SignalRupture as Structural Grammar

SignalRupture (SR) is formalized as a measurable structural grammar describing how systems behave when friction, scarcity, complexity, and overshoot exceed adaptive capacity. Rather than treating cognitive depletion, institutional drift, burnout, informational fragmentation, and ecological overshoot as isolated failures, SR proposes that these phenomena emerge from recurring structural operators observable across domains. Drawing from empirical literature in behavioral economics, stress physiology, cognitive load theory, institutional analysis, platform dynamics, and climate science, SR identifies recurring structural signatures including scarcity-induced cognitive compression (~13 IQ-point equivalent loss; d ≈ 0.80), chronic stress dysregulation (r ≈ .40–.50), information overload effects (r ≈ −.45), burnout correlations (r ≈ .52–.63), institutional drift values (ODD = 0.586–1.000), and planetary overshoot indicators (36.8 Gt CO₂ emissions; 100B tonnes extraction). This revised formulation introduces falsifiability conditions, operational variable definitions, threshold logic, temporal dynamics, and domain typologies. SR is therefore proposed not as a universal explanatory theory, but as a testable diagnostic grammar for systemic erosion under conditions of sustained overload.