Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to. One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.

This is the pattern. Acquisition. Cost optimization. Quality decline. Warranty narrowing. Brand equity extraction. And eventually, divestiture.

It happened to your backpack. The same playbook is running right now on your power tools, your boots, your sunglasses, and about a dozen other product categories where a company you trusted quietly got absorbed by a corporation you've never heard of.

But the pundits have little incentive to test their theories: They make money and gain influence by selling books. The startup accelerators profit by running large cohorts through a power-law funnel, collecting a few outlier successes

This science has only one axiom: If you do what everyone else does, you get what everyone else gets. The Red Queen hypothesis is the closest thing entrepreneurship has to a foundational law.