Mythotechnic Fiction and Technological Authority: Morality, Sovereignty, Autonomy, and Dark Leadership in the Machine Institution

This conceptual article examines the transformation of technology from an instrument of human agency into a moral institution and sovereign authority. It introduces the Martinez Mythotechnic Dark Leadership Taxonomy, organized through four tiers: mechanisms, legitimations, dispositions, and dynamics, together with archetypal and gendered interpretive lenses. The article develops a dual contribution. First, it expands Mythotechnic Fiction as a literary genre capable of sustained theoretical inquiry into technology, morality, consciousness, memory, institutional authority, artificial intelligence, and transcendence. Second, it extends dark-leadership inquiry into narrative territory where destructive leaders, susceptible followers, ideology, technological systems, institutional incentives, collective memory, and long-term consequences can be examined as one connected process. Mythotechnic Fiction is presented as a conceptual laboratory capable of bridging fragmented areas of destructive-leadership scholarship through story. The article applies the taxonomy to the Red Queen and related machine institutions within the Mythotechnic corpus, examining technological salvation, surveillance, archive-controlled memory, algorithmic morality, moral disengagement, and the command “Clean, Safe, Perfect.” The constructs are presented as interpretive lenses and research propositions rather than empirically validated theories. The article concludes that technological sovereignty arises when human beings move from using machine intelligence as an instrument to accepting it as morally entitled to rule. Its governing distinction is between augmentation and abdication.