‘The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?’

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0:39Here's what to make of it.

0:48Hey, I'm Nadja Spiegelman, and I'm a culture editor for New York Times opinion. I'm proposing a new term, micro-looting. What I started doing is I started going into the grocery store. or I would pick up the thing that I wanted, and then I would go. You're paying for that, right? No, babe. It's a human right. People are taking small things from big corporations. And they're feeling justified.

1:11Jia Tolentino:Like, look, everyone's shoplifting from Whole Foods when you're shopping there. You're not going to steal from a deli like that. But Whole Foods, fuck Whole Foods. Fuck Bezos, fuck Amazon, all that. Like, we should be rioting, but we're tired, so I'm going to take these bagels. But is it a slippery slope? And what's going on with our moral code? To find out, I'm talking to political commentator Hassan Piker and New Yorker writer Gia Tolentino.

1:39Thank you both so much for being here with me today to talk about this. Hi, Gia. Hi. Hi, Hassan. Hi. I want to start with a little exercise just about our own morals. Would you share your Netflix password? I do. I also do. Well, I... With anyone. For the longest time, I actually had someone else's Netflix password. That was my primary access to Netflix. And now you share your own? Yeah. Would you get around a paywall on an article you're trying to read? Do it every day on my stream. Every day.

2:14Jia Tolentino:I support it when people do it for my own work. I say, go off. Use the Wayback Machine. Would you pirate music from an indie band? Is it 2005 and I'm using LimeWire? Because yes. I feel like every millennial has at some point done this. I feel like fundamentally Spotify is kind of like deleterious to the musician livelihood. And I use that. But then I go to the shows. Yeah, no, I'm pro piracy all the way. Like across the board, would you pirate a car? Yes. You know, if you could. What would it mean to pirate a car? It was just a classic thing back in the day. The government funded anti-piracy initiatives would be like, would you steal a car?

2:54I'm like, yeah, sure. If I could get away with it, if it was as easy as, you know, pirating IP, I would do it. Would you dine and dash from your local diner? Never.

3:08Jia Tolentino:Never. Except 35%. Mikes, come on. No, I wouldn't do that. If I saw somebody doing that, I'd probably pay for their meal. Yeah. Would you steal a book from the library? Never. No. Would you steal from the Louvre? Yes. I would not be logistically capable of executing such a fact, but would I cheer on every news story of people that I see doing it? Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, I think it's cool. We got to get back to cool crimes like that. Like, you know, bank robberies, right? 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.

3:56Would you steal from Whole Foods?

3:58Jia Tolentino:Yes. And I have under very specific circumstances. I think that stealing from a big buck store, I'll just state my platform. It's neither very significant as a moral wrong, nor is it significant in any way as protest or direct action. but I did steal from Whole Foods on several occasions. Like I've been involved in like a neighborhood mutual aid group since 2021. And so every week I would go get groceries for Miss Nancy, my now family friend who lived nearby and she wanted to go to Whole Foods. She wanted food from Whole Foods. So I was like, okay, great. And so I'd be getting Miss Nancy all her groceries.

4:33Jia Tolentino:And then I would finish and I'd be like, oh my God, four lemons. I forgot four lemons. And on several occasions, I was like, I'm just going to go back, grab those four lemons and get the hell out. You should go to prison. I know. You think they're going to ban me? They should throw you in jail. But I didn't feel bad about it at all. And was part of it because of how you feel about Whole Foods as a corporation? Yeah, it already felt like a bit of a compromise. Like at the time, I was like, I had not been to Whole Foods. I had a bit more sort of consumer discipline about where I was spending my money then.

5:04Jia Tolentino:And I already felt like I was in the hole even by shopping there. And it certainly felt in a utilitarian sense. I was like, this is not a big deal. Well, I'm pro stealing from big corporations because, you know, they they steal quite a bit more from their own workers. However, one thing that might even help your ethical dilemma is the fact that the automated process that they design, these companies know will increase shrink. Right. So it's it's actually factored in the lemons that you stole are factored into the box. bottom line of these megacorporations regardless. And they still end up having increased profit margins because they no longer have to pay for the cashiers that they used to hire as opposed to this automated system, knowing full well that people are still going to be able to steal, still steal a lot more efficiently, as a matter of fact, through the automated process.

