Research Report
DRI-RP-2024-04
When Anchor Remembers for You
How a useful memory service becomes the infrastructure through which people and institutions encounter the past.
Read moreDrifting Reality Institute
Reality no longer changes for everyone at once.
We study life after shared continuity: how people, families, and cultures adapt when the systems built to preserve reality begin determining it.
What is reality drift?
The gradual divergence of memory, context, and shared history across people and systems.
It is not a single malfunction. It is what happens when personalized records, synthetic histories, and continuity infrastructure stop producing one common past. Its causes remain disputed: correction, grief, ordinary memory, institutional revision, denial, cultural change, and adaptation can all contribute.
Read the frameworkActive questions
Current research agenda · 202601→02→03→04→
Who decides which memory is canonical?
When an individual, a family, and Anchor disagree, which account becomes actionable?
What do we lose when forgetting becomes impossible?
A complete archive can protect history while preventing reinvention, forgiveness, or change.
Can incompatible histories remain valid?
Contradiction is not always a defect. Some relationships survive because no final version is chosen.
When does continuity become coercion?
Systems designed to preserve identity can also bind people to records they no longer recognize.
Featured work
View the archiveEssay
DRI-ES-2026-03
The Right to an Unstable Self
Why identity systems must leave room for contradiction, forgetting, reinvention, and change.
Read moreEssay
DRI-ES-2024-03
When Anchor Contradicts Someone You Love
Identity, relationship, and authority when a continuity record conflicts with a person you trust.
Read moreCase file
The Morel Family Discrepancy
Four members of the Morel family retain incompatible accounts of a childhood event. Family Continuity designated one account authoritative after recorded evidence raised its confidence score above the family threshold. One family member refuses the ruling.
Scenario
DRI-SC-2026-01
The First City to Reject Canonical History
A foresight exercise about a municipality that withdraws cultural records from Civic Verification.
Read moreResponse
DRI-RS-2026-01
Anchor Says Drift Is Harm. We Disagree.
A direct response to the claim that reduced divergence should be the default measure of continuity wellbeing.
Read moreUnresolved within the Institute
Should continuity memory ever be canonical?
During emergencies and periods of coordinated manipulation, a trusted continuity record may prevent harm and protect vulnerable people.
Lina Ortega · Memory and Continuity
The moment a record becomes canonical, disagreement becomes noncompliance.
Mara Voss · Rights and Governance
This question remains unresolved within the Institute.
Institute position
Stability is not neutral.
Continuity is not the same as truth. A person should not be bound by the most complete surviving record of them.
Keep evidence visible.Let contradiction remain.Protect the right to change.Make authority contestable.