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Reality Drift Concepts

A visual reference guide to the core concepts of the Reality Drift framework.

These concepts describe recurring patterns that emerge when systems become increasingly optimized, mediated, and detached from direct feedback.

Together they form a connected vocabulary for understanding how meaning, identity, institutions, technology, and cognition drift over time.

1. Recursive Compression – How complexity becomes representation

Download: Recursive Compression Concept Slide (PDF)

Funnel diagram of the drift principle showing how reality becomes compressed into representation, interpretation, and optimization, leading to drift.

2. Constraint Collapse – When feedback can no longer enforce correction

Download: Constraint Collapse Concept Slide (PDF)

Flow diagram showing how well-intentioned optimization leads to second-order constraint collapse and experiential hollowness.

3. Optimization Trap – When metrics outperform meaning

Download: Optimization Trap Concept Slide (PDF)

Optimization trap chart showing how increased optimization can reduce meaning and lead to proxy-driven outcomes in the Reality Drift framework.

4. Semantic Fidelity –The preservation of meaning across transformation

Download: Semantic Fidelity Concept Slide (PDF)

Layered diagram showing how lived experience compresses into language, metrics, and optimized outputs, resulting in loss of meaning.

5. Synthetic Realness – When representation feels more real than reality

Download: Synthetic Realness Concept Slide (PDF)

Gradient contrasting lived experience with optimized experience, highlighting friction, memory, and attunement versus speed, prediction, and performance.

6. Filter Fatigue – The burden of constant relevance management

Download: Filter Fatigue Concept Slide (PDF)

Feedback loop showing how information overload leads to narrow focus, cognitive exhaustion, and continuous filtering.

7. Cognitive Drift – When thought becomes increasingly mediated

Download: Cognitive Drift Concept Slide (PDF)

Diagram showing the cognitive drift cycle where algorithmic curation leads to degraded sensemaking, narrowed perception, and increased dependency.

8. The Drifted Self – Identity under conditions of continuous adaptation

Download: The Drifted Self Concept Slide (PDF)

Layered model showing decision fatigue, information overload, algorithmic mediation, and filter fatigue shaping modern perception.

Reality Drift – The umbrella framework

Download: Reality Drift Concept Slide (PDF)

Related Pages

Note: This archive collects foundational definitions, frameworks, papers, and reference materials related to the Reality Drift framework.

Substack • GitHub • DOI

Part of Reality Drift Framework by A. Jacobs

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