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?”
Hellbound and Down 