Reality Drift — Overview and FAQ
Reality Drift describes a failure mode in which systems continue to function while gradually losing alignment with the reality they are meant to represent, measure, or respond to.
As systems grow more complex, direct contact with real-world conditions is increasingly mediated through metrics, models, categories, dashboards, summaries, and other representations. These tools make reality easier to measure and act on, but they can also become substitutes for the conditions they were designed to represent.
Drift emerges when decisions increasingly respond to these representations while corrective feedback from reality weakens. The system may remain coherent, efficient, and operational even as the gap between its internal representation and real-world conditions grows.
The Reality Drift framework examines this widening gap and the mechanisms that produce it, including optimization pressure, representational compression, proxy substitution, weakened feedback, and recursive reinforcement.
Download: Reality Drift Framework Overview & FAQ (PDF)
