In his Atlantic essay “Theft Is Now Progressive Chic,” Thomas Chatterton Williams takes a scalpel to a peculiar strain of moral vanity—the kind that treats petty theft as a political accessory. His targets include Jia Tolentino and Hasan Piker, figures who flirt with the idea that swiping lemons from Whole Foods, sharing passwords, or hopping paywalls is not merely harmless but faintly heroic. Williams calls it what it is: a breezy contempt for the social contract dressed up as rebellion. When small theft is rebranded as civic virtue, even Vicky Osterweil, the author of In Defense of Looting, begins to look like the sober one in the room.
I confess the whole thing landed on me with the sting of belated education. I had not realized there were circles where breaking the law could be laundered into moral performance. Apparently, this is not an isolated glitch but a trend. The next day, another Atlantic writer, Graeme Wood, weighed in with “Something Is Happening to America’s Moral Code,” invoking James C. Scott’s notion of “anarchist calisthenics”—those small acts of rule-breaking meant to keep the spirit of rebellion limber. Wood’s diagnosis is less romantic: a set of half-formed ethics, offered with confidence and examined with indifference.
What came to mind was Rob Henderson’s idea of “luxury beliefs”—ideas that burnish the speaker’s status while exporting the costs to people who can’t afford them. Consider the casual encouragement of shoplifting. In theory, it’s a minor jab at corporate excess. In practice, it lands on the backs of people like my students—working-class college kids who clock retail hours to pay for what they own.
They tell me what it looks like on the floor. Managers instruct them not to intervene—too risky, too litigious. So they stand there, professionally inert, as merchandise walks out the door. The result isn’t liberation; it’s demoralization. They watch others take what they themselves budget and sweat to buy. And the losses don’t evaporate into the ether—they reappear as higher prices, a quiet tax that falls hardest on those already counting dollars.
This is the part that doesn’t make it into the manifesto. It’s easy to romanticize petty theft when you’re insulated from its consequences. It’s harder to maintain the pose when you’re the one absorbing the cost.
There’s a particular kind of intellectual decay that sets in when smart people talk only to one another, applauding the cleverness of their own provocations. The room gets warmer, the ideas get softer, and reality is politely asked to wait outside. I’ve admired Tolentino’s work for its sharpness and nuance. But there’s a difference between insight and indulgence, and when the latter starts masquerading as the former, credibility takes a hit.
At some point, the performance of rebellion stops looking brave and starts looking careless. And the people paying for it are the ones least invited to the conversation.
Cinemorphosis 
Leave a comment