After the Attention Economy: Temporal Drift, Coherence Architecture, and the Emergence of the Ambient Substrate Ambient Era Canon — Core Paper AEC-3
Year: 2026
Type: report
Abstract: Temporal drift describes the divergence between human internal coherence and externally imposed media rhythms. This paper argues that drift is not psychological but infrastructural: a structural consequence of media systems that enforce sequential formats disconnected from thermodynamic necessity. Rather than arising from individual cognitive limitation, drift emerges from an absence of coherence operators. Using CRT-1.0, ACE-2, and CT, time is formalized not as continuous flow but as residue (ΔR): the reversible thermodynamic requirement for restoring or maintaining coherence. When ΔR → 0, time dissolves. Pre-ambient media generated artificial time signatures, whereas transformer-based architectures—when embedded in ambient systems rather than app containers—collapse drift as a structural attractor by returning time to its thermodynamic substrate.
Author: Eissens, Raynor
Language: English
Topic: Digital Media and Philosophy
Subfield: Computer Science Applications
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7130824873
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