April 28, 2026

Inflation happens at both a national and personal level. A dollar is worth more to someone with no dollars than it is to someone with one dollar. For decades, economists – including Daniel "Emotional Wellbeing Plateaus at $75K" Kahneman and Matthew "No It Doesn't" Killingsworth – have attempted to devise an equation for the changing personal value of a dollar as wealth grows. Nothing has stuck – or made it easier to talk about money across wealth brackets. Now – odd as it may sound – a pseudonymously authored working paper credited to the non-existent "Maverick Institution," may have done the latter. The paper argues the personal value of a dollar depends on what the dollar will be used to do. Initially, the paper argues, dollars are used buy relief from suffering [1], then quality of life, then status, then ego.

The value of the paper isn't the math or the authority (it's sketchy as hell), but the mental model. It's a quick way to understand what different kinds of people are talking about when they talk about money. Not the dollar. The utility of a dollar. For many Oat Milk Elites, that utility is tied to the price of status as well as the price of experience. That's only a bad thing if we fail to understand what other people are talking about. Relief. Dignity. Respectability. Themselves.

On July 16, Astronomer CEO Andy Byron and Chief People Officer Kristin Cabot were caught in flagrante semi-delicto on the Jumbotron cam at a Coldplay concert. Clips of their pre-coital snugglefest went viral and, according to new smut analytics, Pornhub searches for "CEO" and "office affair" surged 4.8x and 3x respectively. Stripped of context, that might seem like a sexual overreaction. Within context… not so much. Over the last fifteen-or-so years, Oat Milk Elites have been subjected to the expanding power of what Harvard law professors Jacob Gersen and Jeannie Suk call The Sex Bureaucracy, a regime of HR policies, Title IX procedures, and rhetorical prohibitions that now govern sexual life. In a world in which office sex has ceased to be part of the professional managerial class project — dating apps reduced the percentage of American couples who met at work by something on the order of 75% — power-imbalanced peri-menopausal dryhumping constituted not just sexual rebellion but something closer to kink.

The thing about the Sex Bureaucracy is that it doesn't just prohibit; it prescribes. American universities instruct undergraduates that consent must be "enthusiastic” and HR delivers similar lessons via mandatory modules. These sexual scripts exist for good reason, but they also, and inevitably, get people excited about the possibility of going off script. That sort of improvisation is called kink and it emerges fastest in proceduralized erotic environments where people feel compelled seek out "edgework," activities that involve a clear threat and require negotiating the line between control and chaos. Andy and Kristin, who ran HR, didn't just work together. They edgeworked together. White-collar masturbators instantly and instinctively understood that distinction.

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A few hours after the attempt on the president's life last weekend, the "false flag" accusations hoisted hastily on social media were flying half-mast. Just a few hours later, they'd been struck. Lone gunman. Senseless. Sure.


Calmer heads prevailed. That’s what calmer heads do.


This week, the calm heads will also prevail over Alex Jones. InfoWars, which Jones was forced to sell after a $1.5B defamation judgment for the Sandy Hook parents he smeared as "crisis actors,” is becoming the property of The Onion. Though the prior instantiation of InfoWars will not be missed by many outside the supplements business, it’s not clear that a win against conspiracy theorists is an unmitigated victory for the forces of reason.

Even though conspiracy – sometimes malicious, sometimes magnanimous –  is core to the work of the marketers, lawyers, doctors, journalists, political operatives, and financial analysts who constitute the professional managerial class, we dismiss conspiratorial thinking as low-status behavior. Conspiracism suggests, after all, a lack of institutional access. A lack of connections. Dismissing conspiracies is not, as we might wish to believe, simply a way to repudiate malignancies like Alex Jones, but a way to perform proximity to power. That performance, ironically, provides air cover for conspirators, often including ourselves.

If there's a spectrum of thinking that runs from anti-conspiracism, the belief no one is conspiring, to personal conspiracism, the belief the conspiracy is about you, most members of the Oat Milk Elite fall toward an extreme at odds with our education. We know the FBI ran COINTELPRO against civil rights leaders and that the CIA dosed Americans with LSD and that Kissinger treasonously parlayed with the South Vietnamese in 1968 to help Nixon win. We know tobacco companies hid carcinogenicity and Exxon hid climate change. We know these are not conspiracy theories, but conspiracy facts – and only the ones that came to light. It's only reasonable to assume others didn't.

For years, InfoWars operated on the principle that most didn’t. In and of itself, that's a good principle for a media outlet. The reason Jones was hated and ostracized was that he was wrong. Almost constantly. But he was often wrong about the right things. Jones got to the Epstein story early. He was among the first to cover the unminuted Bilderberg meetings. He was on NSA bulk collection a decade before Snowden.

But the reward system for public conspiracism is asymmetrical among the educated elite. There's minimal upside to being right and almost unlimited downside to being wrong [2].

That asymmetry occurs because publicly voicing a conspiracy theory almost always requires also voicing stigmatized knowledge. Doctors lie to their patients [3]. Regulators optimize for future job offers. Consulting is mostly executive air cover. HR is a Trojan Horse [4]. College admissions are rigged. Expert testimony in civil litigation is purchased. This is why calm heads in the press (who trade quotes for coverage) recast the conspiracies they uncover as scandals. Doing so implicitly argues that someone failed the system even when the system worked as designed. Times columnists have friends at the Council on Foreign Relations, Goldman, McKinsey, Brookings, and Sullivan & Cromwell.

Professional class obligation requires obfuscatory obtuseness.

Seen from that angle, reflexive anti-conspiracism is our coherent response to having the game rigged in our favor. By aggressively ostracizing conspiracy theorists, we cover for friends who spend at least part of their day doing the rigging and pathologize those who have the unmitigated gall to treat us with just a hint of suspicion.

And anti-conspiratorialism can become extreme. In 2008, Cass Sunstein, soon to run Obama's regulatory office, published a paper recommending covert federal infiltration of citizen belief networks to disrupt conspiracy theories. The paper literally described a conspiracy to disrupt conspiracy theories. Obama, the apotheosis of the professional managerial class's meritocratic ideal, hired him.

Did Cole Allen act alone? Probably. Did the Secret Service let him on the President’s orders? Probably not. Did the President give a post-shooting press coverage about the need for a White House ballroom because he wants to expand the military bunker under it? Probably. Was Alex Jones wrong about everything? Yes. And no. And we’ll probably never find out. That’s not the kind of work The Onion does.

Calm heads do not get to the bottom of things. They just prevail.

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