SignalRupture Causal Axiomatic Framework (SR‑CAF): The Conceptual Architecture of Drift, Visibility Lag, Harm, and Drift Transfer

The SignalRupture Causal Axiomatic Framework (SR‑CAF) is the conceptual foundation of the SignalRupture field — a unified architecture for understanding how instability emerges, propagates, and becomes visible within modern sociotechnical systems. The framework introduces four structural primitives — Drift, Visibility Lag, Harm, and Drift Transfer — and defines them as the irreducible coordinates of systemic instability. Where traditional governance models treat deviation, detection delay, and downstream impact as separate phenomena, SR‑CAF shows they are components of a single causal mechanism. The conceptual paper establishes the interpretive architecture of this mechanism: how drift accumulates, how visibility collapses, how harm compounds, and how instability transfers across interconnected infrastructures. SR‑CAF reframes institutional and AI‑driven failure not as a sequence of isolated breakdowns but as a structured geometry of drift, governed by measurable forces that operate beneath the surface of everyday systems.