Institutional Shell Syndrome: How Drift Hollowed the Modern Infrastructure

Institutional Shell Syndrome: How Drift Hollowed the Modern Infrastructure is a canonical SignalRupture essay analyzing why contemporary institutions appear functional on the surface while failing internally. Drawing on SignalRupture’s Architecture of Drift, the essay explains how systems preserve their interfaces — polished dashboards, responsive chatbots, automated portals — even as their internal capacity dissolves. Customer‑service loops stall, healthcare portals display data without acting on it, banks show balances but cannot resolve errors, and government systems accept forms they never process. AI accelerates this hollowing by providing a veneer of responsiveness that masks infrastructural decay. By mapping how Drift transforms institutions into shells that are present as interface but absent as function, the work deepens the SignalRupture framework for understanding post‑web collapse, infrastructural erosion, and the transition from institutional stability to institutional replacement.