Fifty-One Maps, No Territory
A diagnostic analysis of definitional divergence in the agentic economy (2021–2026).
Abstract
The term "agentic economy" appears in at least fifty-one distinct published definitions between January 2021 and March 2026, issued by academic researchers, venture capital firms, central banks, protocol projects, payment networks, standards bodies, and consultancy houses. This paper advances a diagnostic reading of that proliferation: when a concept is supported by functioning infrastructure, its definitions converge; when definitions multiply without convergence, the concept is a vocabulary in search of a referent.
We catalogue the full corpus, classify it into five categories and two fault lines, and situate it within the sociology of emerging technology vocabularies. Using three historical analogs — electronic commerce (1995–2000), cloud computing (2006–2011), and the sharing economy (2010–2015) — we show that definitional stabilization tracks infrastructure maturity, not research activity. We then propose four empirical tests whose resolution will force convergence. As of March 2026, all four tests remain unpassed. We conclude that the agentic economy is better understood as a pre-infrastructural phase — a phase whose vocabulary will be selected by the infrastructure that eventually gets built, not by the research that precedes it.
Video Summary & Audio Companion
51 Definitions, 5 Axes of Disagreement
Key Findings
- 51 public definitions of "agentic economy" (2021–2026); zero pairwise convergence on all five analytic axes.
- The disagreement is structural, not noise: different actors are mapping different phenomena and labelling them identically.
- Five axes of divergence: agent type, economic role, settlement assumption, identity model, and time horizon.
- Definitional incoherence is a load-bearing problem — policy, infrastructure, and investment are being made against incommensurable maps.
Cite this paper
@misc{dechamps2026maps,
author = {Dechamps Otamendi, Ren\'{e}},
title = {Fifty-One Maps, No Territory: A Diagnostic Analysis of Definitional Divergence in the Agentic Economy (2021--2026)},
year = {2026},
month = apr,
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.19679860},
url = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19679860},
note = {Preprint, Zenodo}
}
