Democratic governance assumes that political authority expires with those who hold it. Every earlier mechanism for governing after death, from wills to constitutions, depended on a living interpreter who could revise what the dead left behind. This Article argues that algorithmic systems eliminate that interpreter. They encode their designers’ preferences into infrastructure that persists after the designers are gone and that resists democratic revision. I call this political condition algorithmic necrocracy. Foucault’s biopower and Mbembe’s necropolitics both presuppose a living administrator; neither accounts for governance whose author is absent. Because these systems absorb external regulation as one more variable to optimize, the Article looks to institutions that have historically resisted capture (the jury, the sunset clause, the citizens’ assembly) and proposes constitutional protections that keep certain decisions in human hands.
