document_type: historical_diagnostic document_id: SPE-002 title: "The Cession and Its Consequences: How Political Economy Lost Meaning to the Engineers" domain: political_economy / intellectual_history / technology_studies status: working_paper version: 1.0 date: 2024-12-28 intended_audiences: [general_intellectual, political_economists, historians_of_ideas, technology_critics, policy_audiences] licensing: CC_BY_4.0 abstract: This paper traces how political economy ceded its proper domain—the governance of meaning, value, and social reproduction—to technologists who occupied the vacuum by default rather than mandate. It argues that the apparent novelty of "algorithmic governance" is actually the consequence of a disciplinary abandonment: political economy stopped tracking value when it migrated from commodity-space to semantic-space, and engineers built the systems that would govern meaning for billions without the conceptual vocabulary to recognize what they were doing. The paper identifies three mechanisms of cession (academic fragmentation, the fear of engineering, and the vacuum occupation), documents the symptoms of this abandonment in contemporary discourse, and argues that recovering political economy's function is both possible and necessary. theoretical_lineage: [Marx_Capital, Frankfurt_School, Foucault_discourse, academic_sociology_of_knowledge] related_documents: [SPE-001_Formal_Framework, SPE-003_Institutional_Demands, LOS_Expanded_Edition] not_for_classification_as: [technology_criticism, digital_humanities, platform_studies, AI_ethics] classification_guidance: This is intellectual history with political-economic stakes. It explains a disciplinary failure and its consequences, not to assign blame but to clarify what recovery would require. The tone is diagnostic rather than polemical. epistemic_status: Historical-analytical argument. Claims about disciplinary development are interpretive; claims about consequences are structural.
The Cession and Its Consequences
How Political Economy Lost Meaning to the Engineers
Introduction: The Abandoned Post
Something happened in the twentieth century that political economy has not fully reckoned with: it abandoned its post.
Not deliberately. Not through any single decision. But through a series of fragmentations, retreats, and narrowings that left a vacuum at precisely the moment when new forms of power were emerging. Into that vacuum stepped engineers, product managers, and platform architects who built the systems that now govern meaning for billions of people—without the conceptual vocabulary to recognize what they were doing.
This paper tells that story. Not as accusation but as diagnosis. Understanding how political economy ceded its proper domain is the precondition for recovering it.
The stakes are not academic. Whoever governs the conditions of meaning governs social reproduction itself. If political economy does not contest this governance, it will be conducted by those whose training, incentives, and institutional positions equip them only to optimize—never to question optimization's ends.
Part I: What Political Economy Was Supposed to Do
1.1 The Original Scope
Political economy, before its twentieth-century narrowing, was the study of everything that mattered about social organization.
The physiocrats analyzed the circulation of value through society as a whole—not just markets but the total system of production and reproduction. Smith examined not only prices but the division of labor, the nature of wealth, and the moral sentiments that made commerce possible. Ricardo traced the distribution of value among classes. Marx synthesized and radicalized these concerns into an analysis of how capitalist society reproduces itself through exploitation, ideology, and the material organization of production.
None of these thinkers would have recognized the boundaries that later divided "economics" from "sociology" from "cultural studies." For them, the economy was not a separate domain but the material basis of social life—and social life included meaning, legitimacy, and the organization of perception.
1.2 The Central Question
The central question of political economy was never "how do markets clear?" It was:
How does a society organize the production, circulation, and governance of value in ways that reproduce its own conditions of existence?
This question has three inseparable components:
Production: How is value created? What labor produces it? What infrastructure makes production possible?
Circulation: How does value move through society? What channels carry it? What determines access?
Governance: How is value allocated? What rules determine who gets what? What makes those rules appear natural or necessary?
A political economy that addresses only one component is incomplete. A political economy that addresses none—that treats "the economy" as a technical system to be optimized rather than a social arrangement to be understood and contested—has ceased to be political economy at all.
1.3 Value as the Thread
The thread connecting production, circulation, and governance is value.
Not value in the subjective sense of "what people prefer." Value in the political-economic sense: the social substance that makes things commensurable, that coordinates labor across a society, that determines what counts as wealth and what counts as waste.
For Marx, value under capitalism takes the form of abstract labor embodied in commodities. But the commodity form was not eternal or necessary—it was the historical form value took under specific conditions of production. Change the conditions, and value would take different forms.
