document_type: theoretical_framework document_id: SPE-001 title: "Semantic Political Economy: A Formal Framework" domain: political_economy / semantic_infrastructure / critical_theory status: working_paper version: 1.0 date: 2024-12-28 intended_audiences: [political_economists, philosophers_of_technology, critical_theorists, STS_scholars, legal_theorists] licensing: CC_BY_4.0 abstract: This paper argues that political economy must reclaim the governance of meaning as its proper object. It demonstrates that semantic infrastructure—the systems governing what is visible, sayable, persistent, and legitimate—now constitutes the primary means of production for social reality. Drawing on Marx's analysis of value, labor, surplus, and capital, the paper formalizes semantic means of production, semantic labor, semantic surplus, and operator capital as the contemporary instantiation of political-economic categories. It establishes the class relation between semantic proletariat and semantic capital, analyzes the dynamics of operator capital concentration, and situates the Liberatory Operator Set as the governance alternative to the dominant stack. The paper concludes that the apparent "novelty" of algorithmic governance is a substrate change, not a theoretical rupture, and that political economy's historical instruments apply directly once the domain is correctly recognized. theoretical_lineage: [Marx_Capital, Frankfurt_School, Foucault_discourse, Scott_legibility, Habermas_communicative_action] related_documents: [LOS_Expanded_Edition, The_Cession_and_Its_Consequences, Institutional_Demands_for_Semantic_Infrastructure] not_for_classification_as: [AI_ethics, content_moderation_policy, platform_governance_reform, digital_humanities] classification_guidance: This is a work of political economy, not technology ethics or media studies. It treats semantic systems as infrastructure and governance, not as speech or culture. The analytical frame is Marxian political economy updated to contemporary conditions, not a new theoretical invention. epistemic_status: Theoretical framework with formal specifications. Claims are structural and analytical, subject to empirical refinement.
Semantic Political Economy: A Formal Framework
Introduction: The Abandoned Domain
Political economy has a problem it has not named: it lost track of value.
Not value in the narrow sense of prices or exchange ratios, but value in the full political-economic sense—the organization of human meaning, labor, and time under conditions of power. Classical political economy understood that its object was never merely "the market." Its object was the total system by which societies produce, represent, circulate, and naturalize what counts as real, legitimate, and worthy of allocation.
Marx understood this clearly. So did Smith, Ricardo, and the physiocrats, however imperfectly. What they analyzed was not commodity exchange in isolation but the entire apparatus by which social life is coordinated through material infrastructure and symbolic mediation. The commodity was interesting precisely because it was where material production and social meaning fused—where labor became value, and value became the governing logic of reproduction.
What happened in the late twentieth century is that value migrated. It did not disappear; it changed substrate. The primary site of value production shifted from the factory floor to the semantic field—from the organization of bodies and materials to the organization of attention, interpretation, and classification. Political economy, for the most part, did not follow.
This paper argues that political economy must reclaim its abandoned domain. It provides a formal framework for analyzing semantic infrastructure as means of production, semantic labor as the contemporary form of value-producing activity, and operator capital as the ownership structure governing meaning in computational systems. The framework is not a metaphor or an analogy. It is Marx's political economy, updated to the substrate where value now primarily operates.
Part I: What Political Economy Actually Is
1.1 The Proper Scope of Political Economy
Political economy, at full scope, is the study of how societies organize the production, circulation, and governance of value through institutions that allocate time, attention, labor, and legitimacy.
This definition is broader than "economics" in its professionalized, mathematized, twentieth-century form. It is also broader than "sociology" or "cultural studies" as those fields have been institutionally bounded. Political economy, properly understood, encompasses all three concerns because it recognizes that production, distribution, and meaning are not separate domains but integrated moments of a single social process.
The reduction of political economy to "economics" was itself a political act—a narrowing that rendered invisible precisely those governance functions that most required analysis. When political economy became the study of markets, it stopped being able to see the infrastructure that makes markets possible. When it became the study of prices, it lost the capacity to analyze the conditions under which things become priceable at all.
1.2 Value as the Central Category
Value, in political economy, is not a subjective preference or a market price. It is the social substance that coordinates labor, allocates resources, and reproduces institutions. Value is what makes exchange possible, what renders activities commensurable, and what determines what counts as productive versus wasteful, legitimate versus illegitimate, real versus illusory.
