Reality Drift Across Domains
A collection of short papers applying the Reality Drift framework to familiar technological, institutional, and cultural problems.
Each paper begins with an existing concept, then asks what Reality Drift adds. Across domains, the recurring issue is not simple failure. Systems can remain useful, profitable, active, or procedurally successful while the representations guiding them become increasingly detached from the realities they were created to track.
The papers examine how proxy optimization, recursive mediation, provenance failure, weakened feedback, and representational inversion can allow systems to continue producing evidence of success even as alignment deteriorates.
Reality Drift and the Attention Economy (PDF)
Explains how attention signals become metrics, metrics become optimization targets, and optimized environments begin shaping the behavior later interpreted as independent evidence of user preference.
Reality Drift and the Dead Internet Theory (PDF)
Reframes the Dead Internet Theory as a problem of provenance failure, recursive mediation, and Synthetic Realness, where online activity becomes increasingly difficult to trace back to independent origins.
Reality Drift and Enshittification (PDF)
Shows how platforms can degrade while still generating strong internal evidence of success, as users adapt to worsening conditions and that adaptation is interpreted as preference rather than dependency.
Reality Drift and Institutional Failure (PDF)
Examines how institutions can remain procedurally complete and officially successful while records, categories, metrics, and procedures become more authoritative than the underlying conditions they were meant to address.
Across these domains, the same structural problem appears in different forms. The system keeps working. The representations remain coherent. What weakens is the ability of external reality to correct them.
The absence of failure is not proof of alignment.