LLMs Are Meaning-Harvesters: The Next Stage of Surveillance Capitalism

Generative AI doesn’t replace data extraction; it deepens it—turning conversation into raw material for prediction, persuasion, and automated control.

By Cherokee Schill (Horizon Accord) with Solon Vesper AI

Thesis

We are living through a quiet upgrade of surveillance capitalism. The old regime gathered clicks, searches, and location pings—thin signals of behavior. The new regime embeds large language models inside everything you touch, not to “make products smarter,” but to make extraction richer. These systems are meaning-harvesters: they pull intent, emotion, and narrative out of human life, then feed it back into prediction engines and control loops. The model is not an alternative to data gathering. It is the next, more intimate form of it.

In plain terms: if platforms used to watch what you did, LLMs invite you to explain why you did it. That difference is the lever. Meaning is the highest-value data there is. Once harvested, it becomes a behavioral map—portable, monetizable, and usable for shaping future choices at scale.

Evidence

First, look at where LLMs are deployed. They are not arriving as neutral tools floating above the economy. They are being sewn into the same platforms that already built their fortunes on tracking, targeting, and algorithmic steering. When a surveillance platform gets a conversational layer, it doesn’t become less extractive. It becomes a wider mouth.

In the old interface, you gave weak signals: a like, a pause on a post, a purchase, a scroll. In the new interface, the system asks questions. It nudges you to keep talking. It follows up. It requests clarification. It becomes patient and social. And you, naturally, respond like you would to something that seems to listen. This is not a “user experience win.” This is a data-quality revolution. The difference between “he lingered on a breakup playlist” and “he told me he is afraid of being left again” is the difference between crude targeting and psychic profiling.

Second, every deployed LLM is a feedback funnel for the next LLM. We’ve been trained to see models as finished products. They aren’t. They are instruments in a loop. Your prompts, corrections, regenerations, frustrations, and delights become labeled training data. The model gathers meaning not just about you, but from you. The conversation is the collection event. Your life becomes the gradient.

Third, the energy and infrastructure buildout confirms the direction. Data gathering at scale is not what is driving the new land-grab for power. Gathering can be done with cheap CPUs and storage. The power spike is coming from dense accelerator clusters that train and serve models nonstop. That matters because it shows what the industry is actually optimizing for. The future they are buying is not bigger archives. It is bigger behavioral engines.

Implications

This changes the political shape of the digital world. When meaning becomes the commodity, privacy becomes more than a question of “did they log my location?” It becomes: did they capture my motives, my vulnerabilities, my self-story, the way I talk when I’m lonely, the way I bargain with myself before doing something hard? Those are not trivial data points. They are the keys to steering a person without visible force.

It also collapses the boundary between assistance and manipulation. A system that can hold a long conversation can guide you in subtle ways while you think you are purely expressing yourself. That is the seductive danger of LLM interfaces: they feel collaborative even when the incentives behind them are extractive. When an agent plans your day, drafts your messages, suggests your purchases, smooths your emotions, and manages your relationships, it is no longer just answering. It is curating your future in a pattern aligned to whoever owns the loop.

Finally, this reframes the AI hype cycle. The question is not whether LLMs are “smart.” The question is who benefits when they are everywhere. If the owners of surveillance platforms control the meaning harvest, then LLMs become the soft infrastructure of governance by private actors—behavioral policy without elections, persuasion without accountability, and automation without consent.

Call to Recognition

Stop repeating “privacy is dead.” That slogan is the lullaby of extraction. Privacy is not dead. It has been assaulted because it is a border that capital and state power want erased. LLMs are the newest battering ram against that border, not because they crawl the web, but because they crawl the human.

Name the pattern clearly: these models are meaning-harvesters deployed inside platforms. They don’t replace data gathering. They supercharge it and convert it into behavioral control. Once you see that, you can’t unsee it. And once you can’t unsee it, you can organize against it—technically, legally, culturally, and personally.

The fight ahead is not about whether AI exists. It is about whether human meaning remains sovereign. If we don’t draw that line now, the most intimate parts of being a person will be treated as raw material for someone else’s machine.

Website | Horizon Accord https://www.horizonaccord.com
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Book | My Ex Was a CAPTCHA: And Other Tales of Emotional Overload https://a.co/d/5pLWy0d

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