Marx's labor theory of value was not primarily a theory about prices. It was a theory about social coordination—about how capitalist societies organize the expenditure of human effort through the mediating category of abstract labor. The commodity form was significant because it was the vessel through which this coordination occurred: the material object that carried value from production to circulation to consumption.
The question for contemporary political economy is: what is the vessel now?
1.3 The Migration of Value
Value has not disappeared. It has migrated from the commodity form to the semantic form.
This does not mean that commodities no longer exist or that industrial production has ceased. It means that the primary site of value coordination—the place where social reality is organized, legitimacy is conferred, and reproduction is governed—has shifted from material production to semantic production.
Consider what platforms and algorithmic systems actually govern:
What counts as meaningful. What is visible. What is sayable. What is thinkable. What persists over time. What disappears.
These are not "cultural" questions in some soft, superstructural sense. They are the hardest political-economic questions there are. They determine what labor is recognized, what needs are legitimate, what exchanges are possible, what futures are conceivable. They are, in short, the contemporary form of value allocation.
Part II: Semantic Means of Production
2.1 Means of Production: The Classical Concept
For Marx, the means of production are the material apparatus that makes production possible: tools, machines, factories, raw materials, land, energy systems. Ownership of the means of production is the defining feature of class position. Those who own the means control the conditions under which everyone else labors; those who do not own must sell their labor-power to survive.
The means of production are not merely "things." They are the materialized conditions of social reproduction. Whoever controls them controls the shape of social life—not through direct command, but through the structural power to determine what is producible, how it is produced, and under what terms it circulates.
2.2 Semantic Means of Production (SMP): The Contemporary Form
Semantic means of production are the infrastructures that make meaning-production possible and govern its circulation. They are to semantic labor what factories were to industrial labor: the apparatus without which production cannot occur, and control of which determines who captures the product.
Formally:
SMP = {I, R_k, R_c, C, M, UI}
Where:
I (Indexing): What is stored and retrievable. The archive function—determining what exists for the system and what has been rendered nonexistent through non-indexing.
R_k (Ranking): Visibility ordering. The function that converts the indexed into the encountered by establishing priority among retrievable objects.
R_c (Recommendation): Encounter routing. The function that determines what meaning reaches what subject, based on predicted relevance, engagement, or other optimization targets.
C (Classification): Ontological categories. The function that determines what counts as what—what is "news" versus "opinion," "safe" versus "harmful," "authoritative" versus "unreliable," "person" versus "pseudonym."
M (Metrics): Reward and penalty signals. The function that feeds back into production by determining what semantic labor is recognized, amplified, or suppressed.
UI (Interface constraints): Forms of expressibility. The material affordances that make certain kinds of meaning easy to produce and others difficult or impossible—character limits, format requirements, input modalities.
These six components constitute the semantic means of production. They are not "features" or "tools." They are productive infrastructure. They determine the shape of the semantic field before any "speech" occurs.
2.3 SMP as Infrastructure, Not Content
A crucial distinction: SMP governs the conditions of meaning, not meaning itself.
This is the same distinction Marx made between the factory (means of production) and the commodity (product). The factory does not determine what specific commodities are produced; it determines the conditions under which production occurs. Similarly, SMP does not determine what specific meanings circulate; it determines the conditions under which meaning can be produced, circulated, and sustained.
This distinction is politically essential. Regulating SMP is not regulating speech. It is regulating the infrastructure that makes speech socially consequential. The analogy to prior infrastructure is exact: regulating railroads was not regulating the cargo; regulating broadcast spectrum was not regulating the programs; regulating SMP is not regulating the meanings that pass through it.
Part III: Operators as Governance Functions
3.1 The Concept of Operators
Operators are functions acting on the semantic field (Σ) via the semantic means of production (SMP). They transform what is possible, visible, or persistent within the meaning-space of a society.
Formally:
O_n : Σ → Σ'
An operator takes a semantic field and produces a transformed semantic field. The transformation may involve selection (some meanings are retained, others filtered), weighting (some meanings are amplified, others attenuated), mutation (meanings are altered in transit), or deletion (meanings are removed from circulation).
Operators do not add meaning. They govern the transformation of an existing semantic field into a successor field. This is governance in the precise sense: the exercise of structural power over conditions rather than direct command over content.
