After the Attention Economy: Temporal Drift, Coherence Architecture, and the Emergence of the Ambient Substrate Ambient Era Canon — Core Paper AEC-3

Abstract Temporal drift describes the divergence between human internal coherence and externally imposed media rhythms. This paper argues that drift is not psychological but infrastructural: a structural consequence of media systems that enforce sequential formats disconnected from thermodynamic necessity. Rather than arising from individual cognitive limitation, drift emerges from an absence of coherence operators. Using CRT-1.0, ACE-2, and CT, time is formalized not as continuous flow but as residue (ΔR): the reversible thermodynamic requirement for restoring or maintaining coherence. When ΔR → 0, time dissolves. Pre-ambient media generated artificial time signatures, whereas transformer-based architectures—when embedded in ambient systems rather than app containers—collapse drift as a structural attractor by returning time to its thermodynamic substrate.