Why This Exists

The Reality Drift framework began with a recurring observation. Systems can continue functioning even as their connection to the conditions they are meant to represent, measure, or respond to gradually weakens.

Across institutions, media, artificial intelligence, and everyday life, decisions increasingly depend on metrics, models, categories, interfaces, and other representations of reality. These representations are necessary, but they can also become increasingly detached from the conditions they were created to describe.

Reality Drift began as an attempt to describe that widening gap.

The framework examines the processes that produce drift, including abstraction, optimization, compression, proxy substitution, and weakened corrective feedback. Its purpose is to make these patterns easier to recognize across otherwise unrelated systems and domains.

The framework centers on a specific question: how can a system continue functioning while gradually losing contact with reality? The archive documents the concepts, mechanisms, and recurring patterns that emerged from pursuing that question across different domains.