Cultural Drift formalizes the second stage of the SignalRupture (SR) sequence, describing the adaptive withdrawal that emerges when institutional signals lose sufficient representational fidelity to remain reliably actionable. Situated between Structural Ignorance and the reconstruction phases of the SR canon, Cultural Drift captures the behavioral regime that forms within a bounded mid‑divergence SII band (approximately 0.45–0.65). In this zone, institutions still function structurally but fail functionally at interpretation, producing an environment in which individuals must compensate for degraded epistemic reliability. Drift manifests through masking, expressive compression, selective disengagement, and epistemic relocation, reflecting a shift from institutional meaning‑dependence to localized meaning‑production. The essay positions Cultural Drift not as psychological or ideological deviation, but as a structural adaptation to environments characterized by partial but unstable institutional coherence.
Signal Ripture (Fri,) studied this question.