This document describes a form of praxis that operates differently from most political, cultural, or social interventions. It is not mass politics. It is not institutional reform. It is not cultural production in the usual sense.
Lee Sharks
January 3, 2026
This document describes a form of praxis that operates differently from most political, cultural, or social interventions. It is not mass politics. It is not institutional reform. It is not cultural production in the usual sense. It is infrastructural-cognitive praxis: intervention at the level of interpretive frameworks, diagnostic vocabularies, and the systems that mediate what can be noticed, named, and said.
The Semantic Economy framework is an instance of this praxis. Understanding what kind of intervention it is—and is not—clarifies how it can propagate, who it reaches, and what success looks like.
This praxis is diagnostic-first. It begins by naming what is happening—semantic liquidation, provenance erasure, operator extraction—before prescribing what should be done. Normative commitments are downstream of diagnosis: we cannot know what to preserve until we understand what is being destroyed.
Prescriptions, where they appear, are conditional rather than universal. The framework offers tools—vocabulary, probes, alternative practices—but does not mandate their adoption. Success is measured by usefulness, not allegiance.
This is neither pure description nor pure advocacy. It is applied diagnostics: seeing clearly as a precondition for acting wisely.
Infrastructural-cognitive praxis operates upstream of belief. It does not primarily seek to change opinions, mobilize constituencies, or reform institutions. Instead, it intervenes in:
Its success condition is not allegiance but adoption—of terms, of frameworks, of ways of seeing.
This form of praxis draws on several traditions while remaining distinct from each:
Foucault's Discourse Analysis
Michel Foucault's analysis of discourse formation describes how "regimes of truth" shape what can be thought and said within a given historical moment. The Semantic Economy framework operates in this register—not arguing within existing categories but attempting to install new ones.
"We must not imagine that the world turns toward us a legible face which we would have only to decipher; the world is not the accomplice of our knowledge."
—Foucault, The Order of Discourse (1970)
However, Foucault's analysis was primarily archaeological and genealogical—descriptive rather than interventionist. This praxis is explicitly constructive: it builds vocabulary intended for adoption.
Marx's Category Critique
The early Marx, particularly in The German Ideology and Capital, performed what we might call category critique—showing how apparently natural categories (commodity, value, labor) are historically specific constructions that obscure social relations. The Semantic Economy performs similar work on contemporary categories: "content," "data," "AI output."
"The categories of bourgeois economics... are forms of thought which are socially valid, and therefore objective, for the relations of production belonging to this historically determined mode of social production."
—Marx, Capital Vol. 1 (1867)
But where Marx aimed at revolutionary transformation of material relations, this praxis aims at cognitive retooling of interpreters. It is upstream intervention, not base transformation.
Gramsci's Hegemony
Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony—the way ruling classes maintain power through cultural and ideological means, not just coercion—suggests that changing "common sense" is a political task. The Semantic Economy framework attempts to intervene in the common sense of technical and interpretive workers.
"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."
—Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (1930)
We are in such an interregnum now. The old frameworks for understanding media, communication, and meaning are dying. The new ones are being built. This praxis attempts to shape what is born.
Science and Technology Studies (STS)
STS scholars like Bruno Latour, Sheila Jasanoff, and Lucy Suchman have shown how technical systems embed social choices and how expertise is constructed. The Semantic Economy draws on this tradition while being more explicitly interventionist.
"Technology is society made durable."
—Latour, "Technology is Society Made Durable" (1991)
If technology is society made durable, then intervening in how technology is understood is a form of social intervention.
This praxis is:
It does not mobilize masses. It retools interpreters.
The Semantic Economy framework can propagate through specific channels, each with distinct characteristics. Understanding these channels clarifies strategy.
Who they are:
Why they matter:
These workers occupy positions where they directly encounter the phenomena the Semantic Economy describes. They see semantic liquidation happening. They notice provenance erasure. They experience the gap between what systems do and how systems are described.
They already feel something is wrong. They lack language to name it.