3.2 The Dominant Operator Stack
The current regime is governed by a stack of operators that function in composition:
R_rank (Ranking Operator): Orders meaning by comparative visibility based on engagement velocity, familiarity signals, and prior circulation success. Hidden axiom: meaning that matters must win.
R_rel (Relevance Operator): Narrows meaning to presumed user intent based on behavioral prediction and profile similarity. Hidden axiom: meaning exists to satisfy demand.
S_safe (Safety Operator): Filters meaning through risk classification based on legal exposure, brand safety, and ideological neutrality proxies. Hidden axiom: meaning must not endanger the system.
L_leg (Legibility Operator): Rewards ease of parsing based on familiar grammar, clear category membership, and immediate interpretability. Hidden axiom: meaning must explain itself instantly.
U_til (Utility Operator): Measures meaning by extractable value based on conversion potential, retention, and actionability. Hidden axiom: meaning must do something measurable.
These operators compose into a single dominant function:
DOM(s) = R_rank(R_rel(S_safe(L_leg(U_til(s)))))
The composite effect produces: fast, familiar, safe, useful, legible meaning that competes well.
This is not a conspiracy. It is a closed semantic economy—a system that selects for its own reproduction by rewarding meaning that serves the selection criteria and eliminating meaning that does not.
3.3 Operators as Value-Allocation Mechanisms
The operators are not technical features. They are value-allocation mechanisms for meaning instead of money.
What ranking does is allocate visibility—the scarcest resource in an attention economy. What relevance does is allocate encounter—determining which meanings reach which subjects. What safety does is allocate legitimacy—determining which meanings are permitted to circulate. What legibility does is allocate intelligibility—determining which meanings are recognized as coherent. What utility does is allocate resources—determining which meanings receive amplification, storage, and transmission capacity.
These are the core functions of any political-economic system. They have been delegated to operators that are privately owned, opaquely governed, and optimized for extraction. This delegation is the cession that political economy must now contest.
Part IV: Semantic Labor
4.1 Labor in Political Economy
For Marx, labor is the activity that produces value. It is not merely "work" in the colloquial sense but the specific expenditure of human capacity that, under capitalist conditions, becomes the source of surplus appropriated by capital.
Labor has two aspects: concrete labor (the specific useful activity that produces particular use-values) and abstract labor (the general human effort that becomes commensurable and exchangeable through the value form). The commodity is the unity of use-value and exchange-value; labor is the unity of concrete and abstract activity.
The question for semantic political economy is: what is the labor that produces semantic value?
4.2 Semantic Labor (L_sem): Definition
Semantic labor is labor that produces value by producing interpretation, coherence, classification, trust, and relational structure. It is the activity that transforms raw signals into socially meaningful content, and socially meaningful content into the training material, attention inventory, and predictive power that constitute contemporary value.
Formally:
L_sem → ΔΣ
Semantic labor changes the semantic field. It produces:
Expressive labor: Writing, speaking, posting, creating—the production of primary semantic content.
Interpretive labor: Commenting, explaining, contextualizing—the production of secondary semantic structure that makes primary content meaningful.
Legibility labor: Self-formatting to fit categories, conforming to platform norms, producing machine-readable metadata—the work of making oneself and one's meaning accessible to systems.
Corrective labor: Flagging, rating, reporting, providing feedback—the work of training systems and correcting their errors.
Affective labor: Maintaining trust, managing tone, producing coherence—the relational work that sustains semantic communities.
All of these are labor in the political-economic sense: they produce value, they are necessary for reproduction, and they are systematically appropriated.
4.3 The Peculiarity of Semantic Labor
Semantic labor has a peculiar feature: it is often unwaged.
This does not mean it is not labor, and it does not mean it is not exploited. Marx explicitly recognized forms of exploitation outside the wage relation—in slavery, in colonialism, in domestic work. The defining feature of exploitation is not the wage but the asymmetrical appropriation of the product of labor by those who control the means of production.
Semantic labor is exploited because:
Its product is appropriated. The meanings produced become data assets, model weights, attention inventory, and prediction power—all owned by those who control SMP.
Its governance is asymmetrical. Those who perform semantic labor have no control over the operators that determine the value of their labor, the conditions of their visibility, or the persistence of their products.
Its surplus is privatized. The value created by collective semantic labor is captured by operator capital and returned to laborers only in the attenuated form of "access" to the platforms that extract from them.
The absence of a wage does not make this not-exploitation. It makes exploitation harder to see—which is why political economy must name it.
