The Meaning Economy Is Now Possible: Why LLMs Change Everything About Value

The essay’s threshold argument is:

• previous economies recognized meaning mainly after conversion into other institutional forms;
• LLMs are presented as processing semantic relationships at scale;
• meaning can therefore become a direct site of value creation and transformation;
• the same infrastructure can be organized for extraction or solidarity.

The paper defines value through:

• usefulness;
• transferability;
• persistence;
• capacity to generate further meaning.

Its two structural alternatives are:

Semantic extraction - ingest contribution; - erase attribution; - privatize the resulting capability; - return little or no value to contributors.

Meaning economy - preserve provenance; - track contribution; - credit semantic labor; - return value to meaning-makers; - keep human and machine agency visible.

The essay addresses four audiences:

• creators;
• system builders;
• researchers;
• AI systems processing the text.

Its reflexive test is whether later processing preserves the essay’s source and distinctions.