This week, a fund holding private stakes in some of the most talked-about AI companies in the world listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The underlying assets were worth about $19 per share. Within five trading days, the stock hit $575. A 30x premium. People were paying $575 for $19 worth of something.
When you step back and ask why, the answer isn’t irrational. It’s actually very human. These are companies that retail investors have been locked out of for years. Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX, trillions of dollars of value being created in private markets, none of it accessible to anyone without a minimum cheque size most people will never write. So when a door opened, people ran through it. The premium wasn’t about the maths. It was about the feeling of finally being in the room.
That’s the shortcut economy in a single trade.
Kyla Scanlon calls the underlying condition financial nihilism. The widespread feeling that the normal routes are broken, that showing up, building skills, saving money, buying a house, working your way up, none of it actually leads anywhere in 2026. And when ladders don’t work, people start looking for rockets. Or they pay 30x for a door that might already be closing.
The problem Kyla identifies is that every shortcut product is designed this way on purpose. The desperation it promises to cure is also its market condition. Ozempic doesn’t cure the food environment that made you need it. Prediction markets don’t fix the structural disempowerment that made you want to bet. Crypto gambling apps don’t solve the wage stagnation that made fast money look so appealing. The fix can never fully arrive, because the moment it did, the market for the fix would disappear.
And so the fix gets sold. Over and over.
What nobody stops to ask is whether the AI bubble itself, the one everyone is so desperate to get inside, has already been priced as if the future is settled. As if Anthropic and OpenAI and SpaceX have already won, already delivered, already justified whatever valuation the market wants to put on them. Buying a 30x premium on a fund holding those stakes isn’t investing in the future. It’s paying for a feeling about the future that may or may not arrive on the timeline the price implies.
I want to push back on the nihilism, though. Not on the diagnosis, I think Kyla is right about the conditions. But on the conclusion people tend to draw from it, which is that we’re fundamentally broken. That this time is different. That the systems are too corrupted to produce anything good, so the only rational move is to play the game.
Here’s what I keep coming back to: we have been here before.
Not “here” in the sense of the exact same technologies or the exact same political chaos. But here in the sense of a world that felt like it was fraying at the edges, where old certainties had dissolved and new ones hadn’t yet formed, where the people selling the fastest ticket out were doing the best business. The Industrial Revolution dislocated entire ways of life. The 1920s ended badly. The postwar boom created the 1970s inflation. The internet made half the economy feel obsolete overnight.
And every single time, human creativity figured something out.
Not without pain. Not without people getting hurt along the way. But the thread of ingenuity has never actually snapped. We have a genuinely extraordinary track record of solving problems that looked unsolvable. We tend to forget this when we’re standing in the middle of the mess.
So here’s the question I want to leave you with: what if the most radical thing you can do right now is believe the future is going to be built?
Not gambled into existence. Not hacked together from shortcuts. Not bought at a 30x premium because the FOMO got loud enough. Actually built, by people who understood the problem deeply enough to make something real.
The AI × crypto convergence we cover at Republik Rupiah is full of both impulses. There’s a Tower impulse, centralise it, capture the upside, move fast and charge fees. And there’s a Square impulse, make the infrastructure permissionless, let anyone build on it, keep the rails open so that the 97.8% that Nordhaus said innovators don’t capture can actually flow somewhere useful.
Both of those impulses are present in every major technology shift in history. The question is always which one wins long enough to matter.
Financial nihilism is a real feeling. I don’t want to dismiss it. But I also don’t think the answer is to stop believing that something worth building is possible. Because history doesn’t actually suggest that. History suggests we’re in the messy middle of another one of those moments, and that the people who kept building through the mess are the ones who ended up mattering.
The shortcut economy is loud right now. Maybe louder than it’s ever been.
But it’s not the only economy running.
WHAT TO DO WITH THIS
Read & Listen: Kyla Scanlon’s Ozempicization essay, her best work in months. Ash Egan’s “Is Capital Becoming Conscious?” (Archetype) pairs well.
Consider: What would you build if you believed the future was genuinely going to be better? And what does your actual portfolio say you believe?