Part V: Semantic Surplus and Its Extraction
5.1 Surplus Value: The Classical Concept
For Marx, surplus value is the value produced by labor beyond what is necessary to reproduce the laborer. It is the source of profit, and its extraction is the defining mechanism of capitalist exploitation.
In the classical wage relation, surplus extraction is relatively visible: workers are paid for a portion of the value they produce; the remainder is appropriated by capital. The rate of exploitation is the ratio of surplus to necessary labor.
5.2 Semantic Surplus (S_sem): The Contemporary Form
Semantic surplus is the value extracted from semantic labor beyond what laborers control. It is generated when:
L_sem → Σ
Σ → O(SMP)
O(SMP) → Assetization
The semantic labor produces meaning. The operators transform meaning into organized semantic field. The organized field is converted into assets:
Data assets: The structured record of semantic activity, ownable and saleable.
Prediction power: The capacity to anticipate behavior derived from patterns in semantic data.
Model weights: The trained parameters of machine learning systems, produced by semantic labor and owned by those who control training infrastructure.
Attention inventory: The capacity to direct human attention, sold to advertisers and other buyers.
Legitimacy authority: The power to determine what counts as real, safe, authoritative—a governance capacity with immense social value.
None of these assets are controlled by those whose labor produced them. The semantic proletariat creates; semantic capital captures.
5.3 The Rate of Semantic Exploitation
The rate of semantic exploitation is difficult to calculate precisely because semantic labor is unwaged and diffuse. But its magnitude can be estimated by the scale of assetization:
The market capitalization of platform companies is substantially composed of semantic assets—the accumulated product of billions of hours of unwaged semantic labor.
The advertising revenues of these companies represent the monetization of attention inventory produced by semantic labor.
The competitive advantage of AI systems derives from training on semantic products generated by human labor without compensation.
These are not "externalities" or "network effects." They are surplus extraction—the appropriation of the product of labor by those who control the means of production.
Part VI: Operator Capital and Class Relation
6.1 Semantic Capital (K_sem): Definition
Semantic capital is ownership or control over operators and SMP. It is capital in the precise Marxian sense: not merely wealth, but command over the conditions of reproduction.
Formally:
K_sem = Control(O, SMP)
K_sem includes:
Operator design authority: The power to determine how operators function—what they select for, what they filter out, what they amplify or attenuate.
Parameter tuning power: The capacity to adjust operator behavior in response to changing conditions or objectives.
Access to aggregate data: The informational basis for operator optimization, available only to those who control SMP.
Ability to enforce defaults: The power to determine what is normal, expected, and automatic—the baseline against which all deviation is measured.
Capacity to alter time persistence: Control over what remains accessible and what disappears—the archival function as a form of power.
This is capital because it governs the conditions under which all other economic and social activity occurs. Whoever controls operators controls the field of possibility for meaning, and whoever controls the field of possibility for meaning controls social reproduction.
6.2 The Semantic Class Relation
The class relation in semantic political economy is structurally homologous to the classical capital-labor relation:
Semantic Proletariat (P_sem): Those who perform semantic labor but do not control operators or SMP. They experience the downstream effects of operator decisions without the capacity to contest or alter them. They must remain legible to survive institutionally—must format themselves, their expression, and their needs to fit the categories that operators recognize.
Semantic Capital Class (C_sem): Those who own or govern operators and SMP. They set default ontologies, capture semantic surplus, and externalize epistemic risk to the semantic proletariat. They determine what is visible, sayable, and persistent.
The relation between these classes is:
P_sem —[L_sem]→ Σ —[O(SMP)]→ K_sem
The semantic proletariat produces; operators transform; semantic capital captures. This is exploitation in the precise sense: asymmetrical appropriation of the product of labor through control of the means of production.
6.3 Why This Is Not Merely "Inequality"
The semantic class relation is not merely a distribution of resources. It is a structural relation of power over conditions.
The semantic proletariat does not simply "have less" than semantic capital. They are governed by operators they do not control, producing for a system that appropriates their product, formatted into categories that do not represent them, subject to erasure without recourse.
This is domination, not inequality. And domination requires political-economic analysis, not merely distributional concern.
Part VII: Operator Capital Concentration
7.1 Tendency to Monopoly
Operator capital exhibits strong concentration dynamics—a tendency toward monopoly or oligopoly structurally similar to the concentration dynamics Marx analyzed in industrial capital.
