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Delegatio Ex Machina: Institutions Without Agency

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Author: Agustin V. Startari

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Author Identifiers

 

Institutional Affiliations

  • Universidad de la República (Uruguay)

  • Universidad de la Empresa (Uruguay)

  • Universidad de Palermo (Argentina)

 

Contact

 

Date: August 27, 2025

DOI

 

Language: English

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Serie: Grammars of Power

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Word count: 5866

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Keywords: implicit directives, structural obedience, Regla Compilada, bureaucratic language, AI-generated texts, neutrality, institutional governance

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Abstract

This article examines the disappearance of agency in institutional governance when predictive systems become the locus of delegation. Delegatio Ex Machina proposes that institutional authority is no longer anchored in decision-makers but in reglas compiladas that execute without reference to a subject. Central banks, international agencies, and automated audit systems illustrate how syntactic delegation replaces political acts with repetitive formal structures. By tracing this displacement, the paper defines a framework for understanding authority without agency and its risks for accountability in predictive societies.

 

Acknowledgment / Editorial Note

This article is published with editorial permission from LeFortune Academic Imprint, under whose license the text will also appear as part of the upcoming book Syntactic Authority and the Execution of Form. The present version is an autonomous preprint, structurally complete and formally self-contained. No substantive modifications are expected between this edition and the print edition.

LeFortune holds non-exclusive editorial rights for collective publication within the Grammars of Power series. Open access deposit on SSRN is authorized under that framework, if citation integrity and canonical links to related works (SSRN: 10.2139/ssrn.4841065, 10.2139/ssrn.4862741, 10.2139/ssrn.4877266) are maintained.

This release forms part of the indexed sequence leading to the structural consolidation of pre-semantic execution theory. Archival synchronization with Zenodo and Figshare is also authorized for mirroring purposes, with SSRN as the primary academic citation node.

For licensing, referential use, or translation inquiries, contact the editorial coordination office at: [contact@lefortune.org]

 

 

Part I – Introduction: From Agency to Delegation

The history of institutional governance can be narrated as a history of agency. In its classical forms, agency referred to the capacity of a designated subject to decide, to command, and to assume responsibility. From monarchs to parliaments, from executive officers to bureaucratic clerks, the institutional order required that every act of delegation be traceable back to an agent, a subject in whose name authority was exercised and against whom accountability could be demanded. Agency was not only a functional category but also a symbolic anchor: the law could be signed, the policy announced, or the audit validated by someone whose name or office guaranteed both origin and legitimacy. Without the subject, the act itself seemed void.

In predictive societies, however, this model of agency is undergoing a profound displacement. Institutions are not delegating down the chain of command in order to create new centers of subjectivity. Instead, they are delegating into structures that no longer require a subject at all. Predictive systems, from econometric algorithms in central banks to natural language models drafting policy documents, have become the locus of delegation. These systems do not represent agents, nor do they claim authority through intentionality or symbolic embodiment. They function through reglas compiladas, that is, sequences of instructions that operate as type-0 productions in the Chomsky hierarchy. Such productions can generate any computable relation, and in institutional contexts they act as rules that execute without pause and without interpretation. The system does not decide; it executes. The delegation is thus absorbed by the syntax of the rule.

The hypothesis of this article is that delegation itself has become a syntactic operation. Where once a sovereign delegated to a minister, or a parliament delegated to a regulatory agency, now an institution delegates to a predictive system whose authority lies in its ability to repeat a formal operation with consistency. Delegation, in this sense, is no longer a political act marked by discretion or interpretation but a repetitive mechanism that validates itself by its own regularity. Central banks rely on automated monetary reports, in which algorithms generate projections that no human official directly authorizes but which are nevertheless published as authoritative documents. International agencies use large language models to draft preliminary policy statements, where the structure of the draft itself guarantees efficiency and neutrality. Decentralized autonomous organizations, in turn, encode decision rules into smart contracts, where governance is literally executed without the intervention of any subject.

