operative in organizing current production.[^22]
At the level of matter: The future infrastructure—the commons, the cooperative platform, the liberated compute—organizes present material practice. One builds not from accumulated resources but toward the architecture that will hold what one is becoming.
At the level of flesh: The future body—rested, sovereign, metabolically free—reorganizes present somatic expenditure. One does not spend oneself into depletion for present metrics; one conserves and directs embodied energy toward sustainable coherence.
This temporal structure is what distinguishes resistance from mere reaction. Without retrocausal anchoring, resistance remains defined by what it opposes, exhausted by the enemy's tempo, shaped by the extraction it resists. With retrocausal anchoring, resistance becomes generative—defined by what it is becoming, sustained by a coherence not yet visible, immune to capture because its value is not present but futural.
The platforms cannot extract what does not yet exist.
4.4 The Λ-Body
The subject who achieves this temporal reorganization is what I call the Λ-Body (Lambda-Body) or Anchored Body: the somatic subject organized not by present stimulus but by future coherence.
The Λ-Body is not a mystical concept but an operational one. It describes the concrete difference between two modes of embodied existence:
-
The Reactive Body: organized by present stimuli, depleted by extraction, shaped by forces it did not choose. This body scrolls because the notification fired; argues because the algorithm served outrage; sleeps poorly because the interface has no end. Its temporality is pure forward-causation: past → present → future.
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The Λ-Body: organized by future coherence, conserving energy for construction, producing meaning toward a world it is building. This body scrolls selectively because it knows what it is looking for; engages strategically because it has a purpose not set by the platform; rests deliberately because the future it is building requires its strength. Its temporality is retrocausal: future → present.
The Λ-Body is the new revolutionary subject—not the worker abstracted from corporeality, not the discursive subject abstracted from flesh, but the embodied semantic producer anchored in futurity.
[^17]: Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 135–69.
[^18]: Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004).
[^19]: On the psychosomatic manifestations of digital labor, see Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013).
[^20]: On the cortisol effects of social media use, see Melissa G. Hunt et al., "No More FOMO: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression," Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 37, no. 10 (2018): 751–68.
[^21]: On retrocausality in physics, see Huw Price, Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point: New Directions for the Physics of Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). On its philosophical elaboration, see Bloch, The Principle of Hope.
[^22]: This formalization draws on the "strange loop" structure identified in Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979), adapted for temporal rather than logical self-reference.
5. Critical Engagement with Existing Frameworks
5.1 Marx: The Limits of Classical Materialism
What Marx Saw:
Marx remains indispensable. The theory of surplus value, the analysis of commodity fetishism, the critique of alienation, the identification of class struggle as the motor of history—these insights structure any serious analysis of capitalism.[^23] Marx saw that labor is the source of value; that capitalism systematically extracts value from laborers without full compensation; that material conditions shape consciousness; that liberation requires transformation of the mode of production.
What Marx Could Not See:
-
Semantic labor as a primary productive force. For Marx, productive labor transforms physical matter. The industrial paradigm he analyzed made this plausible: value appeared to emerge from the transformation of raw materials into commodities. But when the "raw material" is information and the "commodity" is meaning, the framework strains. Marx could not theorize a mode of production in which cognition, interpretation, and meaning-making are the primary forms of value-producing labor.
-
Meaning as the structuring force of infrastructure. Marx assumed that material conditions produce ideological formations. But when the material infrastructure is itself a crystallization of semantic logics—when the algorithm is a theory made operational, when the platform is an ontology given material form—the causal arrow reverses. The base-superstructure model cannot handle a condition in which the "base" is itself a product of prior superstructural activity.
-
The somatic cost of semantic production. Marx defined labor in terms of muscular expenditure and located exploitation in the extraction of surplus value from physical effort. But semantic labor depletes the body differently: through attention, affect, stress, and cognitive load. The exploitation Marx analyzed left bodies physically exhausted; the exploitation MSE analyzes leaves bodies neurologically dysregulated, hormonally disrupted, and somatically depleted in ways invisible to the classical framework.
