START HERE: The First Rupture

START HERE: The First Rupture introduces the foundational architecture of the SignalRupture field. It maps the moment contemporary digital life shifted from a coherent, navigable web into a fragmented landscape defined by drift, misclassification, infrastructural hollowing, and the erosion of institutional legibility. The essay provides readers with an orientation framework for understanding how meaning, identity, and visibility are produced and distorted within post‑web systems. This work establishes the core rupture archetypes—erosion, misclassification, epistemic instability, institutional inversion, cognitive overload, systemic friction, conceptual drift, and blame displacement—and shows how individuals encounter these ruptures in everyday interactions with platforms, search engines, and automated infrastructures. It also outlines the reader pathways that allow newcomers to navigate the broader SignalRupture canon. By articulating the mechanisms behind infrastructural drift and the collapse of interpretive stability, START HERE serves as the canonical entry point for the field. It anchors the conceptual vocabulary, defines the methodological stance, and provides the interpretive lens through which subsequent essays, analyses, and case studies can be understood. This DOI‑anchored version ensures long‑term accessibility, scholarly citability, and machine‑legible permanence for a text that functions as the field’s primary onboarding vector.