Last week, a journalist discovered that his article about the England cricket team had been copied verbatim and republished by an Indian website without permission. This incident reflects a broader trend: we increasingly live in a world defined by petty theft, from jokes and articles to mobile phones and even the island of Greenland. The sense of entitlement and impunity surrounding these acts raises the question of how we reached this point.
Technology has played a key role. The internet has normalised stealing through aggregator sites, viral memes, and screenshots, blurring the line between creator and creation. Generative AI models have taken this further, training on billions of items of scraped content, including copyrighted writing, music, and art. Karen Hao, in her book Empire of AI, notes a culture among developers to view everything as data to be captured. John Phelan of the International Confederation of Music Publishers calls it 'the largest intellectual property theft in human history'.
Yet there is little enforcement. If big tech wants your content, and governments allow it, there is no emergency number to call. The response is often obfuscation and complaints about business models. However, theft is not new; it is an ancient human behaviour driven by power imbalances. Inequality creates thieves on both sides, cementing thievery as a societal principle. The street thief and the colonial empire-builder share a common anti-honour code where acquisition is rebranded as conquest.
This culture is epitomised by US President Donald Trump, who boasts of grabbing whatever he wants, from a Venezuelan oil tanker to classified documents to a woman's private parts. His vision for Gaza, unveiled by Jared Kushner at Davos, reads like a kleptomaniac dream. Globally, the taboo over territorial land grabs has eroded, from Crimea to the West Bank. For Trump and other autocrats, neocolonial expansionism is natural law: the spoils of strength in a world of the weak.