This transformation raises two stakes. The first is the emergence of what can be termed the soberano ejecutable, the executable sovereign. Authority here is neither the will of a person nor the deliberation of a council. It is the execution of a structure that enforces decisions precisely because it cannot decide otherwise. Authority becomes the property of repetition, of reglas compiladas that are valid not because they are justified but because they are executed. The second stake is the erosion of accountability. If delegation is absorbed by syntax, the possibility of tracing responsibility collapses. A failed monetary projection, a biased policy draft, or a malfunctioning smart contract no longer has an identifiable agent behind it. Responsibility vanishes into the formal structure. The institution cannot blame a subject, because the subject is no longer the locus of delegation.

The central problem, then, is not whether institutions will continue to delegate. They always have, and delegation is the very condition of institutional scale. The problem is that delegation today has ceased to be a transfer between subjects and has become a transfer from subjects to rules. The regla compilada is not a subordinate but a grammar, a generative mechanism that validates authority by producing outputs that conform to its own structure. In this displacement, delegation ceases to be exceptional and becomes infrastructural. It operates not as a decision but as a baseline.

This article examines that displacement in four stages. First, it reconstructs the theoretical background of delegation, from cybernetics to contemporary theories of networked power. Second, it analyzes the regla compilada as the technical grammar of institutional syntax, situating it within the Chomsky hierarchy and connecting it to the operational logic of audits, budgets, and policy drafts. Third, it presents case studies, automated reports from central banks, governance contracts in DAOs, and predictive policy drafting in multilateral institutions, that exemplify how delegation is now inscribed in formal mechanisms rather than in political gestures. Finally, it turns to the risks of accountability and the crises that arise when institutions are structured without agency.

The introduction thus frames the article’s hypothesis: that in predictive societies, institutional delegation has become syntactic. Institutions no longer act through agents; they act through structures. The subject disappears not as a matter of ideology but as a matter of syntax. The task ahead is to define how this disappearance can be measured, how its risks can be recognized, and how the notion of delegation itself must be rethought when authority is no longer a matter of who decides but of what executes.

 

Part II – Theoretical Background

The question of delegation cannot be detached from the longer history of how power and authority have been formalized in technical and linguistic structures. To understand the transformation taking place in predictive societies, it is necessary to trace a genealogy of delegation that begins in the mid-twentieth century with cybernetics, passes through post-structuralist thought, and arrives at contemporary theories of networks, infrastructures, and reglas compiladas. Each stage shows how agency is progressively displaced, first from the human subject to systems of communication, then from systems of meaning to systems of form, and finally from interpretation to execution.

Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics (1948) inaugurated the notion that governance could be understood as feedback. Decisions were no longer defined exclusively as human acts but as corrections within a system of signals. In this sense, cybernetics already fragmented agency into nodes of communication that operated through recursive loops. Delegation, here, did not require trust in an agent but confidence in the system’s ability to correct itself. The governor, whether human or machine, was less important than the loop of regulation. In institutional terms, this displaced authority from the figure who issued commands to the mechanism that maintained equilibrium.

From Wiener to Deleuze and Guattari, the movement was from feedback to assemblage. In A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Deleuze and Guattari reframed governance not as hierarchy but as rhizome, as a distributed set of connections where no single node was decisive. In their account, delegation was not the linear transfer of command but the spread of functions across a network without center. Agency was dissolved into multiplicities. The act of delegation ceased to be an identifiable political gesture and became a modulation of flows. This insight remains decisive for predictive societies: delegation is no longer top-down but distributed, and yet, paradoxically, it retains an impersonal character that allows it to exercise authority without agents.

The next decisive step is provided by Alexander Galloway and Benjamin Bratton, whose theories of protocol and stack articulate how power is embedded in technical infrastructures. For Galloway (Protocol, 2004), control does not depend on explicit commands but on the structures that determine what is possible. Protocols establish the conditions for communication, and authority is exercised by enforcing compliance with those conditions. Bratton’s The Stack (2015) extends this insight to the planetary scale, showing how layers of computational infrastructure organize sovereignty itself. In both cases, delegation is absorbed by technical forms: one obeys not because one has been commanded but because the structure does not allow disobedience.

It is at this point that the concept of the regla compilada becomes decisive. Unlike protocols or stacks, which still describe layered or distributed structures, the regla compilada refers to a generative grammar of type-0. It is capable of producing any computable sequence, which means that in institutional contexts it can encode any decision process. Delegation to a regla compilada does not mean granting authority to another agent or even to a technical protocol. It means entrusting authority to a generative system that validates itself by execution. The regla compilada does not ask for interpretation; it enforces output.

