"The talk-control we know about is not instant. Supposedly even if you matched up a ninth-rank Keeper against an ordinary dath ilani they would still take two minutes and anybody else watching would notice the conversation being very weird."
"But, look, you're still angling at this from way too much of a Golarion perspective where you control a handful of top people and suddenly you control the society. If anything runs dath ilan, it's the prediction markets that say which observable outcomes we'll get in ten years if we do something a particular way, and the Legislature negotiates which outcomes we're steering toward. The outcomes are a matter of public record. The prediction markets are things that anybody including me could bet on. If they want to actually steer around Civilization they need the prediction markets to be making bad predictions, presumably about the roads not taken because on the roads actually taken you can see the predictions not coming true. And then the bids get revealed after the fact, and people would notice if their own bids were not listed so you can't understate the bids in one direction, so you'd need there to be these huge mysterious opaque bidders coming in and bidding against all the people who did acknowledge their bids, to claim overly pessimistic outcomes on the roads you wanted to steer away from - you see the problem here?"
"Maybe you can take over Civilization in the sense of getting an Achievement Unlocked on how you theoretically control the minds of the Nine Legislators, but that doesn't actually get you anything, so far as I can tell. The Legislators can't say to steer for a weird outcome without everyone noticing. And Civilization has definitely ever thought about somebody trying to take it over via breaking into some computers, shaped raw causal processes, and making the prediction markets too pessimistic about all courses of action other than the way they want Civilization to go."