When one of my sisters was a tween, she was walking down the street with my grandparents when some change fell out of her purse. She didn’t turn back. “It’s just pennies,” she announced. “It’s worthless. Who cares?” My grandfather had her turn around and pick up each one. “We don’t just throw away money, and we don’t act with casual indifference to things of value, even if they’re of small value,” he explained. He didn’t take this stance because he worshipped the almighty dollar, nor because he grew up very poor—though he did, living above another family’s garage with his widowed mother—but because he considered it careless and fundamentally ungrateful.
I thought back to this bit of family lore this morning, when I watched New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino and the socialist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker debate the merits of microlooting, a made-up word that just means committing theft but feeling good about it. The conversation was hosted by The New York Times Opinion section, and took place in a tastefully decorated whitewashed loft.
Piker is a proud champagne socialist; he sported designer sunglasses on a propaganda trip to Cuba, an island he says has been “asphyxiated” by the U.S., while Tolentino is the cultural critic for the internet age: photogenic and constantly virtue signaling. She, of The New Yorker and a New York Times bestseller, is from the old media world—while Piker is the king of the internet stream, appealing to disaffected young men. But they’re both getting at the same thing.
The headline of the interview, interestingly, is: “The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?” The subhead: “Why petty theft might be the new political protest.” It is worth watching the whole thing for a glimpse into how the very online left—for which Piker and Tolentino are avatars—is responding to the much-discussed death of woke. Answer: a litigation of the Ten Commandments, one by one. According to the very polished, perfectly comfortable class avengers: Murder is up for debate. So is stealing, provided that it’s not from a Zohran Mamdani–sponsored grocery store.
The host, Nadja Spiegelman, began the conversation by establishing her guest’s theft threshold: “Would you share your Netflix password?” “Would you steal from the Louvre?” “Would you steal from Whole Foods?”
Apparently a lot of people steal regularly from Whole Foods. Just a few small things, here and there. They’re even getting thrown in the store’s mini-jail for it. It’s a trend, I think, for two reasons. One is that Whole Foods is owned by Amazon, which was founded by Jeff Bezos, who is the third richest man in the world, and whose name has become a synonym for rapacious capitalism. The second is that Whole Foods sells upscale organic groceries and supplements for people who want to boost their collagen.
Meaning, those microlooting Whole Foods are probably not destitute mothers stealing formula for their babies. They are more likely graphic designers stealing probiotics. People who studied “studies” at Seven Sisters colleges. They are disenchanted magazine writers and casting directors who use their parents’ HBO log-ins. In other words, they are downwardly mobile brats who can afford it. And they are telling themselves that by taking without paying—a behavior known to the rest of us as stealing—they are, in fact, engaging in a quiet political protest.
When asked if she’d ever done this, Tolentino said “yes,” and “on several occasions.” But don’t worry, it was for an elderly neighbor called “Miss Nancy,” who she shops for as part of her neighborhood mutual aid group, which Tolentino has been in since 2021, thank you very much. She said she stole four lemons for Miss Nancy, though we’re never told if anyone checked with Miss Nancy over whether she was cool to receive boosted goods. Piker dutifully reported that he is “pro stealing from big corporations, because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers.”
And, in general, Piker continued: “We’ve got to get back to cool crimes like that: bank robberies, stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature. I feel like that’s way cooler than the 7,000th new cryptocurrency scheme that people are engaging in.”
Rock on, brother—anyway your burger’s up!
Those microlooting Whole Foods are probably not destitute mothers stealing formula for their babies. They are more likely graphic designers stealing probiotics.
Perched atop deep, white armchairs in business casual, the three nodded knowingly to each other as they found even deeper agreement in the fact that “the valence of property is on the table as something to be toyed with, in terms of direct action.” In other words: It’s good, actually, that more people are becoming thieves. “Everyone, try it. See what happens,” Tolentino trilled. “Yeah, chaos. Full chaos. Let’s go,” Piker added, when presented with the idea that if everyone were to steal from Whole Foods, the prices would go up.
At the very least, Piker is clear about what he’s going for: He wants the government to run all the grocery stores, and he thinks that sowing chaos is the surest path there. And by that logic, if stealing leads to nationalized grocery stores, then murder might just lead to universal healthcare! Piker doesn’t endorse the killing of Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, but he points out that Thompson was engaged in “a tremendous amount of social murder” through “the systematized forms of violence, the structural violence of poverty.” Here’s when I would normally change train cars. Of the people who have to deal with Byzantine insurance companies, and with medical debt he said, “For them, that is murder; for them, that is torture.”
In Piker’s morally inverted world, the assassin putting a bullet in someone’s back is a hero, and the guy getting killed is the real murderer. In Tolentino’s world, which is the same one, blowing up a pipeline “should be okay” but getting iced coffee in a plastic cup is “profoundly selfish, immoral, collectively destructive action.” (Yes, she says this.)
Stealing has to do with you, and whether you are a good or bad person, and your community, and whether you want to live in one where all the shampoos at the CVS are kept in tiny jails.
And what about the man who burned down the Kimberly-Clark warehouse in Canada to protest low wages? “Do I think that some sort of fire could hypothetically be framed within a collective action that is tactically useful?” Tolentino rhetorically asked herself. “Yes.”
What is the threshold for some sort of fire, and how can we make sure it doesn’t get mixed up with the bad, hot destructive kind? Which store sells the hypothetical frames?
Stealing from Whole Foods doesn’t actually have to do with billionaires, or how much they pay in taxes. The logic that says slipping a magazine or a chocolate bar into your tote might equal one less orchid at the Bezos wedding is ridiculous. Stealing has to do with you, and whether you are a good or bad person, and your community, and whether you want to live in one where all the shampoos at the CVS are kept in tiny jails.
The Times conversation ended with the same line of questioning it began with from Spiegelman. “Steal from Whole Foods?” Both Tolentino and Piker responded with my grandfather’s least favorite word: “Sure.” He despised sure. He thought it made the speaker seem like they can’t be bothered to give you a straight answer. Like they’re doing you a favor. That deep down, they don’t actually care at all.