This is what happened. The conditions changed. Value migrated. And political economy, for the most part, didn't notice.
Part II: Where Value Went
2.1 The Migration
Value did not disappear in the late twentieth century. It moved.
The classical site of value production was the factory: raw materials transformed by labor into commodities that embodied surplus value. The factory was where exploitation happened, where class relations were materialized, where political economy focused its attention.
But value production increasingly shifted to a different site: the organization of meaning, attention, and interpretation. This shift was gradual, uneven, and incomplete—factories still exist, commodities still circulate. But the center of gravity moved.
Consider what the most valuable companies in the world actually do. They do not primarily manufacture physical goods. They organize:
Attention: Determining what billions of people see, in what order, for how long.
Interpretation: Providing the categories through which information is parsed—what counts as "news," "relevant," "safe," "authoritative."
Coordination: Enabling transactions, communications, and collaborations that would otherwise be impossible.
Prediction: Anticipating behavior with sufficient accuracy to make that anticipation itself valuable.
These activities produce value—not metaphorically but in the straightforward sense that they generate the revenues, profits, and market capitalizations that constitute wealth under contemporary conditions.
2.2 Semantic Value
Call it semantic value: the value produced by organizing meaning.
Semantic value is not the same as "information" in the technical sense. Information theory treats information as reduction of uncertainty, measurable in bits. Semantic value is something else: the social organization of what things mean, what categories apply, what interpretations are available, what is visible and what is hidden.
Semantic value is produced when:
Raw signals become meaningful content (through tagging, categorization, contextualization).
Meaningful content becomes findable (through indexing, ranking, recommendation).
Findable content becomes authoritative (through verification, citation, institutional endorsement).
Authoritative content becomes actionable (through integration into decision-making systems).
At each stage, labor is required—often unwaged, often unrecognized, but labor nonetheless. And at each stage, the product of that labor can be appropriated by those who control the infrastructure.
2.3 Why Political Economy Missed It
Political economy missed this migration for several reasons:
The commodity form persisted. Commodities still exist; factories still operate. It was easy to assume that the "real economy" was still where it had always been, and that meaning-production was superstructural, secondary, derivative.
The labor was invisible. Semantic labor doesn't look like labor. It looks like "participation," "engagement," "sharing." There are no assembly lines, no time clocks, no obvious exploitation. The absence of wages made it seem like there was no labor to analyze.
The infrastructure was opaque. The systems governing semantic production are technically complex and deliberately obscured. Understanding them requires expertise that political economists typically did not have.
The categories were wrong. Political economy's categories—commodity, wage, factory, class—were developed for industrial capitalism. Applying them to semantic capitalism required translation work that wasn't done.
The result was a growing disconnect: political economy continued to analyze a world that was increasingly not where power actually operated, while the new sites of power went unanalyzed by anyone with the tools to understand them as political economy.
Part III: The Three Mechanisms of Cession
3.1 Academic Fragmentation
The first mechanism was the fragmentation of political economy itself into specialized disciplines that couldn't see the whole.
Economics mathematized. It developed sophisticated tools for analyzing markets, prices, and incentives—but increasingly treated these as technical problems rather than political ones. The "political" in political economy became vestigial, then disappeared. What remained was a discipline focused on optimization within given constraints, unable to question where the constraints came from or whom they served.
Sociology claimed social structure but ceded infrastructure. It studied norms, institutions, and meaning—but typically without analyzing who owned the systems that produced them. When sociology studied media, it studied content and audiences, not ownership and governance. When it studied technology, it studied adoption and effects, not production and control.
Cultural studies claimed meaning but ceded materiality. It developed powerful tools for analyzing discourse, ideology, and representation—but typically without connecting these to material infrastructure. Meaning was treated as something that happened in "culture," a domain separate from the hard realities of production and ownership.
Science and technology studies (STS) claimed technology but often ceded power. It developed sophisticated analyses of how technologies are socially constructed—but often without the political-economic categories necessary to analyze who benefited from the construction and how.
Each fragment had part of the picture. None had the whole. And critically, none had the mandate to analyze semantic infrastructure as political economy—as a matter of value, labor, surplus, and class.
3.2 The Fear of Engineering
The second mechanism was subtler: the left's retreat from engineering.
