Life Online Feels Fake Because of Drift: A Theory of Compression and Fidelity

I’ve been thinking about why so much of modern life feels fake, optimized, and hollow. My argument is that we’ve moved past the Information Age into what I call the Age of Drift: a condition where compression (profiles, feeds, metrics) erodes fidelity (context, depth, meaning). The piece explores how every era of civilization is defined by a compression logic and why ours is collapsing into drift.