ROBIN HOODS 2.0 Like his forefathers, Robin Hood 2.0 steals from the rich and gives to the poor, to which category he might belong. This Robin Hood still shoplifts to redress otherwise uncorrectable social wrongs. But he is known by different names, the hero of generations X or Y: by the oxymoronic label “ethical shoplifter” or the apparently ironic art school locution “tactical interventionist.” His influence is part Hoffman. His revived popularity is demonstrated by manifestos like The Coming Insurrection, written by the Invisible Committee in 2005 in France, published by Semiotext(e) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Los Angeles in 2009, and attacked by Glenn Beck as “evil” in 2010. There is a whiff in such polemics of the graduate school seminar as well as the streets: “‘Becoming autonomous’ could just as easily mean learning to fight in the street, to occupy empty houses, to cease working, to love each other madly, and to shoplift.” Playing the old game of euphemism, Robin Hood 2.0 sometimes substitutes the word “taking”