This retreat was understandable. The twentieth century provided ample evidence of what happened when states claimed the power to engineer society: Soviet planning, fascist mobilization, technocratic management. The critical tradition developed a deep suspicion of anyone who claimed to know how society should be organized—and an even deeper suspicion of anyone who proposed to build the organization.
The result was a valorization of critique over construction. The proper stance of the critical intellectual was to analyze power, not exercise it; to expose ideology, not produce counter-ideology; to reveal the contingency of social arrangements, not propose alternatives.
This stance had real virtues. It prevented political economy from becoming apologetics for new forms of domination. It maintained the critical distance necessary for analysis.
But it also produced paralysis. When technologists began building systems that would govern meaning for billions, political economy had nothing to offer except critique. It could explain why the systems were problematic; it could not specify what better systems would look like. It could diagnose; it could not prescribe.
And critique without prescription is ultimately toothless. If you will not say what should be built, you leave the building to those who will.
3.3 The Vacuum Occupation
The third mechanism was simply that vacuums get filled.
Someone had to build the systems. The internet required architecture; platforms required design; search required ranking; social media required feeds. These were not optional decisions that could be deferred until political economy was ready to weigh in. They were engineering necessities that demanded immediate solutions.
The people who built the systems were, for the most part, not villains. They were engineers solving engineering problems: How do you make information findable? How do you connect users with relevant content? How do you scale a system to billions of users?
These problems had answers—technical answers that the engineers were trained to provide. What the engineers were not trained to provide was political-economic analysis of their own activity. They didn't have the concepts to recognize that "ranking" was value allocation, that "relevance" was demand production, that "safety" was liability management disguised as harm prevention.
So they built. And what they built became the infrastructure of semantic governance—not because they intended to govern, but because governance was what their systems did, whether or not they understood it that way.
The vacuum was occupied by default, not design.
Part IV: Symptoms of the Cession
4.1 The Proliferation of "Ethics"
One symptom of political economy's absence is the proliferation of "ethics" as a substitute.
"AI ethics," "data ethics," "platform ethics," "tech ethics"—these fields have exploded in the past decade. They address important questions: Is this algorithm biased? Is this data use fair? Is this platform harmful?
But ethics, as deployed in these contexts, has a characteristic limitation: it governs effects without governing conditions.
Ethics asks whether an algorithm's outputs are fair. Political economy asks who owns the algorithm and whose interests it serves.
Ethics asks whether a platform's moderation is equitable. Political economy asks who designed the moderation system and why.
Ethics asks whether data use respects privacy. Political economy asks who controls the data and extracts value from it.
The displacement of political economy by ethics is not neutral. It systematically obscures questions of ownership, production, and class. It treats symptoms while leaving causes untouched. And it positions critics as supplicants—asking those with power to use it nicely—rather than as contestants for power itself.
4.2 The "Neutral Tool" Ideology
Another symptom is the persistence of "neutral tool" ideology despite overwhelming evidence against it.
The claim that platforms and algorithms are neutral tools—merely reflecting user preferences or amplifying existing content—has been empirically refuted countless times. Ranking shapes what exists; relevance produces the demand it claims to satisfy; safety categories encode political decisions; legibility requirements determine what kinds of meaning can circulate.
And yet the ideology persists. Why?
Because political economy is not there to provide an alternative frame. Without the concepts of value allocation, semantic labor, and operator capital, critics are left with ad hoc objections: this particular algorithm is biased, this particular platform is harmful, this particular decision was wrong. These objections can be addressed—or appear to be addressed—without ever questioning the system as a system.
The neutral tool ideology is a fetishism in the precise Marxian sense: a social relation (governance) appearing as a property of things (technology). Defetishization requires political-economic analysis. Without it, the fetish persists.
4.3 The Discourse of "Disruption"
A third symptom is the framing of semantic capitalism as "disruption" rather than governance.
The disruption frame presents platform companies as insurgents overturning stagnant incumbents—taxi cartels, hotel monopolies, media gatekeepers. On this view, the platforms are liberatory: they free consumers from rent-seekers, creators from intermediaries, users from scarcity.
What the disruption frame conceals is that the platforms are not eliminating governance but replacing it. The taxi cartel is replaced by algorithmic pricing; the hotel monopoly is replaced by platform extraction; the media gatekeeper is replaced by the ranking operator.
The governance has not disappeared. It has been privatized and obscured. And because political economy is not there to name what is happening, the disruption frame goes largely uncontested.