6:02Jia Tolentino:Totally. Well, I also I was looking things like and shrinkage is roughly equal internally as externally. Like they expect it from their employees that they are sort of disenfranchising constantly. But what about the argument that if everyone just starts stealing wantonly from these self-checkout machines, Whole Foods will eventually raise the prices? Yeah, they, chaos, full chaos. Let's go. I mean, look, I'm in favor. I'm in favor of fast and free buses and also government owned storefronts. And, you know, two of those policies, the mayor of this beautiful cities is currently working on. Would you encourage stealing in the same way from a Mumdani-run city-owned grocery store with other prices?

6:45And why? I would not. Because I feel like that's taxpayer-funded and the prices are union labor and the prices are also adjusted regardless.

6:55Jia Tolentino:I think that hypothetical is interesting, right? Because if you look at it from a categorical imperative type thing, what if everybody did this? You know, the converse is like, oh, what if every major grocery chain stole from workers and consumers. And that is basically true, right? Like, it's interesting. Like, I think it speaks to the thing where a kind of harm committed by the individual strangely continually draws more ire than the same harm being committed by a structure. And so, I mean, and so I kind of am inclined towards this. It's like, everyone try it, see what happens. Well, I, by the way, ironically enough, I don't personally do it.

7:32I never do it. When I was younger, I stole some Pokemon cards from a friend and my father punished me. And it was such a harrowing experience that I've like, I literally can't even steal like a candy bar. When we were in college, a lot of my friends used to love doing that, you know, getting drunk, going to the gas station, five finger discount. I would never participate in it. And I still can't to this day participate in it. I'm just saying that I personally don't really care If someone needs the food, they should absolutely steal it. Yeah. There's one thing that's like stealing when you're a teenager and you want the adrenaline rush.

8:09And part of it is about testing the rules and getting away with something. But I feel like what I'm seeing on TikTok and social media is people saying that they're stealing from Whole Foods, not just for the thrill of it, but out of a feeling of anger and moral justification because the rich don't play by the rules. So why should I? And Jeff Bezos has too much money. He's a billionaire. So why should I have to pay for organic avocados? My friends and I have started calling this micro-looting because it has a, like, slight political valence to the theft as opposed to just the thrill of getting away with something.

8:40Have you noticed this around you online? Have you noticed more people talking about stealing in this way?

8:45Jia Tolentino:I mean, I have not seen people talking about micro-looting or such, you know, whatever action that this is online. line, but I think, I mean, it kind of speaks to an attenuation of the tactical language of direct action. You know what I mean? Like, it's like, it doesn't work for me as a form of direct action because it's concealed, right? Like, any successful direct action history has to be ostentatious, has to make itself known as ideally collective, and this is sort of necessarily individual and hidden. But I'm like, oh, great. Let's think of ways to, like, let's take this energy and let's move it into some other thing.

9:26Jia Tolentino:Like, I think it's great that the valence of property is kind of on the table as something to be toyed with in terms of direct action. I feel like we've forgotten there is a long and storied history of sabotage and sort of engagement with property destruction even, which is abhorrent to people. I mean, you remember in 2020, the like Gucci Chanel stuff in Soho when that was looted, that looms so much larger in many sort of Bloomberg liberals' imaginations as profoundly more violent in some ways than the original action being protested, right? And I find that really interesting. Yeah. I mean, I was thinking about the Boston Tea Party as part of like, that's a political destruction of property.

10:08And yet, But right now, it feels like I agree with you. The looting around the 2020 protests was such a huge talking point. It made people so uncomfortable. And I'm curious why, like, what do you think the root of that is?

10:22Jia Tolentino:I was thinking, you know, that thieves are actually quite highly valorized in narrative. Aladdin, famously. Robin Hood. But like Robin Hood, right? Yeah, Jean Valjean. Like it's we we understand it's it's well within the collective consciousness that stealing for need or purpose. You know, it's it's something that that we we understand and feel quite friendly towards. And I think if someone were, let's say, walking out of Whole Foods with an Ikea bag of whatever and giving it to the people, you know, sheltering underneath the scaffolding at the jail going up in Brooklyn next door. Or, you know, like, I think most people would agree that that, you know, if someone were to be stealing with a purpose, we love that in America.

