The Churn Substrate Model: Identity as Recursive Practice in Platform Infrastructures

This paper introduces the Churn Substrate Model (CSM) to explain how digital platforms keep identity open. In contrast to communication theory's traditional focus on belief and persuasion, the CSM highlights the algorithmic dynamics that make identity work continuous and profitable to platform infrastructures. Rather than settling, identity is repeatedly performed and monetized. The model identifies four interlocking dynamics that together sustain identity as unfinished and show that closure is contingent, not inevitable: recursive temporality, expressive rehearsal, interpretive openness, and structural ambivalence. The central implication is that what earlier theories treated as a temporary stage of exploration or rehearsal has become, under platform capitalism, a recurring condition of selfhood for many users. In engagement-optimized infrastructures, platforms thrive by suspending coherence, transforming the loop itself into the product and the self into its raw material. Infrastructures monetize the psychic strain of keeping identity provisional, compelling continual self-performance as a source of value. The CSM is not universal: it is most visible on engagement-driven platforms and less so where external anchors impose stability, or where infrastructural discontinuities interrupt looping. Shifting attention from discourse to infrastructure, the CSM reframes identity as a recursive and extractive condition; the infrastructural substrate of selfhood under platform capitalism.