Zombie Society: A Structural Theory of Post‑Functional Governance formalizes the concept of Zombie Society as a measurable system‑state in which governance persists despite the decoupling of economic, labor, and human‑capacity metrics from the underlying conditions they are intended to represent. Building on the Zombie Metrics Trilogy—GDP distortion, unemployment distortion, and the Eroded Subject—this paper defines Zombie Society as an emergent configuration of post‑functional governance in which systemic strain is continuously displaced across measurement layers, institutional buffers, and human cognitive capacity.Rather than treating societal deterioration as collapse, crisis, or anomaly, the paper models Zombie Society as a stable but misaligned equilibrium: a system that maintains operational continuity by ensuring that no single metric reflects total system failure. The paper also situates Zombie Society within the broader SignalRupture canon by distinguishing its qualitative system‑state description from the quantitative measurement architecture developed in Zombie Systems: A Unified Field Theory of Necromantic Infrastructure, Metric Drift, and Human Capacity Collapse.
Signal Rupture (2026) studied this question.