Zombie Infrastructure: When Systems Outlive the Human Subject examines the emergence of socio‑technical systems that continue to operate after the human subject has been displaced from meaningful participation. Drawing on empirical evidence from financial markets, cognitive science, automation research, and machine‑learning infrastructure, the paper demonstrates that modern systems increasingly function at speeds, scales, and levels of complexity that exceed human interpretability. This condition produces a measurable latency asymmetry, machine‑dominated economic activity, cognitive overload, and governance lag. The paper introduces the Ghost Economy as a quantifiable state in which machine‑executed activity surpasses human‑executed activity, and the Eroded Subject as the cognitively depleted human agent required to maintain systems they can no longer meaningfully influence. Through the integration of Model Drift, Infrastructural Overshoot, and Governance Lag, the paper provides a structural explanation for why institutions persist procedurally while losing substantive control. Zombie Infrastructure is presented not as a failure mode but as the predictable outcome of optimization regimes that externalize cognitive, economic, and institutional costs.
Signal Rupture (Wed,) studied this question.