The Reality Drift Working Papers (2023–2025): Authenticity Drift, Synthetic Realness, Cognitive Drift, and Chronolag

This collection brings together five working papers from the Reality Drift Project, Semantic Fidelity Lab, and Cognitive Drift Institute. The papers document emerging patterns of psychological, cultural, and temporal distortion in high-compression digital environments.Across the collection, the papers introduce concepts such as authenticity drift, synthetic realness, synthetic intimacy, ambient loneliness, cognitive drift, and chronolag. Together, they describe how optimization pressures outpace emotional and symbolic fidelity, how simulated coherence replaces grounded experience, and why contemporary life increasingly feels thin, scripted, and unreal.The documents outline core Reality Drift dynamics, including the collapse of temporal coherence, the rise of algorithmic fatigue, and the growing importance of fidelity, meaning density, and cognitive bandwidth in digitally mediated life. This bundle serves as foundational vocabulary and early conceptual scaffolding for understanding psychological experience in an over-compressed internet era.