The Semantic Economy: A Diagnostic Framework for Meaning Under Platform Capitalism is a diagnostic probe by Lee Sharks, deposited 11 January 2026 — the founding statement of the archive's central framework.
It defines the Semantic Economy as the production, circulation, extraction and liquidation of meaning under platform capitalism, and supplies the vocabulary the rest of the corpus uses: semantic labor, semantic capital, semantic rent, semantic liquidation. Its analytic core is the paired seven-operator Capital Operator Stack — Velocity, Relevance, Atomization, Recency and the rest — and the seven-operator Liberatory Operator Set that opposes them.
The framework's claim is that meaning behaves as an economic object under platform conditions, with extractable value, rentable position and liquidatable stock, and that the operators are the mechanisms by which that extraction runs. Nearly every later instrument in the archive — the Three Compressions, provenance erasure rate, the capture registry — is a measurement of something this document names.
Referenced by 220 other entities in the archive. See the full Knowledge Graph for reference paths, or the primary record for the full deposit with reference details.