Generativity Exploitation: A Baseline-Relative Capability Framework

Knowledge, language, practical judgment, and creative organization can be used without being depleted, while the conditions for developing and exercising them remain scarce, controlled, or revocable. A participant can therefore retain a method, a language, or a latent organization in full while losing effective opportunity to initiate, continue, redirect, or expand it. This asymmetry between retention and foreclosure is invisible to appropriation models built on depletion, and it is the phenomenon this paper addresses. The paper proceeds in four registers. It first analyzes why non-rivalry in generative forms coexists with rival, congestible, excludable, and positional scarcity in their realization conditions. It then locates the proposal among production-centered, transactional, degradation-centered, domination-centered, and structural accounts of exploitation, treating them as rival constraints rather than as a consensus. It develops the capability object philosophically through real opportunity, relationally constituted autonomy, epistemic standing, and the externalization of knowledge into technical systems. It describes the political-economic mechanisms through which control of realization conditions operates, including rentiership, platform bottlenecks, and contributed input without corresponding return, and it separates the distinct actor positions that an artificial-intelligence configuration collapses. On this basis the paper proposes a limited diagnostic for relations in which one party's advantage is produced or sustained through a material reconfiguration of another party's effective generative capability. The primary capability object is a reachable viable repertoire over a declared domain, history, horizon, resolution, action set, and arrangement. An enriched profile adds autonomy, direction, attribution, continuity, or exit only when those dimensions are independently defined. The diagnostic then requires an independently admissible comparison arrangement, participant standing, an actor-linked capability-changing relation, a material capability disadvantage, and a typed benefit-through witness. Causal and constitutive witnesses are separated, and the complete result is a three-valued profile that retains admitted, excluded, and unresolved baselines rather than an unqualified binary verdict. One conditional proposition proves repertoire inclusion under policy expansion, preserved transition probabilities, and expanded viability. Countermodels show that latent generativity can remain fixed while capability contracts, that equal output can coexist with reduced autonomy, that coincident loss and gain can lack a benefit-through path, and that classification can vary across admissible baselines. The framework establishes no prevalence, wrongfulness, liability, remedy, or universal metric, and it makes no empirical claim about any named firm, platform, or industry. It leaves propagation, cycles, recovery, accumulation, legal translation, and identification from finite traces to companion work. Its contribution is a revisable dependency structure that exposes where a proposed diagnosis is supported, relatively rejected, baseline-sensitive, or unresolved.