SignalRupture: The High‑Order Metatheory

SignalRupture: The High‑Order Metatheory presents a post‑institutional diagnostic framework that identifies infrastructures—digital, administrative, environmental, and semantic—as the primary causal architectures shaping modern societal harm. The essay formalizes SR’s ontological inversion, positioning institutions and individuals as downstream expressions of infrastructural design, and integrates cross‑domain empirical convergence to explain population‑level patterns such as institutional drift, cognitive fragmentation, environmental illness, and platform‑mediated meaning collapse. Through mechanisms including Systemic Erosion Theory, Infrastructural Exposure, Slow Harm, Semantic Governance, and Model‑Indexed Epistemic Collapse, the work establishes SR as the first self‑architecting metatheory built for post‑web, AI‑mediated epistemic conditions. Its comparative analysis situates SR above existing high‑order metatheories by incorporating digital infrastructures, administrative systems, and semantic drift into a unified causal model. This essay contributes to academic research on systemic risk, epistemic uncertainty, infrastructural governance, and cross‑domain harm by offering a coherent, scalable architecture for understanding how contemporary systems produce and distribute societal erosion.