Finding Closure: Epistemic Rent and the Exploitation of Interpretation

Abstract

This paper examines how digital platforms reorganise the circulation of meaning. It argues that platform infrastructures systematically privilege interpretations that minimise cognitive effort and maximise transmissibility, thus transforming epistemic closure into a site of rent extraction and differential value appropriation. By introducing the concepts of interpretive friction and epistemic rent, the paper shows how platforms function as rentier capitalists: they privatise the gains of accelerated meaning-making while socialising the costs of contextualisation, verification, and sustained ambiguity. The paper points out how the resulting closure economy represents a structural deskilling of interpretive labour under platform capitalism.