Erosion as a Cognitive Condition

Erosion as a Cognitive Condition theorizes cognitive erosion as a structural effect of contemporary infrastructures that demand continuous interpretive, attentional, and emotional labor beyond human processing limits. The essay distinguishes cognitive erosion from burnout by framing it as a chronic, infrastructural condition rather than an episodic psychological response. Through an analysis of architectures of extraction — including platform acceleration, boundary collapse, informational noise, and crisis‑driven environments — the work explains how cognition becomes thin, brittle, and unable to sustain coherence. By positioning cognitive erosion as a systemic mismatch between human bandwidth and the environments that consume it, the essay provides a framework for interpreting disengagement, fragmentation, and low‑capacity states as diagnostic signals of infrastructural overload. This contribution expands the SignalRupture canon by establishing cognitive erosion as a precursor to rupture and a core mechanism of contemporary human depletion.