Semantics Now and Then; And Why it Matters

August 5, 2026

Picture a general store at the edge of a farming town around the year 1900. A man comes in whose family has traded there for twenty years. The merchant knows his farm and his season and knows the boy needs boots. Last winter he carried this family on their personal book. Not a credit score, a book, with the name written in his own hand, the debt extended because the man's father paid his and the son will pay his. In the spring he ordered a bolt of fabric because the man's wife paused at it once and admired it and he noticed. If the goods fail they are made right, partly from honor and partly because the two men will see each other socially. Behind the counter works the merchant's nephew, learning the stock and the book and the judgment, learning in fact a trade he will one day carry to a town of his own. Everyone in that scene is becoming somebody; keep that in view, because it will matter at the end.

It is easy to read a scene like this as nostalgia; it is not. I have no wish to live in 1900, and before this is done I will argue the modern world won victories the old one could not. But something specific was happening in that store that no longer happens in quite that way, and it is worth naming precisely. We have lost the words for it, and the losing of the words is itself the story.

What moved

Look at the scene again and you can watch five things change hands, five quiet transfers that took a century to complete.

Memory moved first. What was known about the man lived in the merchant's head and on the customer's side of the exchange, kept by a person he could name. Today what is known about you lives on a server you will never see, in a form you cannot read, owned by a party whose name you do not know.

Accountability moved with it. In the store the name over the door was the guarantee, and the man who sold it was the man who answered. Now responsibility dissolves into a ticket queue and a chatbot and a refund window that is engineered.

Knowledge changed its source. The merchant came to know the man's wants through conversation over years, sometimes wants the man himself had not yet spoken. Now your wants are inferred from endless clickbaiting, in the strangest turn of all, sold back to you under the name personalization, as if being clickbaited at all were a service.

Trust was bilateral and earned, slow to build and revocable by either side. It became recognizable, which is unilateral and computed, fast and answerable to no one you can reach. With it went the oldest refuge of all. Anonymity has died more thoroughly in our century than in any before it. In 1900 a person could leave town and be unknown. Today there is no escape. We are the most recorded people who have ever lived, known by everyone and understood by almost no one.

Finally the surplus changed hands. Every exchange generates knowledge about the people in it, their needs and their judgment. In the store that knowledge made the customer more capable. Now it makes the platform more capable. The value of knowing you flows to whoever is not you. The insidious part is none of these transfers was announced, and all of them looked free. That was the point.

The words we used to have

For most of the history of trade, commerce borrowed its language from trust, and the borrowing dignified it. Credit is credere, to believe. A merchant's balance sheet rested on his good name, and the motto of the London Stock Exchange was a sentence about answerability: my word is my bond. A company was those who broke bread together. Industry was diligence, a quality of a person, before it was a sector of the economy. Enterprise was boldness of spirit before it was a firm. An office, officium, was a duty before it was a room. Husbandry was the careful tending of what had been entrusted to you. Trade came from a word for a path, a track walked habitually between people over time, and dealing was not a transaction but the ongoing conduct between parties who expected to meet again. To keep accounts, to reckon, to give an account of yourself, to be a steward: these were terms of answerability before they were financial ones. Nobody in a trading town necessarily needed the merchant to be a good man. They needed to know whether they could count on him, and the language existed to tell them. Even the structure of work was a vocabulary of formation. The guilds organized a life as apprentice, then journeyman, then master, with quality enforced by the craft itself. A person became somebody by stages, and the work spoke for itself.

For five hundred years the language of trust flowed into business. About a century ago the direction of borrowing reversed, and it reversed in three waves, each reaching deeper than the one before.

The first wave, in the 1910s and twenties, renamed the person. Modern advertising and public relations were born together, Claude Hopkins writing in Scientific Advertising and Edward Bernays writing a book frankly titled Propaganda before rebranding the field as public relations. People stopped being customers and citizens in commercial speech and became consumers, defined from the seller's side of the counter by the act of using up what someone sells.

The second wave ran from the postwar years through the 1990s and renamed the organization. The marketing concept of the fifties told companies to organize themselves entirely around the customer, which sounded like humility and was in fact just a pitch. Personnel became human resources, people restated as inventory by their own department without irony. In 1981 came shareholder value, and the company was restated in the grammar of its investors. In the nineties IBM made everything a solution while “use case” walked out of software engineering.  “Use case” describes how an actor interacts with a system, into the boardroom, where businesses now use the vendor's grammar to describe their own purposes.

The third wave, the last fifteen years, renamed the self. Content flattens a novel and a photograph of your child into a container . Engagement is a platform's word for your attention, now used by people about their own relationships. We count followers now, and people speak of a personal brand, which is a person describing themselves in the grammar of packaging. Products, then organizations, and then persons. The seller's nouns migrated inward for a hundred years, each wave renaming a deeper layer of life.

What the modern world won

Honesty requires this section, and I want to write it without reluctance. The modern era feeds more people, cures more disease, and grants more years than any arrangement before it. It also achieved one genuinely noble thing the old world never could: it learned to trust strangers. The merchant's trusted book worked for families he knew, and it excluded everyone else, the newcomer and the foreigner and the man with no father to vouch for him. The credit score, for all its coldness, lends to the stranger. That is a moral advance. Nor was the old world's warmth free of cruelty. Its trust was parochial, and its intimacy could be a wall and sometimes a cage. Any account that skips these things is sentimentality, not analysis.