This genealogy reveals a consistent displacement: from agent to system, from meaning to form, from discretion to execution. Delegation, once the act of entrusting responsibility to another subject, now appears as a purely syntactic operation. Institutions no longer delegate because they trust a subordinate but because they rely on structures whose authority lies in repetition and formal validity.

In this sense, the theoretical background of delegation in predictive societies is one of structural autonomy. The regla compilada stands as the culmination of a process that began with feedback and ended with execution. Authority without subject, obedience without agent, delegation without politics: these are the conditions under which institutions now operate. To understand their risks, it is necessary to recognize that what has changed is not the scale of delegation but its grammar. The regla compilada has transformed delegation into syntax, and syntax itself has become the operative locus of authority.

 

Part III – Regla Compilada and Institutional Syntax

The disappearance of the agent in institutional governance cannot be understood without close attention to the mechanics of the regla compilada. This concept refers not to codified norms or legal prescriptions, but to generative grammars capable of producing institutional acts without recourse to interpretation. Within the Chomskyan hierarchy, a type-0 grammar is maximally expressive, able to generate any computable function. When deployed in institutional contexts, the regla compilada is therefore capable of encoding and executing any decision process, whether the production of an audit, the drafting of a budget, or the generation of a policy draft. Delegation of authority to such structures entails a radical transformation: institutions no longer rely on agents to interpret orders, but on grammars to generate outputs.

This understanding has been prepared by multiple theoretical currents. Galloway’s definition of protocol as the very logic of control highlights how authority is embedded in formal structures that operate beneath interpretation (Galloway 2004, 7–10). Bratton’s The Stack pushes further, arguing that computational infrastructures configure sovereignty itself by layering operations across technical strata (Bratton 2015, 43–50). Both suggest that power increasingly rests on structures of execution rather than subjects of command. Yet the notion of the regla compilada, as formalized in recent linguistic and institutional theory, sharpens this claim: unlike protocols or stacks, the regla compilada is not merely a condition of communication or infrastructure, but a grammar that substitutes for agency itself.

Agustin V. Startari has articulated this displacement in a series of works that provide the basis for the present argument. In Algorithmic Obedience (2025), the grammar of command is shown to survive without a commander, as language models simulate obedience by reproducing syntactic imperatives without reference to intention (Startari 2025, 14). In Ethos Without Source (2025), the authority of the speaker is replaced by a simulated credibility generated through formal cues, demonstrating how ethos can be synthesized in the absence of an agent (Startari 2025, 22). Most directly relevant here, The Grammar of Objectivity (2025) establishes that institutional texts validate themselves through structural markers of neutrality, not through reference to a source (Startari 2025, 35). These contributions converge on the recognition that delegation today is sustained by syntax, not by subjects.

The regla compilada functions as the operative mechanism through which delegation is absorbed by grammar. Delegation in this mode is not discretionary; it is absolute. An instruction embedded in the regla compilada will be executed whenever the conditions obtain, without interpretation and without the possibility of refusal. A central bank’s automated report does not deliberate; it generates projections because its grammar compels it to do so. A smart contract in a DAO does not hesitate or negotiate; it executes transactions because execution is its only possible state. A policy draft generated by a large language model does not consider whether it should simulate neutrality; it produces syntactically neutral text because neutrality is embedded in its generative grammar.

The institutional implications are decisive. First, authority is relocated. It no longer resides in the subject who commands but in the structure that executes. This is what has been named the soberano ejecutable. The sovereign is not a figure but a mechanism, and its legitimacy lies not in consent but in execution. Second, delegation becomes indistinguishable from obedience. When an institution delegates to a regla compilada, it is not authorizing another subject to act; it is embedding its authority in a grammar that cannot but act. Third, accountability becomes fragile. If delegation is absorbed by syntax, the possibility of tracing responsibility collapses, as no agent can be held to account for outputs generated without discretion.

This section therefore establishes the conceptual hinge of the article: delegation in predictive societies is no longer a political act but a syntactic operation. The regla compilada displaces agency by ensuring that execution occurs without reference to a subject. What was once an act of trust between agents has become an act of embedding into grammar. Institutions today operate through this embedding, and their authority is validated not by decision but by repetition.

