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.
This article examines the rise of digital fascism in China amid the youth crisis, economic instability, and tensions between the state and capital within global infrastructural capitalism. Digital fascism is understood as a decentralised, digital form of fascist ideology that appropriates nationalist and pseudo-leftist sentiments and discourses to undermine social movements. We argue that this ideology’s rise is deeply rooted in the collapse of socialist revolutionary ideals and the collective political identity in post-Maoist China. In the absence of a political horizon, some young people are drawn to a distorted form of nationalism, which is a prerequisite for digital fascism. We assert that digital fascism is not a relic of the past but an ideological effect, manifesting as affects, aesthetics, and sentiments embodied in social media and nationalist discourse. By merging resentment, symbolic purity, and moral judgment, digital fascism creates a reactive political subjectivity that engages in symbolic violence rather than strategic political action.
This paper problematises the distinction between the spheres of media-technology and political economy. It reconstructs the value forms in Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism (commodity, money, and capital) as medial forms with inherent laws that lead to abstract domination. Their thing-like appearance, and thus their fetish character, arises because the mediation by which they are constituted remains opaque to social agents. It is shown that a similar opacity is the source of the fetishisation of media-technological quasi-objects like “AI”. Another parallel with digital systems is present in the movement of capital, where value is transformed into an “automatic subject”. Capital processes like a cybernetic system, and this structural homology explains its potent synergy with networked computers: In digital capitalism, the inherent laws of the value forms quite literally program the algorithms. Thus, the reconstruction of Marx as a critic of socio-economic mediation also enables a fundamental critique of digital mediation. Acknowledgement: This article was first published in German as: Degen, Patrique. 2025. Mind Control ohne Controller. Eine medientheoretische Interpretation von Fetisch und Kapital bei Karl Marx’ Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft 17 (1) ‚Mind Control‘: 45-57. https://doi.org/10.25969/MEDIAREP/23744. Translated into English with the journal’s permission.
This article reviews the book Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care, and the Commons by Samuel Moore.
This article rereads Walter Benjamin’s Der Autor als Produzent (1934) as a theoretical resource for analysing journalistic labour under platform capitalism. It recovers Benjamin’s key categories – Umfunktionierung (functional transformation), Belieferung des Apparates (feeding the apparatus), the dialectic of Tendenz and Technik – and mediates them with theories of platformisation (Nieborg and Poell 2018; Poell, Nieborg and Duffy 2022), digital labour (Fuchs 2014), and platform capitalism (Srnicek 2017). The article argues, first, that platformisation constitutes a qualitative intensification of Belieferung: under algorithmic governance, the journalist feeds the apparatus through content, data generation, metric-driven self-regulation, and symbolic credibility. Second, while the platform’s structural power severely challenges Umfunktionierung, three contradictions internal to platform capitalism constitute terrain on which transformative practice remains possible, provided Umfunktionierung is reconceived as collective institutional design.