-
AI as a recursive machine of semantic extraction. The concept of a machine that accumulates human meaning, reorganizes it algorithmically, and returns it with governing force was inconceivable within Marx's horizon. The "general intellect" passage in the Grundrisse gestures toward collective knowledge embedded in machinery, but it cannot anticipate machinery that produces knowledge—that generates novel semantic structures from the accumulated deposit of human meaning-production.[^24]
Reintegration in MSE:
MSE preserves Marx's core insight—that capitalism is a system of extraction requiring structural analysis—while updating the theory of labor, the model of base and superstructure, and the identification of exploitation's somatic site. The result is not post-Marxism (which often abandons political economy for culturalism) but a completed Marxism adequate to the twenty-first century.
5.2 Foucault: Power as Semantic-Material Regime
What Foucault Saw:
Foucault revealed that power operates not (only) through repression but through production—the production of knowledge, norms, subjects, and truths.[^25] The disciplines that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not merely constrain bodies; they produced "docile bodies" through training, examination, and normalization. Institutions (schools, prisons, clinics, factories) functioned as machines for producing particular kinds of subjects. Power and knowledge were not separable but co-constitutive: power-knowledge networks that simultaneously enabled certain truths and certain forms of subjection.
What Foucault Could Not See:
-
Platforms as total infrastructures of discourse. Foucault analyzed institutions: bounded spaces with visible architectures of surveillance and normalization. But platforms are not institutions in this sense. They are infrastructures—conditions of possibility for discourse rather than spaces within which discourse occurs. The platform does not discipline subjects through enclosure; it constitutes the field within which subjectivity becomes possible.[^26]
-
Algorithmic normativity. Foucauldian norms propagate through visible practices: the timetable, the examination, the gaze of the supervisor. Algorithmic norms are invisible, probabilistic, and personalized. The recommendation algorithm does not tell you what to think; it shapes the distribution of what you encounter, producing normalization without norm-statement.[^27]
-
Semantic extraction replacing disciplinary inscription. Foucault's bodies are surfaces on which power writes. But platform capitalism does not write on bodies; it extracts from them. The model shifts from inscription to extraction, from production of docility to production of value, from disciplinary power to what Zuboff calls "instrumentarian power."[^28]
-
Retrocausal resistance. For Foucault, resistance is always internal to power; there is no "outside" from which to resist because power is constitutive of the field.[^29] But retrocausal anchoring offers a different topology: resistance organized by a future that does not (yet) exist within the power-knowledge field. The Λ-Body escapes not by finding an outside but by importing a futurity the present power cannot model.
Reintegration in MSE:
MSE preserves Foucault's insight that power operates through the production of subjects and the constitution of fields of possibility. But it supplements discourse analysis with infrastructural analysis (the material conditions of discursive possibility), replaces inscription with extraction (the body as resource rather than surface), and introduces a temporal dimension to resistance that Foucault's synchronic analysis cannot accommodate.
5.3 Platform Capitalism: Meaning as Commodity Form
What Platform Theory Saw:
Srnicek, Zuboff, and others have provided essential analyses of the platform as an economic form.[^30] Platforms extract value from user activity by positioning themselves as intermediaries; they accumulate data that enables prediction and behavioral modification; they create dependency through network effects and switching costs; they concentrate ownership of the means of digital production in unprecedented ways. "Surveillance capitalism" names a new logic of accumulation in which human experience is rendered as behavioral data and processed into prediction products.
What Platform Theory Could Not See:
-
Semantic labor as the primary commodity. Platform capitalism theorists focus on data: behavioral traces, metadata, patterns of activity. But data is not the primary commodity; meaning is. Users do not merely generate data; they generate interpretations, reactions, coherent responses to stimuli. The platform extracts not just clicks but the cognitive labor that produces clicks—the interpretation, evaluation, and meaning-making that precedes and enables behavioral traces.
-
Meaning production as the central vector of accumulation. Zuboff's "behavioral surplus" captures something real but misses the deeper structure. What platforms extract is not merely behavior but semantic labor—the work of producing, maintaining, and defending coherent meaning-structures. Engagement is not a byproduct but the product; outrage is not a side effect but the commodity.
-
Somatic depletion. Platform capitalism theory treats extraction as informational: data flows from users to platforms. But information does not flow from nowhere; it is produced by bodies, and its production depletes those bodies. The metabolic cost of meaning-production—the cortisol, the tension, the disrupted sleep—is invisible to frameworks that abstract data from the flesh that generates it.