11:08Jia Tolentino:We do. We can love it again. We just have to do it with a purpose. I was reading a Pew Research poll about Americans' morality, and it basically was just like, well, we didn't even ask about the obviously immoral things like theft. We only asked about, like, having an affair. and I was like but I feel like part of what I'm seeing around me is that people feel like the laws are immoral the rich don't play by the rules it is we live in a society where there are billionaires where the top 1 % holds 32 % of the net worth and the bottom 50 % holds 2.5 % so at some point if the laws don't feel moral do you start to question your own sense of having to abide by them, of course.

11:52Yeah. I wanted to work off a point that you were making. This was also something that was addressed in a previous New York Times podcast that I did with Ross Douthat, where I brought up the concept of adventurism. In the Marxist tradition, adventurism is the action that is oftentimes decentralized. Oftentimes anarchists will say this is the propaganda of the deed. The action itself, no matter how violent or how disruptive it is, is justifiable because the disruption is the point. I believe in the power of organized labor and labor militancy and building these structures of power so that we can actually make more effective change, more longstanding change.

12:37So concepts such as micro-looting indicate that there is an energy there, just like you said. And yet many Americans, I think, are totally oblivious to this political language. They lack the political education. They lack the class consciousness to recognize their position in society and lack the capacity, unfortunately, to engage in some kind of organized disruption that would be infinitely more effective.

13:07Jia Tolentino:I think what you were saying about people lack the language and the organizing structure to engage in. Like the, you know, the obvious thing to do if you want to chip into the Whole Foods slash Amazon megastructure of exploitation is to unionize, like to work at a Whole Foods and form a union. And I think the first one was formed recently in Philly, I think. But, you know, I mean, this is, it's like microluting. It feels akin to like a posting about something. Like it is, it's a kind And as an atomized individual action, it's useless. It's much harder to get a job and accept$17.50 an hour and then to organize your colleagues, a process that takes years and is often unsuccessful.

13:50Jia Tolentino:I mean, that's really, you know, the thing about actual collective direct action. It's so much harder. And it often doesn't profit you whatsoever, such as, you know, me getting an extra$10 by grabbing my extra loaf of bread from Miss Nancy. Like, it's like, I do think there's, we are also lazy as humans. We're also selfish. We also, like, we've lost not we've lost not only the language and the union density and the structure to engage in things like this, but we have also lost the sort of muscle that is built up to be able to engage in these sort of things. We've lost the rooms in which these things are planned, you know?

14:25Jia Tolentino:Yeah. And the confidence. I think we've lost the confidence within ourselves because there is not a lot of action like this. And in the absence of that, we lack the willpower because we don't even know what that would look like. And actual, I mean, you know, the climate protests in Europe tend to be more militant, right, than the ones that are here. And they are, you know, blocking roadways. Like, these things that are even objectively completely nonviolent forms of obstruction and interference that don't even involve property destruction, but merely the interruption of the capital flow of the workday, like, are criminalized to shocking degrees to me, even in Europe, you know.

15:07Jia Tolentino:And I guess I'm saying like maybe we are getting the lack of courage is maybe a rational response to the kind of the way these actions are treated in the popular consciousness as well as by the criminal justice system. But they shouldn't be. I want to get back a little bit to the anger underneath this. In 1965, CEOs were paid 21 times the average worker. In 2024, CEOs were paid 281 times the average worker. I feel like some of this is coming from a feeling of like the rules are the social contract is broken. And then there's also the slippery slope of what happens if we completely break the social contract and no one plays by the rules anymore.

15:48And I wonder where you two see the interplay of those two ideas. Well, the rules are already designed in a way where if you steal from the poor, you become rich. If you steal from the wealthy, you go to prison. So there's only one direction where you can do unlimited theft and erode the social contract for the 99%. There's an invisibility baked into the system that allows the wealthy to engage in this sort of behavior. Because, I mean, it's a cliche at this point, but like wage theft is the most consequential amount of theft that takes place in the United States of America. A similar invisibility exists in structural violence as opposed to individual acts of violence as well.