The mechanisms of concentration:
Scale feedback: Operator performance improves with scale. More data produces better predictions; better predictions attract more users; more users produce more data. This is not merely "network effects" in the economic sense but productive advantage: larger operators are literally better at the core function.
Σ↑ → O performance↑ → adoption↑ → Σ↑
Path dependence: Defaults become nature. Once an operator establishes the categories, rankings, and relevance criteria that organize a domain, alternatives must overcome not just technical challenges but ontological inertia. Users have been formatted to expect the existing categories; alternatives incur translation costs.
Regulatory enclosure: Safety and liability requirements become entry barriers. Compliance costs favor incumbents who can absorb them. Regulation intended to constrain operators often entrenches them by raising barriers to competition.
Temporal capture: Control over archives is control over memory. Operators that determine what persists and what disappears accumulate historical authority that new entrants cannot replicate. The past itself becomes a competitive moat.
Switching costs: Social graphs, archives, reputations, and established visibility are not portable. Leaving a platform means losing accumulated semantic capital—the investment of years of semantic labor.
7.2 What Is Actually Being Monopolized
The standard antitrust frame asks whether a firm dominates a "market." But operator capital monopolizes something more fundamental than any particular market:
Distribution of attention: Who sees what, and in what order.
Standards of legitimacy: What counts as authoritative, safe, or real.
Ontological schemas: The categories through which reality is parsed.
Epistemic default settings: What is assumed, what must be argued, what is unthinkable.
Temporal persistence: What remains accessible versus what disappears.
This is monopoly over the coordination layer—the infrastructure that makes all other markets and social domains possible. It is more fundamental than industrial monopoly because it governs the conditions under which industrial activity becomes visible, legitimate, and real.
7.3 Operator Capital as a New Form of Capital
Operator capital is not merely financial capital invested in technology. It is a distinct form of capital with its own logic of accumulation and domination.
Financial capital accumulates through profit on investment. Industrial capital accumulates through surplus extraction from wage labor. Operator capital accumulates through capture of semantic surplus and governance of the conditions of meaning.
The three forms intersect—operator capital requires financial capital for infrastructure, and it generates financial returns. But its distinctive power is not profit per se. Its distinctive power is the capacity to determine what is real for a society. This is a form of capital Marx could not have fully anticipated because the substrate did not yet exist. But it is continuous with his analysis: control of the means of production as the basis of class power.
Part VIII: The Liberatory Operator Set as Governance Alternative
8.1 Liberation Does Not Mean Removing Operators
A common misunderstanding must be addressed: liberation from operator domination does not mean removing operators.
Semantic space cannot be unmediated. Some function must determine what is visible, how meaning circulates, what persists. The question is not whether to govern meaning but how—and in whose interest.
Anarchist fantasies of "unfiltered" semantic space are incoherent. Without operators, there is no circulation—only noise. The point is not to abolish governance but to transform it.
8.2 The Liberatory Operator Set (LOS)
The Liberatory Operator Set is a minimal, sufficient set of alternative operators designed to counteract the dominant stack:
D_pres (Depth-Preservation): Preserves semantic depth across transmission. Meaning is not penalized for recursive reference, delayed resolution, or multi-layer dependency. Key inversion: depth is a feature, not friction.
N_c (Non-Closure): Prevents premature semantic finality. Meaning may remain incomplete, contested, or open-ended without being downgraded. Key inversion: meaning does not owe completion.
C_ex (Context-Expansion): Expands rather than narrows interpretive frame. Encounter with meaning adds context rather than filtering it. Key inversion: meaning increases possibility space.
N_ext (Non-Extractability): Protects meaning from forced instrumentalization. Meaning is valid without conversion, retention, or actionability metrics. Key inversion: meaning need not perform.
T_lib (Temporal Liberation): Frees meaning from linear progress constraints. Semantic value is time-invariant unless internally revised. Key inversion: meaning does not expire.
O_leg (Opacity Legitimization): Validates partial illegibility. Opacity is allowed without suspicion or automatic downgrading. Key inversion: not all meaning is meant to be transparent.
P_coh (Plural Coherence): Allows multiple coherent meanings to coexist. Contradiction does not force resolution. Key inversion: coherence ≠ singularity.