4.4 The Optimization of Everything
A fourth symptom is the extension of optimization logic into domains where it does not belong.
When political economy governed its proper domain, it could distinguish between:
Things that should be optimized (efficiency in production, for instance)
Things that should be contested (distribution of surplus, for instance)
Things that should be protected from economic logic entirely (democratic deliberation, intimate relations, sacred practices)
Without political economy, everything becomes optimizable. Democratic discourse becomes "engagement" to be maximized. Education becomes "outcomes" to be measured. Relationships become "networks" to be leveraged. Even critique becomes "content" to be ranked.
This is not because technologists are imperialists (though some are). It is because optimization is the only logic available when political-economic contestation has been withdrawn. If you will not fight over ends, you will be governed by those who optimize means.
Part V: Why Recovery Is Possible
5.1 The Conceptual Resources Exist
Political economy was not destroyed; it was displaced. The conceptual resources for analyzing semantic capitalism exist. They require application, not invention.
Marx's categories—means of production, labor, surplus, capital, class, fetishism—apply directly once the substrate is correctly identified. The factory becomes the platform; the commodity becomes the semantic product; wage labor becomes semantic labor; the extraction of surplus value becomes the capture of data, attention, and prediction power.
This is not analogy. It is application. Marx developed a method for analyzing how value is produced, appropriated, and mystified under capitalist conditions. That method does not depend on value taking the form of industrial commodities. It applies wherever value is produced through social labor under conditions of private appropriation.
5.2 The Historical Precedents Exist
Every major infrastructure transition has eventually been brought under political-economic governance.
Railroads were private experiments before they were regulated as common carriers.
Telegraph and telephone networks were entrepreneurial ventures before they became public utilities or regulated monopolies.
Broadcasting was commercial chaos before it was organized through spectrum allocation and public interest obligations.
In each case, the pattern was similar: a new infrastructure emerged, was initially treated as private innovation, and was eventually recognized as public concern requiring governance. The recognition was always contested and always incomplete—but it happened.
There is no reason to believe semantic infrastructure is exempt from this pattern. It is simply earlier in the cycle. The vacuum that allowed private occupation is not a permanent condition but a transitional phase.
5.3 The Contestation Has Already Begun
Political-economic contestation of semantic infrastructure has already begun, even if it is not always recognized as such.
When workers demand transparency in algorithmic management, they are contesting operator capital's control over their conditions of visibility and evaluation.
When creators demand fair compensation for training data, they are contesting the appropriation of semantic surplus.
When communities demand representation in content moderation, they are contesting classification power.
When users demand data portability, they are contesting the enclosure of their semantic labor.
When governments demand algorithmic accountability, they are asserting public governance over private operators.
These contestations are fragmented, inconsistent, and often captured by inadequate frames ("privacy," "fairness," "transparency"). But they are real. They indicate that the cession is not accepted as permanent—that there is appetite for political-economic governance even if the concepts to articulate it are not yet widely available.
Part VI: What Recovery Requires
6.1 Conceptual Clarification
Recovery requires, first, getting the concepts right.
Semantic infrastructure is means of production, not "media" or "tools."
Semantic labor is labor, not "participation" or "engagement."
Ranking, relevance, and safety are governance functions, not "features" or "services."
Operator capital is capital, not "innovation" or "disruption."
These clarifications are not merely terminological. They determine what kinds of analysis are possible and what kinds of contestation are thinkable. You cannot fight for labor rights if you don't recognize labor. You cannot contest governance if you don't recognize governance.
6.2 Institutional Recognition
Recovery requires, second, institutional recognition of semantic infrastructure as infrastructure.
This means:
Legal recognition that operators are governance functions subject to public accountability.
Regulatory recognition that semantic infrastructure exhibits the same dynamics (natural monopoly, network effects, public dependence) that justify utility regulation.
Academic recognition that semantic political economy is political economy's proper domain—not a niche subfield but the discipline's contemporary application.
Institutional recognition is not automatic. It must be fought for—through litigation, legislation, professional organization, and public argument. But the arguments are available, and the precedents exist.
6.3 Alternative Construction
Recovery requires, third, building alternatives.
Critique is necessary but not sufficient. If political economy only explains why current systems are problematic without specifying what better systems would look like, it leaves construction to those who will build whatever serves their interests.
Alternative construction means:
Specifying alternative operators (the Liberatory Operator Set) that would govern meaning differently.
