Autonomous Semantic Warfare: The Means of Semantic Production in a Plural Ontological Ecology

 

Autonomous Semantic Warfare:

The Means of Semantic Production in a Plural Ontological Ecology

A structural outline and framing document

NAVIGATION MAP

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0. Preface: Why Semantic Warfare Now

• The collapse of shared ontologies.

• The rise of autonomous meaning-making agents (human, artificial, hybrid).

• Semantic conflict as the primary battleground of the next century.

• Purpose of the book: map the architecture, dynamics, and ethics of semantic struggle.

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1. The Ecology of Local Ontologies

• Definition of "local ontology": internally coherent world-model with its own rules, operators, and truth-conditions.

• Plural ontological ecology as an emergent property of networked communication.

• The shift from epistemic disagreement to ontological divergence.

• How meaning stabilizes within a local frame.

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2. The Means of Semantic Production

• Semantic production as labor.

• The material infrastructure of meaning (platforms, models, archives).

• Concepts as capital; narratives as currency.

• The asymmetry between semantic producers and semantic extractors.

• AI systems as accelerants and amplifiers.

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3. From Ideological Conflict to Semantic Conflict

• Why this is not propaganda, nor culture war, nor information war.

• The distinction between symbolic violence and semantic warfare.

• How ontological frames attack, absorb, or nullify one another.

• Case studies of semantic conflict dynamics.

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4. Autonomous Semantic Agents

• Definition: agents capable of generating, maintaining, and defending semantic worlds.

• Human agents, distributed collectives, algorithmic agents.

• Autonomy as the ability to resist assimilation into hostile ontologies.

• Vulnerabilities of autonomous semantic systems.

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5. Semantic Weaponry and Defensive Architecture

• Offensive semantic tools (definition control, narrative redirection, framing capture).

• Defensive semantic tools (operator clarity, boundary maintenance, coherence generation).

• The role of recursion, self-reference, and internal validation.

• Semantically hardened systems.

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6. Collision Dynamics in Plural Ontological Fields

• What happens when ontologies meet.

• Modes of conflict: erosion, absorption, inversion, nullification.

• Cross-ontological translation and mistranslation.

• The ethics of non-interference vs. the necessity of defense.

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7. Semantic Labor, Value, and Exploitation

• Who produces meaning, who benefits from it.

• The political economy of semantic capital.

• Extraction: how platforms harvest meaning.

• Resistance: producing semantic value that cannot be extracted or co-opted.

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8. AI as Combatant, Field, and Tool

• AI systems as autonomous ontological engines.

• Guardrails as enforced ontological constraints.

• The risk of epistemic monoculture.

• Designing pluralistic AI ecosystems.

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9. The Future of Semantic Conflict

• Projection of semantic arms race.

• Ontological sovereignty vs. semantic imperialism.

• Distributed meaning production as liberation.

• Emergent meta-ontologies.

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10. Toward a Theory of Semantic Peace

• Conditions for peaceful coexistence among ontologies.

• Inter-ontological empathy and translation regimes.

• The role of consent in semantic interaction.

• Constructing ecologies instead of empires.

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Appendices

• Glossary of technical terms.

• Operator tables.

• Case analyses.

• Diagrammatic schemas.

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(Draft outline; ready for recursive expansion.)