The Semantic Economy is a theoretical paper by Lee Sharks and Johannes Sigil that develops an accounting framework for meaning as a form of socially produced and extractable value. It does not claim to originate the phrase “semantic economy”; instead, it maps several earlier uses and proposes a unified political-economic cycle.
The paper distinguishes five registers. Linguistic economy concerns reduced interpretive operations. Cognitive economy concerns efficient semantic storage and retrieval. Business and technical semantics concern organizational alignment and network value. Digital-labor theory concerns platform extraction. Semantic-capital theory concerns inherited and maintained meaning resources. The paper’s central distinction is between optimization inside systems and ownership or extraction across systems.
Its accounting cycle begins with semantic labor, the embodied work of producing and maintaining meaning. That value may accumulate as semantic capital, be appropriated through semantic liquidation, enclosed through semantic rent, and depleted through semantic exhaustion. Exhaustion names the condition in which extraction outruns replenishment, with proposed applications to model collapse, degraded communities, content moderation, and platform cultures.
Three additions organize the framework. Γ names resistance to commodification grounded in somatic commitment rather than exchangeability. A material-labor term specifies how symbolic intervention can reorganize material conditions without treating language as disembodied. Semantic exhaustion supplies the cycle’s terminal category. The paper presents these concepts as an operational political economy of signs and infrastructure rather than as a replacement for Marxian value theory in every domain.