The nihilism industry: Streaming disavowal and ressentiment in the age of prediction markets

Abstract This article reads Amin Samman’s new book, Currency of Nihilism , alongside two symptomatic products – the HBO/BBC series Industry and the rise of prediction markets – to argue that ressentiment , disavowal, and nihilism name three interlocking dimensions of the same affective formation. Ressentiment supplies the logic of injury and blame; disavowal, the mechanism that renders the absence of ultimate meaning enjoyable rather than haunting; and nihilism, the temporal form in which ressentiment and disavowal circulate. Industry dramatises the void Samman theorises – at once managing the anxieties of financial nihilism and giving voice to the utopian wish, however inverted, that the whole apparatus might collapse. Prediction markets capitalise mass nihilistic affect as price and industrialise, at scale, the void’s indifference to content – turning everything from election outcomes to assassination contracts into tradable binary instruments. The more the world feels empty and value-less, the more people reach for speculative gambles. Financial nihilism thus emerges as an industry: a profitable machinery that converts meaninglessness into mood, mood into order flow, and order flow into volatility.