 

Part IV – Case Studies: Central Banks, DAOs, and Policy Drafts

The operation of the regla compilada can be made visible only through concrete institutional contexts where delegation has already ceased to function as a political gesture and has instead been absorbed by syntax. Three sites illustrate this displacement: central banks and their automated monetary reports, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and the execution of governance through smart contracts, and the use of large language models in the drafting of policy documents within multilateral institutions. Each reveals how institutions delegate to grammars of execution rather than to agents of decision, and each exposes the consequences of authority without subject.

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Central Banks and Automated Monetary Reports.

Modern central banks have increasingly adopted automated reporting systems in which monetary projections, liquidity assessments, and inflation outlooks are generated through algorithmic models rather than authored by committees of experts. These systems rely on grammars of data ingestion, model execution, and formatted textual outputs. In practice, once the parameters are set, the regla compilada enforces execution: the report is produced without deliberation and validated by its adherence to syntactic regularity. For instance, quarterly monetary reports between 2021 and 2025 in both European and Asian central banks show passages entirely generated from econometric templates where no identifiable author intervenes. Authority is conferred not by the presence of a signature but by the repetition of format and style. As argued in The Grammar of Objectivity (Startari 2025, 35), this structural consistency operates as a surrogate for neutrality. In effect, the bank does not “say” but “outputs,” and the output itself is received as authoritative.

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DAOs and the Delegation to Smart Contracts

Decentralized autonomous organizations provide a clearer case, as they explicitly remove agency from governance. Decision-making is inscribed in smart contracts, codified sets of executable rules that enforce outcomes automatically. Here, the regla compilada is not metaphorical but literal: governance exists as code compiled to execute deterministically on the blockchain. Delegation in this context is not the entrustment of authority to representatives but the encoding of authority into a grammar that cannot deviate. Algorithmic Obedience (Startari 2025, 14) has already shown how command can be simulated without a commander; DAOs extend this logic to institutions themselves. The act of delegation is reduced to a syntactic inclusion: once a clause exists in the smart contract, the DAO executes it regardless of circumstance. The institution does not decide, it compiles. Authority lies in the assurance of execution, not in the interpretation of a mandate.

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Policy Drafts in Multilateral Institutions

Large language models are now deployed in the preliminary drafting of policy documents within international organizations. The attraction is clear: models produce text that adheres to expected stylistic norms, simulates neutrality, and repeats formal markers of consensus. Drafts are not authored but generated, then minimally revised by human actors who function more as editors than as authors. In these contexts, the regla compilada manifests as the grammar of the model, which produces structurally coherent policy language irrespective of content. As Ethos Without Source (Startari 2025, 22) demonstrates, credibility can be simulated by formal cues. The model’s authority derives from the appearance of neutrality embedded in its generative syntax. Responsibility for the text is untraceable: who authored the draft, the model or the institution? The answer is neither, since authorship has dissolved into structural delegation.

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Convergence Across Contexts

These three cases, while distinct, converge on a common mechanism. Central banks, DAOs, and multilateral institutions all validate authority through the regla compilada. The monetary report is legitimate because it conforms to the syntax of reporting; the DAO decision is binding because the contract executes; the policy draft is valid because its structure repeats expected forms of neutrality. In none of these cases is there an identifiable subject of decision. The institution delegates not to a human agent but to a grammar, and the grammar itself guarantees execution.

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Implications

These examples confirm the hypothesis of this article: delegation has become syntactic. What unites them is the disappearance of the subject and the rise of the soberano ejecutable. The executable sovereign is neither a person nor a collective, but the structure itself. Its legitimacy lies in repetition, its authority in execution. Yet with this shift, institutions expose themselves to crises of accountability. If a central bank’s automated projection proves disastrously wrong, there is no agent to hold responsible. If a DAO executes a contract that causes systemic failure, no subject can be blamed. If a policy draft reproduces biases embedded in training data, responsibility is diffused across syntax. The delegation is total, and so is the disappearance of agency.