The ruler

But notice what we chose to measure. The great economic metrics of our time were born in the very decades of the change. National accounts arrived in the 1930s, GNP was perfected for planning a war, and GDP was standardized in 1953. They count one thing, the volume of priced exchanges. Aim that ruler backward and the old world nearly vanishes. The merchant's advice, given inside the relationship, records zero. The coat mended at home records zero, though the coat bought cheap and bought again when it fails counts twice. The winter carried on a good name records zero, and so does the apprentice becoming a master. Care given inside a family, formation inside a craft, trust accumulated inside a trade: none of it transacts, so none of it exists.

Simon Kuznets, who built the national accounts, warned that the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income. We built the ruler anyway and then managed everything toward what it could see. What gets measured gets managed, and the seller held the ruler.

Where the value went

Underneath all of it runs the one change that explains the rest. Every exchange between people generates knowledge about them, and for most of history that knowledge surplus settled on the person's side of the counter. It was mortal and fragile, kept in one man's head, but it worked for you. The first era's knowledge of you was real but mortal, and it died with the merchant. The second era is immortal but alienated. It lives forever, belongs to an organization, and works on you rather than for you. The third era, the one only now becoming possible, can be immortal and yours. It rests on three new facts. First, the economics of memory have inverted, and a life's records, every message and document and photograph, now fit on hardware a person can own outright. Second, machines have learned language well enough to do the merchant's work, the sorting and remembering and resolving of what a thing means to you, so the daybook can be kept at scale with or without a merchant behind every counter. Third, the incumbents cannot follow, because custody is their business model. A platform cannot sell you a meaning layer you own, because your meaning, held on its side, is the asset it monetizes. The reversal requires no one's permission and no one's collapse. It requires only that the better path exists and be walkable. The flow reverses.

A unit worth restoring

This is more than sentiment and it should be measurable, and the honest starting point is that economists have known for a generation that transactions are the wrong unit. Amartya Sen won the Nobel in 1998 for saying so. The measure of a life is not what passes through its accounts but what a person is actually able to be and do. Capabilities, not transactions. The Human Development Index was the crude first attempt to put his idea into numbers, and crude as it is, it already tells the two-sided story. By capabilities the modern era wins decisively on health and material freedom, and it loses on a dimension nobody counts: the degree to which the informational byproduct of your own life accrues to you.

That missing dimension needs a name. Call it knowledge equity, the share of your own life's meaning that you hold and can use and can compound. Five questions score it. Do you possess it, can you reach it, can you move it, can you exclude others from it, and does its dividend pay you?

Run the test on modern life and the score is near zero. Europe is proofing it as policy. The law now lets anyone download their data from the platforms, and almost no one does anything with the file, because a zip file is not something a person can use. Formal ownership and the actual practical effect is zero. Sen's word for the gap is capability: possession without capability is a receipt, not an asset. The last question is where the modern score collapses entirely, because the dividend has never once paid you.

Run the same five questions on a business and the exercise turns practical, but notice first that a business is not the opposite of a person in this argument. An organization is an entity of the same kind. It has a meaning of its own, its way of doing things and its accumulated judgment and its culture, which is only its meaning made visible. It too can hold that meaning or let it scatter. Most companies today have let it scatter. Their context sits in a dozen systems that do not agree, in vendors' formats behind vendors' gates, and their knowledge equity is near zero and it now shows more than ever. The great technology pilots of this decade keep failing at rates no board would tolerate anywhere else, and they fail in proportion to how little of their own context the organization actually holds. The tools arrive asking for the very thing the company no longer possesses. Run the five questions before the next pilot and the answers will predict the outcome better than the demo will.

The older arrangement understood this without needing to say it. The firm and the person co-existed around their meaning and served each other. The merchant's house held the knowledge of the trade, the apprentice absorbed it and carried it onward, and each made the other more capable. What the extraction century broke was never the individual against the organization. It was the relationship between the two. The restoration repairs both parties at once. The person owns their meaning again, the organization owns its own again, and the exchange between them becomes mutual, as it was in the analog era, only conducted now with tools the analog era never had. That is a measurable and durable value, not a mood but a diagnostic. A person can score their life on it, a board can score their company, and an investor can score a market.

What is retuned to us

Every era gets the merchant's memory it builds. Ours built one that belongs to someone else, immortal and comprehensive and pointed at us. Stated in the terms of this essay, what is becoming available is the old semantics in a new form. What came over hundreds of years, a vocabulary of trust that made strangers into counterparts and counterparts into neighbors, was renamed over the last hundred, until the words described consumers and users and resources instead of persons. It is now available again, with a different kind of semantics: meaning that machines can hold and resolve on both sides. The old words do not need to come back. What they carried does, and this time it can be held at scale and benefit our capitalistic society in no other way ever imagined.  That time is upon us, and it can be our future. Whether it will or not is up to us.