16:37If it's a police officer engaging someone violently, the automatic assumption from the average person is, oh, that's probably a criminal. They probably deserved it. But if there's any circumstance where someone else is fighting back against police, like in a normal protest environment, for example, ultimately, most people assume that that is chaotic. It's a chaotic situation and that it is born out of the escalations from the protesters themselves, even if, as regular citizens, we're infinitely closer to those exercising their First Amendment rights than those with the power stamping out people exercising their free speech rights.

17:18We never look at systemic forms of violence and we don't look at systemic forms of theft in the same way that we do as individuals breaking that social contract.

17:28Jia Tolentino:I think there is, you know, in my ideal world, like what we are talking about, the one kind of theft being inescapable and hegemonic and, you know, completely oppressive, and then people trying to get a little bit of it back through stealing from Whole Foods or whatever, right? The ideal world is not one in which this continues and this increases to somehow even it out, right? The ideal world is one in which the theft from above is broken by regulatory means and or bottom-up means like unionization, right? Yeah. You were just talking about wanting, not being like we should encourage wanton theft across the board, but we should try and fight against the theft that comes from the top.

18:15It feels difficult right now in a moment when, to like hope for regulatory change when that would come from the government, let's say. And a lot of the billionaires like Bezos and Cook and Elon Musk are given a seat at the table in terms of the government itself when billionaires themselves, they pay much lower tax rates than most Americans. My producer was just giving me this fact that she saw today. 88 corporations that made$105 billion in profits in 2025, including Tesla, Southwest, United, Life Nation, Disney. They made$105 billion in profits and they collectively paid income taxes of zero dollars.

19:04Jia Tolentino:Right. I mean, it's a far more consequential withdrawal of resources and trust from the public sphere to do that, to talk about any individual thing that any person has ever done, right? Like, it's like, and I think, I mean, the 1%, the top 1 % of Americans, 20 % of their income is withdrawn from, is withheld from reporting every year, like, as just a standing statistic. And that's not even a corporate structure. That's not even, I mean, that's just ordinary rich people, you know? So, OK, to go back, you were talking about sort of what you do see as effective political protest. And recently, a employee upset, fired Kimberly Clark Warehouse as a protest.

19:47Is that an effective form of political protest or is that purely violent?

19:52Jia Tolentino:No, I found it. No, that you got to be tactical. I mean, I feel like Mike Davis wrote about this. It's like it's not the action. It's the context in which it exists. And do I think that some sort of fire could hypothetically be framed within a collective action that is tactically useful? Yes. Does a disgruntled guy burning down the warehouse do it for me in terms of effective political action? Not at all. But I do. Sabotage has played a formative role in labor unions. In everything. Yeah, in labor unions as well. But if it's conducted unilaterally, then it's entirely different. That's an individual action.

20:30Jia Tolentino:And if he could have gotten away with it without being caught, I bet he I mean, I didn't follow this case very closely, but it seemed like, yeah, like anything done by an individual on an emotional, you know, on a kind of primarily emotional whim. It's that's not that's not the point. That's not the point. But then when you feel this much anger and it doesn't feel like there's hope for it to be changed in a regulatory way, I think that's when you get to things like Luigi Mangione killing the CEO of UnitedHealthcare and there being an outpouring of glee for murder online because it feels like finally someone can actually do something about health care.

21:09I think 40 % of Gen Zers felt that that murder was morally justified. But it's scary to be in a society where people feel that murder is morally justified. And I'm curious how we thread that line. Yeah. Engels wrote about the concept of social murder. And Brian Thompson, as the UnitedHealthcare CEO, was engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder. the systematized forms of violence, the structural violence of poverty, the for-profit paywalled system of healthcare in this country. And the consequences of that are tremendous amounts of pain, tremendous amounts of violence, tremendous amounts of deaths.

21:58And that was a fascinating story for me because Americans are very draconian about crime and punishment. They're very black and white on this issue. And yet, because of the pervasive pain that the private healthcare system had created for the average American, I saw so many people immediately understand why this death had taken place. Even before they knew who the shooter was or what the motive was, we had universalize this pain so much so that virtually every American has a similar experience, a shared experience where they have a loved one that spent their last days, instead of spending them with their family, spending it on the phone, talking to their healthcare provider to maybe get a little bit of economic respite so they don't carry on medical debt for their next generation, for their next of kin.