Post-Personal Dark Leadership: Destructive Authority, Responsibility Dissolution, and Command Persistence in Human–Machine Institutions

This conceptual theory article introduces Post-Personal Dark Leadership (PPDL), a framework for explaining how destructive authority can persist after an originating leader is absent, displaced, forgotten, or no longer necessary. PPDL shifts the unit of analysis from an individual leader to the durable human–machine institutional arrangement through which authority is encoded, reproduced, and enforced. The article develops seven constitutive mechanisms: legacy encoding, categorical sovereignty, command memory, tacit command transmission, anticipatory compliance, responsibility dissolution, and restricted ethical reopening. Eight theoretical propositions establish conditions for empirical investigation and distinguish PPDL from ordinary technological malfunction, bureaucracy, structural violence, algorithmic management, and personality-centered accounts of dark leadership. The analysis critically examines Dark Digital Leadership as an adjacent development. Although that framework explains how digital technologies can amplify the traits and conduct of dark human leaders, it does not fully account for leader-absent authority, post-tenure command persistence, distributed harm without unified destructive intention, nondigital institutional carriers, tacit command, or the separation of authoritative capacity from responsibility and meaningful appeal. Situated within the Martinez Mythotechnic Fiction and Mythic Authority research program, the article connects dark-leadership theory with institutional memory, technological authority, artificial intelligence, sociomaterial organization, moral responsibility, and ethical contestability. It proposes that personality traits may help explain the origin of destructive authority, while Post-Personal Dark Leadership explains its institutional afterlife.