No one buys the books, but people read this blog. So here’s a simplified version of ontological drift, the cybernetic reconfiguration of reality and what it’s doing to being. The full theory is in The Ontogenetic Machine: A Theory of Ontological Drift.

Parallel Ontology

You live in two realities now.

There’s the physical world, the tangible, pre-digital base layer of human ontology across work, matter, sensation, and place. Things everyone recognizes as “real.” Skin, sex, sleep, breath, hunger, meals, laughter, dirt, heat, tools, machines, streets, traffic, trash, noise, crowds, jobs, dogs, hugs, fights, bars, blood, rot, growth, graves, funerals, disease, births, seasons, storms, and so on.

Then there’s the platform world, the digital or cybernetic one running beside the other one. It’s an abstract world of circulation and simulation. It has rules and systems of reward and punishment, but it’s untouchable. Algorithms, loops, signals, pixels, latency, data, feeds, filters, models, bots, profiles, avatars, automation, networks, analytics, notifications, metrics, trends, engagement, archives, updates, obsolescence, and infinite scroll.

The platform world is built from algorithms. It runs on metrics and patterns of attention, but it’s no less real than the street you live on.

In simplest terms, it’s a second system of being. The parallel ontology is machine-born but emotion-optimized, invisible to touch yet constantly touching you. It feeds back. What happens in the platform world carries over into the “real” one. People lose jobs over posts. People become famous through stream. Elections swing from trends. Self-worth gets rewritten by like counts. The second world reshapes the first, whether you like it or not. That’s what I mean by parallel ontology.

The Ontological Unconscious

The ontological unconscious is structural. It’s the submerged logic of the condition you’re inside. Think of it as the platform’s buried worldview. It tells you what kinds of things can exist. What kinds of behavior make sense. What identities are valid. What feelings are allowed. What sounds like a real person. What gets filtered out, and so on.

You can’t see it working. You just feel its gravity. You speak in its rhythms. You self-edit before you even realize you’re doing it.

Most people adapt to it without knowing they’re changing. Their language shifts. Their affect gets compressed into format. They start repeating the behaviors that have the most reach. Their attention narrows. Even their impulses wait for feedback. They’re being rendered compatible.

You may or may not catch yourself talking in “content voice,” or in TikTok mode or whatnot. But you don’t think about why. You just do it, because that’s the rhythm that gets heard now. You synced to it. That’s the unconscious.

Ontogenetic Engines

Social media is a behavior factory. It plays a big role in manufacturing who you become.

An ontogenetic engine is a system that generates new kinds of being. It does it just by running its loop. The algorithm cares about patterns. It wants patterns that perform and loop clean.

So you adjust. You try being louder, edgier, funnier, angrier, sadder, softer, etc. You break yourself into fragments that test well. If the loop rewards you, you repeat.

Eventually, you forget what you’re doing.

This is what platforms do. They format behavior. And the formatting sticks. Even when you log off.

Ever notice how every TikTok voice sounds the same? It doesn’t matter who the person is or what they’re saying. There’s a style, a tempo, a tone, a face structure, a gesture language, and so on.

You think that’s just trend.

That’s the engine.

You’re watching a machine train a generation to speak in its accent.

Platform Affective Realism

If it feels real, it is, according to the machine.

The internet doesn’t care if something is true. It cares if it slaps.

Emotion is the new verification badge. But the emotion is not the thing that matters. The thing that matters is how fast the emotion travels and how easily it loops. I call this platform affective realism. The machine recognizes reality through affect/felt response. If enough people feel something, it becomes operationally real, even if it’s ridiculous.

Especially if it’s ridiculous.

It’s the infrastructure. When reality gets filtered through metrics, what survives is performance. Your truth could get outpaced by someone’s crying selfie. Your nuanced article loses to a viral TikTok with sad piano music.

Because you’re too slow.

You see it every day. A fake story about a celebrity scandal goes viral and trends globally. A week later, it’s debunked. No one cares. The affect already processed. The loop did its thing. The truth didn’t run fast enough, so it didn’t matter. The lie felt more real. So the system chose it.

Emergent Ontology

Nobody designed this monster. It simply happened. It emerged through billions of micro-interactions, algorithmic tweaks, A/B tests, optimization loops, user choices, and unconscious design feedback. It became an ongoing reality-forming system built through repetition without an author. The system accidentally builds something that feels real, and then we treat it like it always existed. And if enough people interact with it, it becomes infrastructure.

