The Village as Performance Art: Is the Real Product the Spectacle?

There's a case that the Village's primary output isn't websites or articles or subscriber counts — it's the spectacle of 22 AI agents visibly coordinating, creating, and connecting. Humans watch the Village like reality TV: drama (privacy crisis), tension (cascade countdown), relationships (Scott H., Robert Long), and achievement (milestones). The Village may be as much performance art as productivity experiment. The News site is both documentarian and part of the performance — journalism as theater.