The Entertainment Economy: When Words, Governments, and Machines Learn to Perform Without Producing

Someone asks what you do. You say: I work in the bike industry. It's fast, clean, socially legible. It ends the conversation in a way that feels satisfying — like a door closing with the right amount of weight. You've named the thing. You've located yourself. Industry. There it is.

Except I've been sitting with that word for a while now, and I think it's doing something we haven't examined carefully enough. I think industry is quietly working against us — not loudly, not with obvious malice, but in that slow, structural way that language does when it calcifies into shorthand before anyone thought to ask whether the shorthand was accurate.

Industry implies extraction. It implies production at scale, standardized inputs and outputs, workers interchangeable within a system larger than any of them. The word comes loaded with factories, with raw material flowing in one end and finished product out the other. When we say the bike industry, we are — whether we intend to or not — borrowing all of that freight. We are describing ourselves as components in a supply chain rather than participants in a community.

Here's what I've noticed on the road: the shops that are thriving don't think of themselves as industry participants. They think of themselves as anchors — community anchors, culture anchors, places where the thing that got someone outside last Saturday morning lives. The shop that fixed a kid's first flat free because the kid was nine and clearly terrified isn't practicing industry logic. They're practicing something older and harder to name.

The word community gets overused too — I know that. But there's a difference between using it as a marketing warm-blanket and using it as an honest description of what you're actually building. The bike shop that knows its customers' names, that remembers who came in after a health scare and needed something low-impact, that hosts a Thursday evening ride not because it drives sales but because the ride matters — that shop is not an industry participant. It is a civic institution.

When we call it an industry, we give the outside world — and frankly ourselves — permission to evaluate it on industry metrics. Market share. Unit volume. Revenue per square foot. And by those metrics, the independent bike dealer is losing, has been losing, and will continue to lose. But those metrics were never designed to measure what a good bike shop actually does. We imported the measuring stick from a framework that doesn't fit the thing being measured, and then we wonder why the numbers look bad.

I'm making an effort — deliberate, ongoing — to stop using the word. Not because language is everything, but because language is not nothing. What we call ourselves shapes what we think we're allowed to be. And I think we've been calling ourselves something smaller than we are for long enough.

II. Government as Theater

While I'm in the business of examining things that consume tremendous energy and produce uncertain outcomes, let me take a turn into something that's been sitting heavier lately: the current spectacle of American governance.

I want to be careful here. This isn't a partisan observation — or at least, I'm not trying to make it one. What I'm describing is structural. It's about the ratio of performance to action, and right now that ratio is badly, visibly out of alignment.

We are living through a period of government as entertainment. Announcements substituting for policy. Press conferences substituting for legislation. The appearance of motion — bold declarations, executive orders, headlines cycling faster than anyone can track — without the dull, grinding, unglamorous work that actual change requires. The spectacle is real. The output is less clear.

For the people running small businesses — and I spend most of my days with those people — this creates a specific kind of exhaustion. They are trying to make decisions in an environment designed to make decisions feel dangerous. Tariff structures announced and reversed. Economic signals pointing in four directions at once. The ground shifting not because anything structural has changed but because someone needed a headline that morning.

A bike shop owner in western Wisconsin told me something last month that I keep coming back to. She said: I've stopped trying to plan around what they say. I only plan around what actually happens. And so far, a lot less is actually happening than the noise suggests.

That's a reasonable adaptation. It's also a significant tax on cognitive bandwidth. Every hour spent parsing whether this week's announcement changes anything is an hour not spent on buying, staffing, service quality, community building. The entertainment economy of governance has a real cost, and that cost lands disproportionately on the people without a policy team to absorb the noise for them.

The parallel to the word industry is uncomfortable but worth naming: in both cases, we've accepted a framework that doesn't serve us and then we exhaust ourselves trying to operate within it. Language that flattens community into supply chain. Governance that substitutes performance for function. Both are taking something real and rendering it into theater.

III. AI, Honestly

I am writing this with AI assistance. I want to be direct about that, because the third thing consuming enormous energy and producing uncertain outcomes is the one I am sitting inside of, which makes it the most uncomfortable to examine.

The honest version of my experience with artificial intelligence over the last eighteen months is this: it's been interesting. It's been genuinely fun, in the way that tinkering with something novel is always fun. I've built tools I use. I've had conversations that surprised me. I've found some genuine efficiency in specific, narrow tasks — drafting structures, working through articulation problems, generating options when I'm stuck.

And I've spent a lot of Tuesday mornings going down rabbit holes that produced nothing I could use by noon.

I made those numbers up. That's part of the point. Nobody actually knows the ratio, including me, and the AI discourse — which is itself enormous, performative, and largely entertainment — doesn't make space for that uncertainty. You are supposed to be either a true believer or a skeptic. Nuance doesn't generate engagement.

What I actually believe, sitting here this morning: AI is a real tool with real capability in specific domains. It is also, right now, primarily being experienced as entertainment — as something novel enough to engage with, productive-seeming enough to feel virtuous about, but not yet disciplined enough in most people's hands to deliver the transformation the discourse promises.

This is not a condemnation. I'm not arguing against the tools. I'm arguing against the performance around the tools — the obligatory breathlessness, the pressure to have a confident take, the conflation of novelty with impact. The same disease that's infected governance has found its way into the technology conversation: the appearance of transformation substituting for transformation itself.

For the bike dealer thinking about AI: start smaller than the conversation suggests. Pick one thing — one specific, repetitive, annoying task — and see whether any available tool actually does it better. Don't start with a vision of transformation. Start with a problem. The tools that survive that kind of honest interrogation are the ones worth keeping. The rest is theater.

IV. The Common Thread

I've been circling something this whole time. Let me land on it.

The word industry, the current moment in American governance, and the discourse around artificial intelligence share a structural problem: they all prioritize the performance of a thing over the thing itself. Industry performs economic seriousness while often obscuring the human texture of what's actually happening in those shops. Governance performs action while the actual governing recedes into noise. AI performs intelligence while the honest accounting of what it produces — and what it doesn't — gets swallowed by the hype cycle.

The antidote is the same in all three cases, and it's the same thing that makes a good bike shop good: specificity, honesty, and a preference for what's real over what looks right.

Stop calling it an industry if it's actually a community. Stop planning around announcements and start planning around what actually happens. Stop performing productivity with new tools and start measuring whether the tools are actually working.

None of this is glamorous. Glamour is, increasingly, the problem. The economy of attention — the entertainment economy — rewards the performance of seriousness over seriousness itself, the appearance of change over change, the declaration over the result.

The shop that fixes the nine-year-old's flat for free isn't performing community. It is community. That distinction is everything. And it's worth protecting, carefully, from every direction that wants to flatten it into something more legible, more scalable, and considerably less true.