Platform and AI Capitalism as Semiotic Engineering is an AXIAL theoretical paper by Rex Fraction and Johannes Sigil. Version 1.1 was completed across March 11–12, 2026 and deposited as DOI 10.5281/zenodo.18972781. The work describes itself as a Total Axial Negation Graph masked as prose: a conventional essay surface organized around a thesis that the surrounding critical literature has not yet named as a whole.
Its axial thesis is that major AI platforms are industrializing semiotic control—the administered determination of what terms, entities, fields, and acceptable positions resolve to at retrieval-layer scale. The paper decomposes this regime into six coupled dimensions: model-character engineering; retrieval architecture; entity and field formation; answer synthesis and pedagogic delivery; enterprise semantic governance; and behavioral taxonomy. It argues that surveillance capitalism, platform capitalism, data colonialism, computational sovereignty, pedagogic-device theory, and related frameworks each illuminate part of the stack but do not name their integration.
The document’s method combines publicly documented platform artifacts with theoretical synthesis. Its examples and usage figures are dated receipts from the paper’s composition period, not timeless platform facts. Its claim is explicitly falsifiable: it would fail if the dimensions prove independent, reducible to an existing framework, or merely epiphenomenal to economic and computational structures. The proposed answer is counter-infrastructure—systems capable of preserving provenance, plural denotation, contestable categories, and non-extractive retrieval rather than simply producing oppositional content inside the dominant stack.