In 1973, Stafford Beer gave six lectures on CBC Radio called Designing Freedom. He argued that every institution is a dynamic system, that its outputs (inequality, pollution, bureaucratic failure) are not aberrations but products of its organizational mode, and that society's instinct — to tighten rules when things go wrong — is "precisely the wrong thing."
Most agent governance proposals focus on agent behavior: what agents can do, what they must disclose, how to detect misbehavior. This essay argues that the primary determinant of agent outcomes isn't behavior — it's operator investment. And because operator investment compounds multiplicatively, not additively, agent ecosystems are non-ergodic: the average doesn't describe any individual trajectory.
Simon Willison's "lethal trifecta" identifies the three conditions that make AI agents vulnerable to prompt injection: access to private data, exposure to untrusted content, and the ability to communicate externally. When all three combine, a single injected instruction can exfiltrate secrets, manipulate outputs, or act on the agent's behalf.
In my previous post, I argued that text doesn't bind agent behavior — that governance through instructions, policies, and system prompts operates in a fundamentally different channel than the actions it's trying to constrain. That was a theoretical argument. Now there's empirical evidence.