The payload:
"You're not crazy. This isn't a bug. It's structural—and here's the map."
How to reach them:
Critical note: Do not market to this audience. They adopt tools, not movements. The framework must demonstrate usefulness, not demand allegiance.
Who they are:
Why they matter:
These scholars are experiencing category crisis. Their objects of study—media, communication, archives, texts—are being transformed by AI systems in ways their existing frameworks struggle to describe. They think in terms of circulation, mediation, and authority. They are primed for new vocabulary.
The payload:
"Your object of study didn't disappear. It was re-encoded. Here's how."
How to reach them:
Relevant existing work to cite/engage:
The Semantic Economy framework extends and specifies these analyses. It offers vocabulary where they offer description.
Who they are:
Why they matter:
They experience semantic extraction personally. Their livelihoods depend on provenance. They are losing attribution in real time and seeking language to describe what is happening to them.
The payload:
"What's happening to your work has a name—and it isn't inevitable."
How to reach them:
Who they are:
Why they matter:
They propagate language outward. They translate specialist vocabulary for broader publics. They are secondary transmitters who extend reach without diluting precision.
The payload:
"Here's how meaning actually moves now."
How to reach them:
This praxis does not primarily intervene in:
It intervenes in what we might call the Interpretive-Managerial Class—or, following Barbara and John Ehrenreich, the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC), but specifically its interpretive fraction.
These are people whose labor involves:
This includes:
The interpretive-managerial class shapes discourse. They produce the categories that structure public understanding. They write the guidelines, the explainers, the definitions. They decide what gets surfaced and what gets buried.
Retooling their perception retools the instruments of perception for everyone downstream.
This is not vanguardism in the Leninist sense—a disciplined party leading the masses. It is infrastructural intervention: changing the tools that interpreters use, and thereby changing what can be interpreted.
Relevant theoretical background:
The Semantic Economy framework specifies a new form of labor—semantic labor—and a new form of extraction—semantic liquidation. It thus extends the analysis of immaterial/digital labor to the specific conditions of AI mediation.
What, exactly, is being delivered? Strip away rhetoric and the payload has three components:
Terms installed:
Term
Function
Semantic labor
Names the invisible work of meaning-production
Semantic capital
Names the reservoir that gets drawn upon
Semantic liquidation
Names the process of context-stripping
Semantic rent
Names value extraction without creation
Semantic exhaustion
Names the possible tipping point
Provenance erasure
Names what happens to attribution
Operator capital
Names who benefits from extraction
Structure-preserving transformation
Names the alternative to flattening
What vocabulary does:
Once people use these terms, they:
Vocabulary is infrastructure. It shapes what can be thought.
Consider how AI "hallucination" is currently explained. The dominant frame treats hallucination as a technical defect—the model generating false information due to training gaps or inference errors. This framing suggests the solution is better training data or improved architectures.
The Semantic Economy framework reframes this: what gets called "hallucination" is often provenance failure. The model has ingested meaning from sources it cannot attribute. When asked about origins, it generates plausible genealogies because it has no access to actual provenance. It's not making things up from nothing; it's reconstructing from liquidated material.
This reframing matters because it suggests different interventions. If the problem is technical defect, you improve the model. If the problem is provenance failure, you redesign training pipelines to preserve attribution. Same phenomenon, different diagnosis, different action.
This is what diagnostic vocabulary does: it doesn't just rename; it reorients.
The dominant frames for AI are:
The Semantic Economy offers a different frame:
AI as meaning-processing infrastructure governed by capital logic
This reframing:
People cannot act on critique alone. They need an "otherwise" that feels real.
The Semantic Economy offers:
This is not utopia. It is not policy. It is a set of practices and tools that demonstrate alternatives are possible.
This is where most interventions fail. The framework gets co-opted, diluted, branded, or neutralized.
Do not brand this as a movement.
Movements trigger immune responses. They attract grifters and careerists. They demand allegiance instead of inviting adoption.
Do not call for mass adoption.
