The Age of Shameless Theft: How AI and Inequality Fuel Our Impulse to Steal
In a world where everything from copyrighted art to mobile phones and even the island of Greenland seems up for grabs, we are witnessing an era defined by shameless theft. This phenomenon is not merely about petty crime but reflects deeper societal shifts driven by artificial intelligence, growing inequality, and the actions of our political leaders. The consequences are profound, reshaping how we interact with property, creativity, and each other in the digital age.
The Digital Culture of Entitlement
Technology has played a pivotal role in legitimising theft within our shared digital culture. Aggregator websites, viral meme accounts, and the ubiquitous practice of screenshots and copy-pasting have blurred the lines between creator and creation. Our ideas, thoughts, and images are swept into a common buffet, making theft feel frictionless and victimless. The rewards for virality are high, while penalties are almost nonexistent, creating an environment where stealing becomes an embedded norm.
Generative AI models, trained on billions of scraped content items—including copyrighted writing, music, and art—simply follow this established tradition. As Karen Hao notes in her book Empire of AI, there is a culture among developers to view anything as data to be captured and consumed. John Phelan of the International Confederation of Music Publishers describes this as the largest intellectual property theft in human history. Yet, with no police on the scene and governments often turning a blind eye, victims are left with little recourse beyond plaintive wails about business viability.
Historical Roots and Political Amplification
Theft is not a new invention of the internet; it is one of the oldest human behaviours, driven by asymmetries of power, wealth, and opportunity. Inequality fosters thieves on both sides, cementing thievery as a defining principle of society. From street thieves to colonial empire-builders, acquisition is often rebranded as victorious conquest, underpinned by an anti-honour code.
This culture is starkly embodied by political figures like Donald Trump, who boasts of grabbing whatever he wants—from Venezuelan oil tankers to classified documents and even a woman's private parts. His doctrine of coercive acquisition reflects a broader trend where territorial land grabs, from Crimea to the West Bank, are spun as tools of survival in a securitised world. Trump's Vegas-style reconstruction plan for Gaza, rich in AI imagery and unveiled by Jared Kushner at Davos, reads like a kleptomaniac's dream, highlighting how neocolonial expansionism is framed as natural law for the strong.
Societal Implications and Personal Boundaries
On a deeper level, the age of theft reveals how we view others and our adherence to rules when leaders flout conventions. When countries are built on stolen labour or peoples are displaced for casino-like developments, pirating a football stream seems trivial by comparison. This erosion of personal boundaries raises dystopian questions: what if tech giants like Google or WhatsApp held our data hostage for ransom? In a world where ownership is merely hard power by another name, mass theft begins to look like an unanswerable business case.
As David Graeber astutely observed, historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft—a line that ironically underscores the very issue at hand. In response, we grip our phones tighter, add watermarks to creative work, and vote for parties addressing inequality rather than exacerbating it. Yet, in the meantime, we must navigate this stolen world with small, polite requests, like asking a shop assistant to unlock the mackerel fillets. The age of shameless theft is here, and its impacts are only beginning to unfold.