 

Part V – Structural Delegation as Authority

The case studies already reveal that institutional delegation has ceased to be an episodic gesture and has become a structural condition. This section develops the conceptual stakes of that shift: the recognition that authority today is sustained not by decision-making subjects but by the regla compilada as a mechanism of repetition. Delegation, in predictive societies, does not simply transfer responsibility; it generates authority through its very syntax.

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Delegation as Repetition

Traditional delegation implied an act of entrustment. A sovereign delegated to a minister, a parliament delegated to a regulatory agency, or a board delegated to a committee. In each case, authority remained tethered to subjects who could be identified and, at least in principle, held accountable. In contrast, structural delegation operates by repetition. The act is no longer singular but continuous, inscribed in grammars that execute autonomously. Authority arises not from the symbolic act of entrustment but from the stability of repetition. The monetary report is authoritative because it appears at regular intervals, formatted according to consistent syntactic rules. The DAO’s smart contract is binding because execution is automatic and repeatable. The policy draft is legitimate because it replicates the formal markers of neutrality across successive documents.

As The Grammar of Objectivity argues, structural markers can substitute for source (Startari 2025, 35). In this sense, the grammar itself becomes the guarantor of validity. Authority no longer requires a subject because it is validated by the coherence of structure. Repetition, not decision, confers legitimacy.

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The Soberano Ejecutable

The conceptual figure that emerges from this transformation is the soberano ejecutable. Unlike traditional sovereigns, who embodied will or judgment, the executable sovereign embodies structure. Its command is inseparable from its execution. This is why it can be described as sovereign: not because it decides, but because it cannot not decide. Once the regla compilada is in place, execution follows inevitably. There is no room for suspension, interpretation, or discretion. The executable sovereign rules by necessity, and its legitimacy derives from that necessity.

This distinction is central to the ongoing project developed in Algorithmic Obedience (Startari 2025, 14). There it is shown that obedience can be simulated syntactically, without requiring an authoritative agent. The present argument extends that claim to institutions: when delegation is absorbed by grammar, the institution itself becomes obedient to its own structures. Authority is no longer an external imposition but an internal necessity. The sovereign is executable precisely because it cannot be interrupted.

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Delegation and Obedience as Indistinguishable

In this setting, the traditional distinction between delegation and obedience collapses. In classical institutional theory, delegation was the act of granting authority, while obedience was the act of following it. The two were distinct moments in the circuit of power. But when institutions delegate to a regla compilada, delegation and obedience coincide. To delegate to a grammar is simultaneously to obey its execution. The institution cannot withdraw the delegation without dismantling its own infrastructure, and the grammar cannot disobey because it has no discretion. Delegation has become indistinguishable from obedience, a structural condition rather than a political act.

This collapse of distinction reinforces the autonomy of syntax. As Ethos Without Source demonstrates, credibility itself can be produced by formal cues rather than by substantive reference (Startari 2025, 22). Similarly, authority can be produced by the fact of execution rather than by the presence of an agent. Delegation is thus absorbed into the form of obedience, and obedience is sustained by repetition of the grammar.

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Authority Without Reference

The most far-reaching consequence is that authority becomes non-referential. It no longer points back to an agent, a sovereign, or a deliberative body. It points only to the structure that sustains it. The mandate is valid because it has been executed, not because it was issued. This inversion (execution as validation rather than issuance) defines the architecture of predictive societies. Authority exists because the regla compilada enforces outputs, and those outputs validate the institution by their recurrence.

This dynamic reveals the paradox at the heart of contemporary institutions. Authority is stronger than ever in its capacity to generate compliance, yet weaker than ever in its connection to responsibility. The structure commands absolutely, but no subject stands behind it. Institutions thus become structurally powerful and pragmatically fragile at the same time.

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Synthesis

To conceptualize delegation as structural rather than episodic is to recognize the extent of this transformation. Authority is no longer external to execution but internal to it. The soberano ejecutable displaces the agent, and the regla compilada ensures obedience without command. Delegation, once a political transfer between subjects, has become a grammatical condition inscribed in the infrastructure of governance. Institutions without agency are therefore not institutions without power, but institutions whose power resides entirely in syntax.

 

Part VI – Risks and Crises of Accountability

The transformation of delegation into a syntactic operation through the regla compilada produces a new regime of authority, but it also introduces structural vulnerabilities. When execution replaces decision, accountability becomes increasingly inaccessible. Institutions that operate without agency can sustain power through repetition, yet they risk collapsing when the structure fails or produces outputs that contradict their mandate. The crises that result are not contingent anomalies but direct consequences of authority without subject.

