The economist Alice Lassman has a name for a shift that the labour statistics keep describing and never explain: production nihilism, the growing indifference among young people to what work they do and where exactly the money comes from. Financial nihilism already accounted for where that money goes once earned, into prediction markets, meme stocks, cryptocurrencies and small luxuries. Lassman's argument is that the earning side has gone the same way. On Mercor, knowledge workers are paid to train LLMs to do their jobs. Women earn millions on OnlyFans. Young creators build YouTube empires. Some work as escorts with no sexual component. For some this is supplementary; for others it becomes the main source of income.
The machinery that used to hold this together was not moral, it was financial. Mortgages, raising children, the pursuit of status and power sustained a work discipline that kept the production system running. Every part of that has weakened for people now entering the workforce: jobs are unstable, housing is unaffordable, childbearing gets postponed, and only 6% name a leadership position as their main career goal. Hope about the future was one of the economy's load-bearing resources, the thing that made long hours tolerable. Income was imagined as a sequence — hard work becomes a salary, the salary becomes a mortgage, the mortgage becomes a pension. When the sequence stops running, the attitude to work at the front of it changes too.
What replaces it is deliberate plurality. More than half of Americans now regard a portfolio career as more attractive for future workers than the traditional path, and 57% of Gen Z report a side income, more than double the rate among boomers. E-commerce platforms such as Shopify made working across several fields practical at once; a Shopify ad features a young woman building her own craft business at night, telling the camera that "normal people sleep" and treating this as a good thing. The main job in this arrangement becomes a financial anchor. It pays the rent while the side pursuits do the work of identity. The word "writer" looks better on a Hinge profile than "analyst."
The AI industry sits on both sides of this ledger, which is the part of Lassman's argument with the most torque. She has previously written about the slow disappearance of the prestige career: thanks to AI, companies no longer need a large team of entry-level employees to scale. The rung that used to convert a graduate into a professional is being removed by the same technology that now offers those graduates piecework training its replacement.
For the theoretical frame Lassman reaches for Lauren Berlant's "anticipatory present," the state that held people inside the economic system by getting them to accept hardship now against a promised better life later. Young people find it increasingly hard to picture a flourishing future, let alone reach one, and may be among the first generations to say plainly that the future is closed. When the promise stops working, people extract as much value as they can from the present, using whatever assets late capitalism lets them convert into money. This is the other face of the little-treat economy.
The neoliberalism this generation grew up inside offers a simple exit: with enough effort, anything can be made into a commodity. When Western society was first absorbing that idea, French artists were registering alarm about the postwar consumer boom. In Jean-Luc Godard's "Two or Three Things I Know About Her," a Parisian housewife named Juliette turns to prostitution to sustain the lifestyle being sold to her; she decides to sell her time and her own body. The plot anticipates a great deal about gig work under platform capitalism. Juliette turns everything she has into a resource in order to afford to live in the present. The New Wave used women as the objects through which anxiety about unstoppable commercialisation was expressed. Lassman reads Gen Z as rewriting the character: Juliette as a subject building her own relationship with the economy rather than a helpless, bored object of it.
That is an active kind of nihilism. Nietzsche described nihilism of this sort as the shedding of values that have outlived their use, and production nihilism refuses to treat the existing economic system as the final source of meaning, creating new values as it goes. Against this Lassman sets the story Silicon Valley tells itself about who survives the coming changes from AI: people of "high agency," who think independently and act without constant direction. She reads it as the appearance of agency rather than the thing itself, a repetition of Berlant's waiting trap in which people are again handed a recipe for success in an economy where success is realistically unavailable to most of them.
She is right about the recipe and too generous with the category. Flattening Mercor, OnlyFans and the YouTube empires into one phenomenon is the essay's weakest move, because the terms differ enormously. A creator building an audience accumulates an asset that compounds. A knowledge worker on Mercor is being paid once, at a rate set by the buyer, to transfer the tacit expertise that made them employable in the first place — and the transfer is permanent. That is not a portfolio career, it is a liquidation, and calling it one of several equivalent income streams obscures the only case here where the worker is selling the tool rather than the output.
The numbers have the same problem. 57%, 6%, "more than half" all measure participation and preference, not income. None of them says what a side income pays, and the OnlyFans millions are the tail of a distribution, not its shape. Indifference to where money comes from is easier to document than sufficiency, and an argument built on the first can quietly imply the second.
Lassman's closing observation still holds, and it is the sharpest line in the piece: if the origin of money no longer determines what kind of life it leads to, the origin stops carrying meaning. What that leaves is an AI industry buying the expertise of workers whose career ladders it is simultaneously dismantling, at prices it sets, from people with no particular reason to hold out for better.