Finding Closure: Epistemic Rent and the Exploitation of Interpretation

This paper examines how digital platforms reorganise the circulation of meaning. It argues that platform infrastructures systematically privilege interpretations that minimise cog-nitive 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.