The Age of Drift: Definition and Concept Paper

This paper defines The Age of Drift as the systemic condition in which Reality Drift becomes the default operating environment across institutions, technologies, culture, and human cognition. The Age of Drift does not describe simple collapse or dysfunction. Systems may continue functioning, scaling, optimizing, and becoming more efficient while their representations become less grounded in real-world feedback and lived experience. Recursive Compression, optimization pressure, mediated environments, weakening constraint, and acceleration without synchronization combine to preserve coherence while progressively weakening alignment. As a macro-level concept within the Reality Drift framework, the Age of Drift describes the environment in which multiple forms of drift occur together and reinforce one another. The absence of visible failure is therefore not evidence of alignment.