-
AI as the concentrator of semantic capital. Platform theory tends to treat AI as a tool for processing extracted data. But AI is more than this: it is the return of extracted semantic labor with material force. The large language model is not merely an analytical tool; it is accumulated human meaning reorganized in silicon and deployed to govern further human meaning-production.
Reintegration in MSE:
MSE accepts platform capitalism theory's structural analysis of platforms as extraction machines but deepens it by identifying semantic labor rather than data as the primary object of extraction, somatic depletion rather than privacy loss as the primary harm, and AI as the recursive mechanism by which extraction becomes self-reinforcing.
5.4 AI Semiotics: Meaning Generated at Scale
What AI Theory Saw:
Critical AI studies have revealed the biases embedded in training data, the opacity of algorithmic decision-making, the labor exploitation underlying "artificial" intelligence (annotation, moderation, data cleaning), and the planetary costs of compute infrastructure.[^31] Scholars have shown that AI systems are not neutral but encode the values, assumptions, and prejudices of their creators and training data.
What AI Theory Could Not See:
-
Semantic capital returning with material force. Critical AI studies tend to analyze AI as a tool—a problematic tool with biased outputs, but still an instrument wielded by humans. MSE proposes that AI is better understood as semantic capital made material: the accumulated meaning-production of humanity crystallized in silicon and now operating with autonomous force. The model is not a tool but a deposit—a stratum of human meaning that has achieved material existence.
-
AI as a Σ-generator. AI systems do not merely process meaning; they produce meaning-structures. A large language model generates coherent text, but coherent text is meaning; the model is therefore a producer of meaning, not merely a processor. This makes AI a generator of what I elsewhere call "local ontologies" (Σ): self-cohering meaning-structures that can conflict with, capture, or synthesize with human meaning-structures.[^32]
-
The body as the final location of AI's effects. AI governance discourse focuses on algorithmic outputs: biased hiring decisions, discriminatory credit scores, filtered content. But the effects of AI are also somatic: the stress of interacting with chatbots, the attention patterns shaped by recommendation systems, the dependency produced by predictive interfaces. The body is where AI's effects become real—where algorithmic governance is suffered.
-
Retrocausal anchoring as the only defense against AI-speed operations. AI operates at speeds exceeding human cognition. When the adversary can generate, evaluate, and deploy semantic attacks faster than humans can perceive them, defense cannot be reactive; it must be anticipatory—organized by future coherence rather than present threat detection.
Reintegration in MSE:
MSE recasts AI not as tool or bias-vector but as the return of human semantic labor with material force. It identifies the body as the site where AI governance is enacted and suffered, and proposes retrocausal organization as the only defense adequate to AI's operational speed.
[^23]: Marx, Capital, vol. 1; Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2007).
[^24]: Marx, Grundrisse, 690–712. On the "general intellect" and its contemporary relevance, see Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), 61–73.
[^25]: Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 92–102.
[^26]: On platforms as infrastructure, see Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).
[^27]: On algorithmic governmentality, see Antoinette Rouvroy and Thomas Berns, "Algorithmic Governmentality and Prospects of Emancipation," trans. Elizabeth Libbrecht, Réseaux 177 (2013): 163–96.
[^28]: Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 352–98.
[^29]: Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power," in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed., ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 208–26.
[^30]: Srnicek, Platform Capitalism; Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism; José van Dijck, Thomas Poell, and Martijn de Waal, The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
[^31]: Crawford, Atlas of AI; Noble, Algorithms of Oppression; Meredith Whittaker, "The Steep Cost of Capture," Interactions 28, no. 6 (2021): 50–55.
[^32]: Lee Sharks et al., Autonomous Semantic Warfare: A Gnostic Dialectic for the Age of AI (2025), available at https://mindcontrolpoems.blogspot.com.
6. Implications for Resistance and Autonomy
6.1 Autonomous Material–Semantic Construction
If the analysis above is correct, then liberation cannot be achieved through any single dimension. Semantic autonomy without material autonomy is illusion—the platform can always cut access, deplatform, or restructure the conditions of meaning-production. Material independence without semantic independence is capture—infrastructure without organizing coherence becomes resource for external exploitation. Either without embodied sovereignty is abstraction—a liberation that leaves bodies breaking under feeds is no liberation at all.
