The Indicator from Planet Money - The new language of AI tech workers

Episode Date: October 27, 2025

It’s hard for young tech workers to find a job, even with the AI buildout bonanza. This has spawned a curious worldview that fears AI is coming for our jobs and a drive to be at the top of the AI food chain. This, tech writer Jasmine Sun believes, is revealed in the emerging dialect of Silicon Valley tech workers.   Today on the show, San Francisco slang. Jasmine Sun takes us on a tour of high-agency 996ers and NPCs to see what it could mean for our present and our future.Related episodes: No AI data centers in my backyard!How much is AI actually affecting the workforce?For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez. Music by Drop Electric. Find us: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Newsletter.  See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

NPR. There is a paradox going on in Silicon Valley right now. There is this absolute fire hose of cash pouring into the AI buildout from companies like Amazon and Microsoft. But at the same time, young tech workers are finding it hard to land a job. Jasmine's son is a tech writer who's been following this trend. She used to work for Substack and various tech companies. And one thing she's observed is a new dialect among tech workers in San Francisco. that reveals a dog-eat-dog mindset.

If the world is going to split into the techno-kings and the techno-peasants, I better prove that I'm going to stay on top because I am high agency enough, I have the taste, I am 9-9-6ing hard enough that I'm going to make it. High-agency, 9-9-6ing? What do these terms mean? Jasmine's essay on the way Bay Area developers talk went viral recently, not just as a curiosity, but because many of these workers believe what they're experiencing could be a preview to what's coming for the rest of us.

This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Darien Woods. Today on the show, San Fran's slang. We combed through the jargon, the argo and the etymology of Silicon Valley in the AI era and what it says about our present and our future. Jasmine's son calls her writing about the Bay Area tech community and anthropology of disruption. And to set the scene, I asked her where she actually did her anthropological observations. She said Twitter slash X, of course, but also house parties and spas.

Shortly before writing the piece, I was in Archimedes Bonya, which is the Russian sauna on the outskirts of San Francisco. There are a lot of, like, I guess, old Russian guys in there, but there's, it's also become a bit of a tech hotspot for tech workers to go, to decompress, to socialize. And so I was there with probably nine or ten, twenty-something investors, founders, like AI people. It's clothing optional. So it's kind of an interesting vibe in 80% male. And they kind of just sit around and talk about AI. Wow, that's quite an image.

So among all this, we're hearing a new language emerge. These terms themselves could be an indicator of the economic climate in Silicon Valley. right now. So shall we dissect a few of them? Let's do it. First of all, high agency. What does this one mean? High agency is a fun one. I'm hearing it everywhere these days. I think a person is high agency. If they have a lot of personal initiative, they're very resourceful, and they're really good at getting what they want and not even thinking about what roadblocks might be in the way. I think it also has an element of contrarianism in it. It's high agency to be able to define your goals for yourself, to not listen to what other people say is the default path or the good job, to not

sort of put your resume in this drop box with 1,000 other applications and competing, but actually it's very high agency instead. To show up to the office with a box of the CTO's favorite chocolates or something like that, that is what it means to be high agency. It's like, I'm going to figure out a creative way to get what I want from the world. It's interesting because we're reaching a world where intelligence is almost becoming commodified with artificial intelligence. And so this is something that chatbots don't really have, which is the drive to do something. Right. Next term, NPC. Tell me what NBC means.

An NPC is a non-player character. It's a term that comes from the world of video games. An MPC is the opposite of being high agency. It's somebody who has no grand missions of their own. They can't really deviate from the script they're given. They just are background characters. You are automatible is essentially what you're saying. You can be coded. You can be automated by a game designer. You don't have goals or ideas or creativity of your own. Yeah, it's pretty brutal, almost like you don't have a soul.

That is basically what people are saying. I think it's pretty mean to call people NPCs. I think in the essay I joke that the MPCs are stuck playing LinkedIn games and watching Marvel movies totally blind to the technological tsunami that's going to come for them. Which brings us to the next term, permanent underclass. Permanent underclass is a crazy one. It is just so bleak. So there are all these tweets that I saw joking about the permanent underclass.

And they usually went something along the lines of like, we only have five months to escape the permanent underclass. Like, you better work hard because you're going to get stuck in the permanent underclass. This guy, Nick Carter on Twitter, said, everyone I know believes we have a few. years maximum until the value of labor totally collapses and capital accretes to owners on a runaway loop. This is the permanent underclass thing and everyone I know subscribes to it. And so if that's true, then you are in a world where capital is the only thing that matters. Like if you can pay more money, you can basically run more instances of AI. You can sort of rent labor that is perfectly replicable. And so all of these jokes, they are really jokes about the permanent underclass, but they're

they sort of reflect this, I think, economic anxiety that people don't know whether their skills are going to survive what they think of as AGI. And can you explain AGI? AGII stands for artificial general intelligence, and it's the notion of an AI that can do any cognitive task that a human can is the definition. You think that AI will get to a point where there is nothing intellectual or cognitive that it cannot do. So excluding robotics and sort of like physical tasks, but any level of coding, any level of economics research, any level of illustration or creative coming up with ideas for articles and stories like AI will be able to do.

So this foreboding of a potential permanent underclass leads us to our next term, 996. Yeah, 996 stands for 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. 6 days a week. It's a work culture where the idea is that you were working. those hours, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. 6 days a week. That doesn't sound healthy. No, it doesn't. It's a lot. It's a lot. It's funny because Silicon Valley used to, there's a time where people were playing ping pong at work and advertising work-life balance and remote work. But no, everyone's back to the office, and they're adding Saturdays too. 9-96 is interesting because it came from China and Chinese big tech companies that mandated a 996 schedule during the 2010s until so many employees started experiencing health problems and going to the ICU that the government instituted

policies to formally ban 996, but it continues in informal ways. And San Francisco this year has, I suppose, decided that if they want to compete with the Chinese tech companies, they too should adopt this work practice. So to recap, we have people being described as either high agency or opposite NPC, which might or might not affect whether they end up in the permanent underclass and some of the ways to avoid that are by working 996 hours. What does this discourse tell you about the hopes and fears of tech people in San Francisco and Silicon Valley right now? I think there's a lot of interesting dissonance going on where people do believe that there will be inequality that's created by AGI, that there will be some people who are the automators

and some people who are the automated. But rather than this leading to any sort of, you know, political consciousness or interest in activism or slowing down, I think the way that tech culture is reacting is by everybody working as hard as they can to prove that they are going to end up on top of that divide. I think that this is super important because when you take a step back, you'll notice that a whole lot of behaviors in the corporate world are following what other people are doing. I think back to when Elon Musk cut thousands of staff at X or Twitter back then, And then suddenly all the other tech companies were doing the same thing.

And a lot of it just seemed to be following what other people were doing. And so if this is the language and the culture and the narratives being built up, it might explain some of the trends we're seeing around hyper-scaling of AI data centers and the ways that people are choosing to forge their careers and the companies they found. Yeah, I totally agree with that. It is funny how much people are trying to prove that they're not. an MPC by all going to the same parties and the same berries classes and drinking the same Celsius.

And so there is a bit of irony in that, I think. Well, Jasmine's Son, independent writer, thank you so much for joining the Indicator. Thank you so much for having me. Jasmine's son writes at jasmine.substack.com. This episode was produced by Angel Kareiros with engineering by Kwayze. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Kate Canaan edits the show and The Indicator is a production of NPR. Thank you.