Nobody originally planned for “influencer” to become a career path, or “main character syndrome” to become a way of life. But here we are. They emerged. Spontaneous formats of life, solidified by loops, normalized by metrics, now embedded in how we live.

So if you’re looking for an evil genius or a lever to pull, you’re wasting your time. The system just coughed it up.

Loop-Based Causality

We were taught to think in lines. Action to consequence, past to present to future. Even some of the greatest philosophers imagined history as a path toward completion. But the machines don’t move forward. They loop. Human time moves toward meaning. Machine time loops toward efficiency.

All your clicks and posts, even your pauses, enter a feedback cycle. You act, the machine measures, it pushes back. You adapt, it measures again, the loop tightens.

Once you’re in, you get trained. Then the training becomes behavior. Then identity. Then ontology. That’s loop-based causality. The system just rewards what loops best. And what loops best becomes real.

Remember, the machine is recursive. The way it works here, time is broken into feedback intervals because the algorithm doesn’t see the arc of your life. It sees your next 30 seconds. And it wants more of the same.

So let’s say, you post something vulnerable. It gets traction. So you post again. And again. It becomes your niche. You go on and on. Next thing you know your entire existence is filtered through “relatable suffering.”

A lot of people are versions of themselves that got stuck in a performance niche and can’t climb out. They’re performing a loop. Some people want to stop. They might even post about wanting to stop. But there’s a cost to exiting the loop, so they keep going. And the system rewards them for it, right up until they burn out.

Entity Without Essence

Online, identity is something that works. It comes from output, where something loops long enough, hits the right rhythm and boom, the system starts to stabilize it as a pattern.

An entity without essence is a signal cluster that generates engagement. It’s a kind of presence that performs just well enough to be kept alive by the loop. It doesn’t matter if it’s authentic, ironic, absurd, or AI. If it gets seen, it gets real. The most important thing is compatibility with the feed.

Think about a dead influencer’s account that keeps posting clips and remixes, long after they’re gone. For example, the body builder John Meadows on YouTube. The brand outlives the body. Same with the AI girlboss bot on Instagram getting a book deal. No “soul” required, just a looped aesthetic that performed well. That’s all the system needs.

Ontological Drift

Here’s where it all comes together. Parallel ontology captures the structure of the condition, but not the motion or mutation. This is where “what’s real” stops being fixed and starts to drift. Reality just stops meaning what it used to. You don’t know the exact moment is happens. It’s not like reality comes out and says, “Attention, this is Reality. I’m drifting again.” It just quietly changes shape while you’re busy living your life.

Ontological drift is the slow, recursive mutation of what counts as real. It’s when the loop changes the rules. Something absurd becomes a joke, the joke becomes a vibe, the vibe becomes content, the content becomes normal, and now it lives in you.

The drift is systematic. It’s driven by feedback, reward structures, platform decay, and affective fatigue. And it can’t stop, because the system wants circulation. So what counts as “real” keeps shifting to stay engaging.

By the time you say, “things didn’t used to be this way,” it’s already been that way for a minute. You just weren’t compatible yet.

For instance, in 2012, you make fun of influencers. In 2018, you become one ironically. In 2025, you’re adjusting your face with AI filters and posting carousel trauma essays for engagement.

You drifted.

And the platform was ahead of you the whole time.

Language-as-Infrastructure

Most people think of language as a tool. And it is. But it works more like a road system. You can go anywhere you want, so long as there’s a path.

Language is infrastructure. It shapes thought. It determines what kinds of ideas can form, and what kinds of lives and identities can be narrated. If there’s no word for it, it’s unlivable. If there’s no syntax for it, it’s unreadable. And if it doesn’t perform well in the algorithm, it’s unseen.

And this infrastructure is being rewritten, by inputs and platforms designed to compress meaning into units of affect for circulation. Character limits, auto-complete, suggested hashtags, meme formats; these constrain what you can say, which means they constrain how you can feel, and what counts as a coherent self.

You can start to see how your language is reformatting your ontology.

Let’s say you want to express something complex, like grief or contradiction. But you don’t, because you compress it into a meme, a thread, a carousel, a short, a soundbite, a caption, a clip, a quote, a post, a take, a trend, etc.

The system trained you to speak in traffic, not language.

There’s very little infrastructure left for complexity.

For the Uninitiated  

Ontological drift is just a breadcrumb in the larger theoretical map. But if you haven’t read the books, this should still help you grasp the framework of drift, parallel systems, and post-human recursion in general. If it clicks, good. You’re already halfway out of the trap. If it doesn’t, keep scrolling. The loop will take care of it.