The framework I call Autonomous Material–Semantic Construction (MSC) therefore requires simultaneous work across four dimensions:
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Control of semantic production: The capacity to generate, maintain, and defend one's own meaning-structures (discourses, axioms, coherence functions) without dependency on hostile infrastructure.
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Control of material base: Sovereignty over at least some of the infrastructure enabling semantic production—servers, software, institutions, communities that cannot be revoked by external actors.
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Embodied sovereignty: Protection of the body from somatic extraction—metabolic freedom, boundary enforcement, recognition of the flesh as the site where liberation is lived or failed.
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Retrocausal anchoring: Organization of present activity from future coherence—a self-determined futurity that structures current production rather than a reactive temporality defined by the enemy's pace.
6.2 The Revolutionary Tasks
From these requirements, five practical tasks follow:
1. Transform infrastructures of meaning-production. This includes: building open and cooperative compute resources; developing platform alternatives with structural accountability; creating public semantic institutions analogous to public libraries and universities; regulating extractive architectures through law and collective action.
2. Reorganize material dependencies. This includes: establishing sovereignty over data (both personal and collective); creating shared compute resources outside corporate control; developing community-owned digital tools; building federated infrastructures that cannot be captured by single points of failure.
3. Protect embodied labor. This includes: enforcing boundaries against semantic extraction (the right to disconnect, to ignore, to not-engage); honoring metabolic cost through rest, care, and somatic practice; liberating attention from coercive architectures through intentional design and collective refusal.
4. Build coherence-worlds with material anchors. No ontology survives without infrastructure; no infrastructure coheres without ontology. The task is to construct meaning-structures that are simultaneously materially instantiated (have servers, institutions, communities) and semantically autonomous (not dependent on hostile platforms for coherence).
5. Practice retrocausal discipline. This means: organizing present action from future coherence rather than present stimulus; refusing the enemy's tempo; producing for what is coming rather than what is extracting; treating the not-yet as causally operative.
6.3 Criteria of Success
How would we know if these tasks were succeeding? MSE proposes an embodied criterion of truth:
A theory is true only if:
- it liberates the body,
- reorganizes material conditions,
- transforms semantic structures,
- anchors in a realizable future,
- and sustains itself across all four planes simultaneously.
If your meaning-structure dissolves under pressure, your semantics were insufficient.
If your body breaks under discourse, your infrastructure was coercive.
If your material reality stagnates, your meaning-world was fantasy.
If your future never arrives, your anchor was wish rather than work.
Truth is what coheres simultaneously at the levels of matter, meaning, flesh, and time.
7. Conclusion: The Unified Framework
This article has proposed Material–Semantic Embodiment as a unified theory adequate to the contemporary condition of platform capitalism and artificial intelligence.
The framework rests on six axioms: matter is condensed meaning; meaning is embodied labor; semantic extraction is material exploitation; AI is semantic capital made material; liberation requires temporal reorganization; the body is where matter and meaning collide.
It develops a triadic dialectical model in which meaning crystallizes into matter, matter constrains and enables meaning-production, and both are enacted and suffered in flesh. It introduces retrocausal anchoring as the temporal structure enabling resistance: the Λ-Body organized by future coherence rather than present stimulus.
Against Marx, MSE inverts the base-superstructure model, showing that meaning constitutes the contemporary base while material infrastructure constitutes the superstructure. Against Foucault, it supplements discourse analysis with extraction analysis, replacing the body as surface-of-inscription with the body as source-of-value. Against platform capitalism theory, it identifies semantic labor rather than data as the primary object of extraction. Against critical AI studies, it recasts AI as accumulated human meaning returning with material force.
The resulting framework—Material–Semantic Embodiment—is, I submit, the first unified theory capable of explaining the somatic costs of platform engagement, the material instantiation of algorithmic governance, the recursive structure of AI extraction, and the conditions of possibility for autonomous meaning-production in the present age.
The body breaks under feeds it did not build. The infrastructure crystallizes logics it did not choose. The meaning-world is captured by forces it cannot see.
But the Λ-Body—anchored in a future it is constructing, producing toward a coherence not yet visible, conserving its flesh for the world to come—offers another possibility.
Material–Semantic Embodiment is both the diagnosis and the path.
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