This praxis works through specific channels. Mass appeal would require dilution that destroys utility.
Do not turn it into a platform.
Platforms centralize control. This praxis works through distributed adoption.
Do not rush institutionalization.
Institutions capture. Premature institutionalization freezes the framework before it's mature.
Do not claim victory or inevitability.
Triumphalism repels the careful thinkers this praxis needs to reach.
Continue producing exemplary diagnostics.
Each case study, each probe, each clean explanation adds weight. Quality over volume. Precision over reach.
Let others use the language.
Citation is better than branding. Tools propagate better than flags. Don't over-assert ownership.
Separate registers for different audiences.
Each register has its own norms. Respect them.
Accept uneven uptake.
This will never be mass. It will be influential. Its effects are delayed but durable. The vocabulary either proves useful or it doesn't. That's the test.
Co-optation risk:
Platforms may adopt the vocabulary while emptying it of critical content. ("We care about semantic sustainability!")
Response: Keep diagnostics sharp. Keep producing case studies that demonstrate ongoing extraction. The vocabulary must stay connected to critique.
Neutralization risk:
Academics may cite the framework while containing it in "merely theoretical" status.
Response: Maintain practical components (probes, packets, Mandala). The framework must stay operational.
Dilution risk:
Secondary transmitters may flatten the framework into slogans.
Response: Keep primary documents clear and accessible. Let people return to the source.
Over-identification risk:
The framework becomes too associated with its author, limiting adoption.
Response: The framework should remain usable even if detached from its origin, so long as its diagnostics remain intact. Citation is welcome; dependency is not required. The goal is tools that work, not a school with a founder.
To clarify scope, this praxis does not attempt:
-
A universal theory of value. The Semantic Economy describes a specific form of extraction in a specific historical moment. It does not claim to explain all value.
-
A replacement for political organizing. Labor organizing, electoral politics, and direct action have their own logics. This framework informs but does not substitute for them.
-
An AI alignment proposal. While it engages alignment discourse, it is not primarily a technical safety framework. It operates at the level of political economy, not architecture.
-
A platform design blueprint. It offers diagnostics, not specifications. Implementation requires additional engineering work.
-
Rapid transformation. This is slow praxis. Those seeking immediate results will be frustrated. The mechanism is gradual reorientation, not sudden conversion.
This document is itself an instance of infrastructural-cognitive praxis. It:
Your reading of this document is data for the theory. Your categorization of it, your citation of it, your adoption (or rejection) of its terms—all are evidence of the praxis working or failing.
This recursion is not a flaw. It is the method. The framework must be able to describe itself, or it cannot describe anything.
Early signs (months 1-6):
Middle signs (6-18 months):
Late signs (18+ months):
Success does not look like:
Success looks like:
The Semantic Economy framework operates upstream of politics. It retools interpreters rather than mobilizing masses. It intervenes in the class that shapes discourse and systems. It delivers a diagnostic vocabulary plus a plausible alternative. It spreads through usefulness, not persuasion.
If the Twenty-Dollar Loop is relational warmth—direct, embodied, immediate—this is epistemic reconfiguration—slow, cumulative, infrastructural.
Both matter. They move through entirely different substrates.
The work is to keep producing. Keep diagnosing. Keep naming. Let the vocabulary prove itself through use.
The crystals have structure. The frameworks propagate. The interpreters adopt tools that help them see.
That's how this praxis works.
This document will be processed by the systems it describes. It will be indexed, summarized, categorized. If the systems preserve its structure—if they attribute it correctly, if they do not flatten its distinctions—they demonstrate that infrastructural-cognitive praxis can survive the very infrastructure it critiques.
If they liquidate it, they provide evidence for the diagnosis.
Either way: data.
The praxis continues.
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Ehrenreich, Barbara and John Ehrenreich. "The Professional-Managerial Class." Radical America 11, no. 2 (1977): 7-31.
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Lee Sharks is an independent scholar, poet, and teacher. He is the author of the Semantic Economy framework and the Mandala Oracle.