What Is Reality Drift?

Reality Drift describes a modern failure mode in which systems continue to function even as they gradually lose alignment with the real-world conditions they were meant to reflect.

Across technology, institutions, media, and everyday life, optimization increasingly replaces judgment, metrics substitute for meaning, and processes continue operating even as their connection to real outcomes weakens. Nothing visibly breaks. Outputs remain coherent and performance indicators may continue to improve. Yet the structures beneath them gradually drift away from the realities they were built to serve.

This shift rarely appears as a dramatic failure. It accumulates through small adjustments that seem reasonable in isolation. Efficiency improvements, new metrics, automated workflows, and algorithmic mediation gradually reshape how systems perceive and respond to reality. What remains is often functional, but increasingly less grounded in the conditions it was meant to reflect.

Reality Drift is an ongoing writing and research project developed by A. Jacobs. The work examines how optimization, mediation, and scale reshape perception, meaning, and the systems that organize modern life.

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• What Is Reality Drift?
  A short introduction to the framework and why it matters.

• Reality Drift Overview & FAQ
  A broader explanation of its structure, mechanisms, and applications.

• Reality Drift Glossary
  Definitions of the framework’s core concepts and terminology.