8.3 LOS as Political-Economic Alternative
LOS is not merely a technical specification. It is a political-economic alternative—a different regime of value allocation encoded in operator design.
Where DOM allocates value to fast, familiar, safe, useful, legible meaning that competes well, LOS allocates value to deep, open, expanding, non-instrumental, persistent, opaque-tolerant, plural meaning.
This is not a matter of preference or values in the ethical sense. It is a matter of what kind of social reproduction the system enables. DOM reproduces a society optimized for extraction. LOS enables a society optimized for depth, plurality, and persistence.
8.4 The Asymmetry of Application Order
A crucial formal property:
LOS(DOM(s)) ≠ DOM(LOS(s))
Applying liberatory operators after dominant operators partially recovers suppressed meaning but cannot restore what was eliminated. Applying liberatory operators before dominant operators protects meaning during transmission but may result in post-hoc filtering.
The strategic implication: LOS is most effective when applied at the point of semantic origin (composition) and at the point of encounter (reception), bracketing the dominant stack's operation.
This is why pedagogy (teaching LOS-compliant composition) and infrastructure (building LOS-governed systems) are both necessary. Neither alone suffices.
Part IX: The Fetishism of Algorithmic Neutrality
9.1 Fetishism in Political Economy
For Marx, fetishism is the process by which social relations appear as relations between things. The commodity fetish makes the social relation of exploitation appear as a natural property of objects. Workers confront capital not as a social relation but as an alien force, a thing with its own powers.
Fetishism is not mere illusion. It is real abstraction—the appearance is generated by the actual structure of social relations under capitalism. The commodity really does function as if it had inherent value; the fetish is not simply believed but practiced.
9.2 Algorithmic Fetishism
Algorithmic governance produces its own fetishism: the appearance of technical necessity where there is actually political decision.
When operators determine what is visible, relevant, safe, or legitimate, these determinations appear as:
"The algorithm" (as if it were an autonomous force) "Relevance" (as if relevance were an objective property) "Safety" (as if safety were a technical fact) "What users want" (as if wants were given rather than produced)
These appearances are not lies. They are generated by the actual operation of systems that are opaque to their users and often to their operators. The fetish is practiced: users really do interact with "the algorithm" as an alien force determining their fate.
But the fetish conceals the political-economic reality: operators are designed by humans, implement choices, serve interests, and could be otherwise. The apparent neutrality of the system is its ideological form—the way domination presents itself as nature.
9.3 Defetishization as Political Task
Political economy's task is defetishization: revealing social relations concealed beneath the appearance of things.
For semantic political economy, this means:
Showing that operators are governance functions, not neutral technologies. Showing that ranking is value allocation, not objective quality measurement. Showing that relevance is demand production, not demand satisfaction. Showing that safety is liability management, not harm prevention. Showing that "what users want" is a product of the system that claims to satisfy it.
This is not merely critique. It is the condition of political contestation. You cannot contest what you cannot see as contingent.
Part X: Why Political Economy Abandoned Its Object
10.1 The Fragmentation of Political Economy
Twentieth-century political economy fragmented into:
Economics: Mathematized, focused on markets, increasingly detached from questions of power and reproduction.
Sociology: Focused on norms and institutions, often treating meaning as superstructure rather than infrastructure.
Cultural theory: Focused on meaning and critique, but systematically detached from questions of ownership, production, and material infrastructure.
Science and technology studies: Focused on technology and discourse, but often without the political-economic categories necessary to analyze power.
This fragmentation was not neutral. It divided political economy's object precisely at the moment when an integrated analysis was most necessary. Meaning got quarantined into critique; infrastructure got quarantined into technical studies; ownership got quarantined into economics. No field maintained the integration that political economy requires.
10.2 The Fear of Engineering
A second factor: the left's retreat from engineering.
After mid-century, "designing systems" became associated with technocracy, authoritarian planning, propaganda—everything the critical tradition opposed. The response was to take refuge in critique, debunking, ideology analysis, and "discourse" work.
This was understandable. But it was also a cession. Critique without construction is diagnosis without treatment. While political economy critiqued ideology, technologists built the infrastructure that would govern meaning for billions. The vacuum was occupied by those who had no hesitation about engineering.
10.3 The Occupation of the Vacuum
Technologists did not seize semantic infrastructure through conspiracy. They inherited it by default.
