Misalignment: Preface

Much contemporary discourse treats misalignment as a failure: of communication, of understanding, of information, of coordination. The assumed remedy is correction — more data, better models, clearer explanations, stronger incentives. This series begins from the refusal of that assumption. Misalignment is not an accident that befalls meaning from the outside. It is a structural possibility internal to meaning as such.

The central claim of this series is simple but unsettling: locally coherent construals do not, in general, compose. There is no guarantee that meanings which function perfectly well within their own regimes can be jointly sustained, translated, or reconciled without remainder. Misalignment arises not because something has gone wrong, but because nothing has gone wrong in the same way.

Across seven posts, this series explores misalignment from multiple angles. It begins by clearing away familiar misinterpretations (Part I), then examines why composition fails (Part II) and why corrective strategies are systematically misdirected (Part III). It shows that stability can persist without agreement (Part IV) and traces the structural invariance of misalignment across scales (Part V). It confronts breakdown and pathology without appeal to norms (Part VI), and concludes with strategies for living, designing, and acting within persistent non-alignment (Part VII).

This has consequences. It means that disagreement is not the primary phenomenon, that error is not the general explanation, and that appeal to a shared reality does not settle the matter. It also means that stability does not imply alignment, that systems can endure while remaining structurally incoherent, and that breakdown can occur without falsity or failure. What follows is not a theory of how to fix misalignment, but an exploration of what becomes visible once we stop treating alignment as the default condition of meaning.

The series does not offer solutions. It does not prescribe correction or moralise failure. It asks readers to perceive misalignment as a condition to navigate, not a defect to repair, and to act with clarity, prudence, and attention within the inevitable gaps of meaning.