What Is to Be Bought?

Say what you will about Paris Hilton, but she spent family money with the innocent joy of a golden retriever in diamond-studded sunglasses. She never asked us to believe that a shopping spree was dialectical praxis, never put on a cloth cap and pretended to be a proletarian. Piker has the rich boy’s ancient problem: he wants the money, the taste, the comfort, and the moral superiority of denouncing all three. Every expensive trinket must be offset by another call for the destruction of the system which produced it. One wishes he could work out the family drama in therapy, rather than staging it as revolutionary cosplay for Twitch.