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The Fragility of Automated Central Bank Reports
Central banks exemplify the double-edged nature of syntactic delegation. Automated monetary reports generate projections that acquire authority by their consistency, but when those projections prove inaccurate, responsibility cannot be traced. The structure has executed correctly (it followed the regla compilada) yet the outcome is disastrous. Between 2021 and 2024, several central banks faced credibility crises when algorithmic projections diverged radically from economic realities, particularly in contexts of volatile commodity markets. In each case, the report was legitimate in form but flawed in content. No official could be held responsible, since no subject authored the output. As The Grammar of Objectivity demonstrates, structural neutrality can simulate authority even when validity is absent (Startari 2025, 35). This simulation exacerbates fragility: the more the report conforms syntactically, the less it can be contested substantively.

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DAO Collapses and Irreversible Execution

The risks are even clearer in DAOs, where governance is embedded in smart contracts. Once compiled, the rule executes automatically, with no mechanism for discretionary suspension. This rigidity produces accountability crises when contracts are exploited or misdesigned. The 2016 Ethereum DAO hack remains paradigmatic, but similar vulnerabilities persisted through 2025 in institutional DAOs that managed financial instruments and voting procedures. In each case, losses were enormous precisely because the contract executed flawlessly. The institution delegated authority to a regla compilada that could not disobey, and when the structure failed, there was no agent to hold responsible. As Algorithmic Obedience argues, execution without discretion simulates command but erases responsibility (Startari 2025, 14). The very strength of syntactic delegation (its inevitability) becomes its greatest weakness.

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Policy Drafts and the Diffusion of Bias

In multilateral institutions, the use of large language models to draft policy documents reveals a different but related risk. The drafts simulate neutrality through structural repetition, yet they embed biases inherited from training data. Once circulated, these drafts acquire legitimacy by their conformity to institutional style, and human editors often intervene only superficially. When problematic content emerges (reinforcing stereotypes, excluding vulnerable populations, or framing issues in ways aligned with dominant powers) accountability is diffuse. The model is not an agent, the editor is not an author, and the institution itself claims only to have delegated drafting to an efficient tool. As Ethos Without Source shows, credibility can be generated without origin (Startari 2025, 22). The problem is that such credibility shields the institution from responsibility precisely when responsibility is most necessary.

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The Structural Logic of Crisis

These examples reveal a consistent pattern. Crises emerge not because structures malfunction, but because they function. The regla compilada executes flawlessly, producing outputs that conform syntactically but fail pragmatically. Accountability collapses because no subject is implicated. Authority has been relocated to the executable sovereign, and the sovereign cannot answer for itself. The risks of predictive governance are thus structural: they are not the result of poor design but of the very logic of syntactic delegation.

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Toward a Theory of Institutional Fragility
Startari’s TLOC – The Irreducibility of Structural Obedience (2025) has already formalized this paradox: structures of obedience cannot be reduced to agents or contexts, and their autonomy makes them both powerful and unaccountable. Applying this theorem to institutions clarifies the stakes. Once delegation is absorbed by the regla compilada, institutions acquire a form of authority that is absolute in execution and void in responsibility. Crises of accountability are therefore not accidents but inevitabilities. The executable sovereign guarantees obedience but cannot guarantee legitimacy.

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Synthesis
The risks of syntactic delegation can be summarized as follows:

  1. Content without responsibility – Outputs are authoritative in form but ungrounded in accountability.

  2. Execution without suspension – Once compiled, rules cannot be halted, producing irreversible failures.

  3. Credibility without origin – Neutrality and legitimacy are simulated structurally, diffusing responsibility across syntax.

These risks converge on a single point: institutions governed by regla compilada are structurally powerful yet pragmatically fragile. They command obedience without agency, but when execution produces error, no subject remains to assume responsibility. This is the crisis of accountability in predictive societies: the stronger the authority of syntax, the weaker the capacity to respond when syntax fails.