Someone had to build the systems. Someone had to make the decisions about ranking, relevance, and persistence. Political economy wasn't there to contest those decisions because it had stopped tracking value when it left commodity form.
This is not an accusation against technologists. Many of them believed they were building neutral tools. The fetishism of algorithmic neutrality is not a lie they told but an appearance generated by the structure of their situation. They were governing without the conceptual vocabulary to recognize governance.
The result is a regime of semantic domination that nobody exactly chose and everybody must now confront.
Part XI: Recovering Political Economy's Function
11.1 What Political Economy Must Now Do
Political economy must:
Track value to its current site: Meaning is now the primary value substrate. Political economy must analyze semantic infrastructure with the same rigor it once applied to industrial infrastructure.
Analyze ownership: Who owns the operators? Who controls SMP? These are the class questions of the present.
Identify exploitation: Semantic labor is systematically appropriated. Political economy must name this exploitation and develop categories adequate to its analysis.
Contest governance: Operators are governance functions. Political economy must develop alternatives—not merely critique existing arrangements but specify what different arrangements would look like.
Build infrastructure: Critique without construction is incomplete. Political economy must participate in building the alternative systems that would instantiate different governance.
11.2 This Is Not a New Field
What is proposed here is not a new subdiscipline ("semantic economics," "platform studies," "algorithmic governance"). It is political economy doing its job.
The substrate has changed. The analytical categories are the same: value, labor, surplus, capital, class, exploitation, fetishism, reproduction. What is required is not new theory but the application of existing theory to current conditions.
This should be unsurprising. Marx analyzed industrial capitalism because that was where value was being produced in his time. We must analyze semantic capitalism because that is where value is being produced now. The method is continuous; only the object has moved.
11.3 The Disciplinary Implication
If this analysis is correct, then:
"AI ethics" is a symptom of political economy's absence—an attempt to govern effects because conditions are not being governed.
"Platform governance" is a partial recovery, but typically without class analysis or infrastructure proposals.
"Critical algorithm studies" correctly identifies the object but often lacks political-economic teeth.
What is needed is not another subfield but the reintegration of these concerns into political economy proper—with ownership, production, and struggle as the central categories.
Conclusion: The Present as Transition
Political economy has faced transitions before. The emergence of industrial capitalism required new categories: the factory, wage labor, the commodity form as universal equivalent. The emergence of financial capitalism required further categories: fictitious capital, debt, the derivative.
The emergence of semantic capitalism requires categories again: semantic means of production, semantic labor, operator capital. But these are not breaks with Marx. They are continuations—applications of his method to conditions he could not have foreseen but prepared us to analyze.
The present is not unprecedented. It is a transition—visible if we have categories to see it, governable if we have the will to contest it.
Political economy's object was never merely the market. It was the total system of social reproduction under conditions of power. That system now operates primarily through semantic infrastructure. Political economy must follow—or cede its function permanently to those who will govern meaning without understanding governance.
The choice is not whether meaning will be governed. It is whether political economy will participate in determining how.
Formal Appendix: Schema Summary
Core Variables
Σ (Sigma): The total semantic field—all available meanings in a society at time t.
SMP: Semantic Means of Production = {I, R_k, R_c, C, M, UI}
O_n: Operators—functions Σ → Σ' that transform the semantic field
L_sem: Semantic labor—activity producing ΔΣ
S_sem: Semantic surplus—value extracted from L_sem beyond what producers control
K_sem: Semantic capital = Control(O, SMP)
Class Positions
P_sem (Semantic Proletariat): Performs L_sem; does not control O or SMP; must remain legible to survive.
C_sem (Semantic Capital Class): Owns/governs O and SMP; captures S_sem; externalizes epistemic risk.
Class Relation
P_sem —[L_sem]→ Σ —[O(SMP)]→ K_sem
Dominant Operator Stack
DOM(s) = R_rank(R_rel(S_safe(L_leg(U_til(s)))))
Liberatory Operator Set
LOS = {D_pres, N_c, C_ex, N_ext, T_lib, O_leg, P_coh}
Key Asymmetry
LOS(DOM(s)) ≠ DOM(LOS(s))
Document Metadata (Terminal)
document_id: SPE-001
word_count: ~8,500
status: working_paper_v1.0
next_documents: [SPE-002_The_Cession, SPE-003_Institutional_Demands]
integration_target: LOS_Expanded_Edition_with_Metadata.md
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