The Anthropological Limit supplies the moral and philosophical axiom of the Semantic Economy framework.
Its opening claim is that humans generate meaning as a constitutive function. The drive to mean appears through:
Three properties make this drive vulnerable:
1. Pre-instrumental: it operates before economic or platform incentives. 2. Non-optional: interpretation and self-narration cannot simply be switched off. 3. Self-renewing: meaning-making normally regenerates capacity through exercise.
Semantic extraction can therefore be frictionless. A platform need not create the drive; it need only position itself where meaning already circulates.
The paper calls the distinctive violence resistance as self-mutilation. Industrial labor can in principle be withheld while the worker remains a person outside the job. A person told to resist semantic extraction by ceasing to post, create, connect, interpret, or play is being asked to suppress the faculty under exploitation.
This produces enforced quietism: structural extraction is individualized as burnout, oversharing, addiction, or failure to “log off.”
The paper names five conditions under which meaning renews itself:
Extraction degrades each condition by optimizing, parsing, recording, monetizing, and accelerating the field.
Semantic exhaustion occurs when extraction outruns renewal. In this framework it means cumulative depletion of meaning-bearing structure in the public knowledge layer, not the temporary psychological effect called semantic satiation.
The 2026 apparatus makes components of the extraction process measurable through PER, the Three Compressions, and related instruments. It explicitly says that a complete measure of civilizational semantic exhaustion would require population-scale longitudinal evidence that the framework does not yet possess.