It’s with some hesitation that I assign a uniform political adherence to the emerging class of nicotine pouch products most of us just call Zyn. Reactionary podcasters mainline them, sure, but so do liberal accountants in Chicago and moderate plumbers in Jacksonville. Recently, though, they’ve become almost a microcrystalline cellulose amulet for a very particular brand of rightwing productivitymaxxer who uses them to maintain a Mentat-like focus while they’re vibecoding or programming a Claude swarm. 

The nicotine pouch market in the US was worth about $4 billion in 2024; Zyn accounted for half of that revenue, making it the dominant player in a space where every tobacco company is investing. The product seems to be omnipresent in a certain kind of mouth now, but why?

Zyn comes from Sweden, where oral nicotine has been normalized for decades, but not all lip pillows are treated the same. Snus, which contains tobacco, is far more popular with men and has long been considered masculine. Tobacco-free nicotine pouches evolved in a different lane and, historically, skewed female. I’ve spent several dinners in Stockholm watching beautiful Swedish women demurely eject pouches from the upper lip with the practiced grace of stimulant-addicted courtiers, while most Swedish dudes don’t touch the stuff.

That a chemical could be gendered in the first place is interesting, but it’s doubly intriguing because in the U.S., we’ve come to the exact opposite conclusion as our socialist cousins. Nicotine pouches here are for the fellas, and they want more year after year. Phillip Morris International bought Zyn’s manufacturer Swedish Match in 2022 for $16 billion; the company sold almost a billion cans of Zyn last year. There are plans to build a new $600 million facility in Colorado to keep up with demand. This is all part of the plan: PMI and other major tobacco companies want to phase out cigarettes altogether. (They apparently kill people.)

The pouches have become the stimulant of choice for a subsection of men drifting rightward on a rip current. Finance guys tired of being told they couldn’t call things “gay” or “retarded” anymore; biohackers who listen to Andrew Huberman at 2x speed; the redpillers who see the tins of Zyn, Velo, On!, Rogue, Juice Head, FRE, Sesh, Lucy, or Clew on the desk of their favorite podcasters.

Politicians understand the value of the signifier, too. In 2024, Chuck Schumer urged the FDA to scrutinize Zyn’s marketing practices, warning that the pouches posed an addictive risk to teenagers. The rebuke from the right was swift: Marjorie Taylor Greene called for a “Zynsurrection,” and Richard Hudson, a congressman from North Carolina, posted a photo with a tin of Zyn with the caption: “come and take it!”

But the reactionary craving for an efficient way to get nicotine into your bloodstream is most legible in the tech sector. Palantir—or, as one friend jokingly calls it, “Salesforce for Killing People”—installed a custom Lucy vending machine in their offices last year so that engineers and salespeople could stay wired without leaving the building. 

After Zyn executives distanced themselves from Tucker Carlson for saying the pouches were a great sexual stimulant on Theo Von’s podcast, he turned on the brand and said it was for “women and liberals” before launching his own brand, Alp. In a video promoting it on X, he wrote “Zyn is for they/them, Alp is for you” —an homage to one of the Trump campaign’s most debased and effective ads.

Other reactionary titans in Silicon Valley have waxed poetic about the powers of nicotine pouches. Peter Thiel has called nicotine a “really good nootropic drug that raises your IQ 10 points,” and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey said that he’s “afraid that nicotine might be really, really good” because “America smoked its way to becoming the dominant hyperpower” on the tech talk show TBPN. 

The science on these sachets is mixed: they’re certainly better for you than lighting up a cigarette, but they also spike your heart rate, which can create issues for those with pre-existing blood pressure or cardiac conditions. In some ways, Zyn represents nicotine in its most optimized form, stripped of combustion and engineered for a lower risk profile while preserving the stimulant’s core benefits.  

And why tech? Silicon Valley has increasingly adopted a zero-sum philosophy that has accelerated its adoption of nicotine—as well as other questionable drugs—as productivity boosters. If we take “productivity” as a loose stand-in for “money,” then nicotine pouches like Zyn offer a frictionless path to making enough cash to get an escape pod before the world collapses. 

Zyn’s delivery mechanism is key here: smoke breaks took you away from your desk and, eventually, fucked with your stamina. Vaping was easier to do inside, but you still had to go through the charade of hiding your personal plume. With nicotine pouches, you can stack tins on your desk and never leave. It is oblivion of self in a sachet, a total commitment to the mission of either changing the world to shape your personal philosophy or getting so rich it doesn’t matter. 

The “996” discourse that broke out in some tech circles last year was also colored by that worldview. 996 originated in the Chinese tech industry, where employees at hypergrowth companies like Alibaba were expected to work 9am to 9pm for 6 days a week. The philosophy found fans among some of the loudest, most deranged voices in Silicon Valley, who thought employees had gotten lazy and soft. A young venture capitalist named Henry Stebbings went even further, writing in a controversial LinkedIn post that “7 days a week is the required velocity to win right now.” The goal is to build something you can sell or take public before the world collapses or AI takes over, and use whatever drugs you need to make that happen.

Dovetailing with that population is the growing contingent of libertarian-adjacent biohackers who are ordering Chinese peptides and experimental supplements to lose weight, focus their minds, sleep better, and, apparently, improve their ability to make eye contact. (An OpenAI researcher who helped develop Sora called the peptide oxytocin “Ozempic for autism.”) This relentless pursuit of self-optimization strikes me as indicative of a wider pessimism about the world at large, where the only thing worth improving is yourself. It’s a philosophy of the individual, a sort of steroidal objectivism that has a natural home in Silicon Valley’s growing rightwing vanguard. 

A joke circulated in tech circles last year that feels like a time traveler’s warning: “You have two years to escape from the permanent underclass.” I get the sense that many on the right don’t believe this is something to laugh at. 

The little tin of Zyn on the desk becomes a talisman against that future, a way to squeeze out a few more productive hours before the collapse arrives. They’ll put whatever they need to in their bodies to avoid it, and the risk of adding addictive or dangerous chemicals to their bloodstream is a small cost to avoid being left behind when the end comes.