Administrative Necromancy and Systemic Mortality: AI-Mediated Extensions of the Martinez Dark Leadership Framework

Counts differ because each database indexes a different set of publications. We treat OpenAlex as the canonical count; Google Scholar is not shown (no API, and crawling it violates its ToS).

This theoretical paper extends the Martinez Mythotechnic Dark Leadership framework by formalizing five concepts derived from the author’s existing research corpus: Administrative Necromancy, Automated Necro-Authority, Systemic Mortality, Circuit Breakers for Harm, and Zombie Command. The paper distinguishes canonical retrieval, cross-corpus synthesis, and conceptual extension. It argues that organizations preserve authority through culture, policy, classification, software, automated systems, and inherited technical architectures, allowing command to survive the disappearance of its originating human source. Administrative Necromancy describes the institutional preservation of operative authority after its originating decision-maker has departed. Automated Necro-Authority describes the machine-mediated execution of inherited authority without continuing human reauthorization. Zombie Command describes directives that continue to govern after active authorship, contextual validity, or meaningful justification has disappeared. The paper introduces Systemic Mortality as the normative principle that consequential systems should possess mechanisms for expiration, review, revocation, decommissioning, or renewed authorization. Circuit Breakers for Harm describe operational mechanisms capable of interrupting automated authority when evidence indicates unacceptable harm, anomaly, rights violation, or contextual failure. Together, these concepts extend the Martinez Leadership Afterlife model from a theory of authority persistence into a theory of persistence, interruption, and termination. The paper further examines how concepts distributed across an established theoretical corpus can be synthesized, evaluated, and formally incorporated into an expanded framework.