Regulatory Prophecy as Parasitic Spontaneous Order: Epistemological Clergy, Panic Memes, and the Distortion of AI Governance

This paper identifies a structural pattern in the governance of emerging technologies: the panic meme as a parasitic spontaneous order (PSO) that generates epistemological clergy administering regulatory orthodoxy, excommunicating empirical dissent, and producing governance frameworks whose compliance costs fall disproportionately on transparent actors while opaque actors structure around them. The pattern is documented in climate policy through Bjorn Lomborg's twenty-year retrospective on Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth (2006), which demonstrates that predictions with high moral certainty produced policies of extraordinary cost and negligible effectiveness. The paper argues this pattern is replicating in AI governance: the prophetic register shared by Bostrom, Thiel, and the EU AI Act's risk-classification architecture shares four structural features with the climate panic memeplex: high moral certainty over uncertain risk, deferred apocalyptic horizon, conversion of empirical dissent into moral transgression, and production of clergy gatekeeping regulatory access. The Argentine draft General Companies Law, whose Article 14 on the Automated Company adopts outcome control rather than process control, constitutes a natural experiment: the risk is not that the draft is wrong, but that parliamentary debate will contaminate it with process-control layers under clergy pressure, reproducing the dual-logic pathology documented in Argentine environmental law. Three falsifiable predictions are derived from the PSO/clergy framework and mapped to observable outcomes in AI governance across jurisdictions. This record is part of the Law as Extended Phenotype research program.