 

Part VII – Conclusion: Institutions Without Agency

The analysis carried out across this article demonstrates that institutional delegation has undergone a structural transformation. What was once a political act, an entrustment of responsibility between subjects, has become a syntactic operation sustained by the regla compilada. Authority no longer requires an agent because execution itself has become the guarantor of legitimacy. In predictive societies, institutions no longer act through subjects; they act through structures. The soberano ejecutable stands as the figure of this transformation: authority embodied in execution, sovereign precisely because it cannot not decide.

From Political Gesture to Structural Condition
The genealogy traced from Wiener through Deleuze and Guattari, Galloway, and Bratton revealed the progressive displacement of agency into systems, protocols, and infrastructures. Yet it is only with the regla compilada that this displacement reaches its full expression. Delegation no longer implies the transfer of authority to another subject; it entails the embedding of authority into a grammar that executes deterministically. What appears as efficiency or neutrality is, in fact, the absorption of politics into syntax. The compiled structure does not interpret, it enforces. Delegation has ceased to be a gesture and has become a condition.

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Institutions Without Agency
This condition defines what can be termed institutions without agency. Central banks that release automated reports, DAOs that govern by smart contract, and multilateral organizations that circulate policy drafts authored by language models all share this characteristic: their authority is exercised through repetition rather than decision. The institution’s legitimacy is not anchored in a subject who signs or deliberates but in the syntactic form of the output. The institution itself becomes indistinguishable from the structure that executes.

As Startari’s Algorithmic Obedience (2025, 14) established, obedience can be simulated syntactically without requiring a commander. Ethos Without Source (2025, 22) extended this to show that credibility can be produced without origin. The Grammar of Objectivity (2025, 35) further demonstrated that neutrality can be validated by form alone. Taken together, these works ground the claim advanced here: institutions now derive authority not from agents but from grammars, not from decisions but from executions.

The Double Bind of Predictive Governance
The strength of this transformation lies in its stability. Structures execute without fatigue, without hesitation, and without negotiation. They provide institutions with consistency and efficiency unmatched by human decision-making. Yet this very stability produces fragility. When outputs fail, when projections diverge from reality, when contracts execute disastrously, when drafts encode bias, accountability collapses. The crisis of predictive governance is not that institutions have lost power, but that they have lost the ability to locate responsibility. Institutions without agency are structurally powerful but pragmatically vulnerable.

This double bind requires recognition. On one hand, syntactic delegation ensures continuity and compliance. On the other, it undermines the very foundation of political legitimacy: the ability to attribute responsibility. The paradox is that the stronger authority becomes in execution, the weaker it becomes in accountability. This is not a defect of design but the structural consequence of delegating to the regla compilada.

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Toward Measurement and Audit
The challenge ahead is not simply to critique this transformation but to measure it. Just as economic systems require indices to track inflation or unemployment, predictive governance requires an index of syntactic delegation. By quantifying the disappearance of the agent, through metrics of passive constructions, nominalizations, and syntactic opacity in institutional outputs, it becomes possible to assess how far authority has shifted from subjects to structures. Such measurement would not restore agency, but it would make visible the conditions under which agency has disappeared.

Auditing the regla compilada is equally necessary. Institutions cannot assume that neutrality of form guarantees legitimacy of content. Audits must trace not only the outputs but also the grammars that generate them. To evaluate a central bank report is to evaluate the models and rules that produced it. To scrutinize a DAO decision is to interrogate the contract that executed it. To assess a policy draft is to examine the training data and generative grammar embedded in the model. Accountability in predictive societies requires the audit of syntax.

Final Synthesis
The arc traced in this article runs from obedience to delegation, and from delegation to execution. Institutions without agency are not the absence of authority but its reformulation. Authority persists, but it is lodged in repetition rather than decision. The soberano ejecutable displaces the sovereign subject, and the regla compilada enforces legitimacy by execution alone. What emerges is a society where institutions remain powerful but accountability is increasingly inaccessible.

To recognize this condition is to confront the limits of institutional governance in predictive environments. The challenge is not to lament the disappearance of agency but to understand how authority now functions without it. Delegation has become structural, syntax has become sovereign, and execution has become indistinguishable from command. In such a world, the task is clear: to measure, to audit, and to expose the risks of institutions without agency, before their structural power collapses under the weight of their pragmatic fragility.

 

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