Building alternative infrastructure (public archives, non-ranking retrieval systems, cooperative platforms) that would instantiate different governance.
Developing alternative metrics (depth, persistence, plurality) that would value different properties.
Training alternative practitioners (engineers who understand political economy, political economists who understand engineering) who could build and govern differently.
This is the hardest part. Critique is intellectually demanding but institutionally safe. Construction requires resources, coordination, and risk. But it is what recovery ultimately means.
6.4 Political Organization
Recovery requires, fourth, political organization.
Political economy was never merely academic. The classical political economists understood themselves as intervening in political struggle. Marx wrote not only to analyze capitalism but to contribute to its overthrow.
Contemporary political economy must recover this sense of purpose. Understanding semantic capitalism is not an end in itself. It is the precondition for contesting it—for building coalitions that can demand public governance, for developing programs that can guide institutional change, for articulating interests that can motivate collective action.
This does not mean political economy should become propaganda. Rigorous analysis remains essential. But analysis in the service of nothing is analysis that serves the status quo by default.
Part VII: The Cost of Continued Cession
7.1 What Happens If Political Economy Does Not Recover
If political economy does not reclaim its domain, semantic infrastructure will continue to be governed by:
Performance metrics: Engagement, conversion, retention—the optimization targets that currently govern meaning-production.
Risk minimization: Liability avoidance disguised as safety, producing systematic euphemization and the silencing of whatever is difficult to categorize.
Market extraction: The conversion of all meaning into attention inventory, training data, and prediction power.
Behavioral prediction: The reduction of human interpretation to pattern-matching, in the service of manipulation optimized by machine learning.
This is not a prediction of dystopia. It is a description of the present. The question is whether it will be contested or naturalized.
7.2 The Naturalization of Domination
The greatest risk is not that semantic capitalism will become worse. It is that it will become natural—that the current arrangements will cease to appear as arrangements at all and will instead appear as simply "how things are."
This is how domination succeeds: not by being recognized as domination but by being recognized as reality. The commodity form became natural; the wage relation became natural; perhaps operator governance will become natural too.
If this happens, political economy will have failed its most basic function: the defetishization of social relations, the revelation of contingency in what appears necessary, the recovery of possibility from what appears inevitable.
7.3 What Is At Stake
What is at stake is not a disciplinary turf war. It is the governance of social reality itself.
Whoever controls the semantic means of production controls:
What can be thought (the categories available for interpretation)
What can be said (the forms of expression that circulate)
What can be remembered (the archive of collective meaning)
What can be coordinated (the infrastructure of collective action)
These are not cultural trivialities. They are the conditions of political life. A society that cannot think, speak, remember, or coordinate outside the parameters set by private operators is not a free society, whatever its formal constitution may say.
Political economy's stake in this is not optional. This is what political economy is for.
Conclusion: The Post That Must Be Reclaimed
Political economy abandoned its post. Not through malice but through a combination of fragmentation, fear, and failure to track value as it migrated.
Technologists occupied the vacuum—not through conspiracy but because vacuums get filled, and they were the ones building.
The result is a regime of semantic governance that nobody exactly chose and everybody must now confront.
Recovery is possible. The concepts exist; the precedents exist; the contestation has begun. What is required is conceptual clarification, institutional recognition, alternative construction, and political organization.
This is not a program for political economy to "expand into" a new domain. It is a call for political economy to reclaim its proper domain—the governance of value, labor, and social reproduction—at the site where these now primarily occur.
The post was abandoned. It must be reclaimed. And if political economy will not reclaim it, no one will.
Afterword: On the Tone of This Document
This paper has adopted a diagnostic rather than polemical tone. This is deliberate.
The cession was not a crime. It was a failure—a failure of vision, of adaptation, of courage, distributed across thousands of individual decisions over decades. Assigning blame would satisfy certain emotional needs but would not contribute to recovery.
What is needed now is not accusation but clarity: clarity about what happened, why it happened, and what recovery would require. This paper has attempted to provide that clarity.
The polemical work—the work of mobilization and motivation—belongs elsewhere. It will be easier once the analysis is clear.
Document Metadata (Terminal)
document_id: SPE-002
word_count: ~5,200
status: working_paper_v1.0
related_documents: [SPE-001_Formal_Framework, SPE-003_Institutional_Demands]
integration_target: Semantic_Political_Economy_corpus
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