From Cognitive Extraction to Preservation: The Infrastructure of Sustainable Value[De l'extraction cognitive à la préservation : L'infrastructure de la valeur durable]

For decades, capitalism has progressed through successive extraction frontiers: natural resources, human labor, attention, and now cognition itself. Large language models transform organizational reasoning into training data, creating a bidirectional extraction that standardizes thought while monetizing it. This paper proposes a paradigm shift from cognitive extraction to cognitive preservation. Drawing on biological phenotype theory and carbon chemistry principles, we introduce the concept of organizational cognitive phenotypes—the unique ways organizations think, reason, and innovate, shaped by decades of accumulated experience. We demonstrate how cognitive preservation infrastructure, based on atomic Knowledge Capsules that naturally nest like carbon atoms, enables systematic serendipity while maintaining organizational singularity. Facing an unprecedented demographic transition where 10,000 experts retire daily, cognitive preservation represents not merely a technical solution but civilizational infrastructure for sustainable value creation. We present operational validation from 24 months of research collaboration with CentraleSupélec Paris-Saclay, including 228 algorithmic methods and 91,000 lines of production code. This work establishes cognitive sovereignty as the natural extension of data sovereignty in an era where uniformization threatens the organizational diversity that drives innovation.