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So it’s come to this. Outside, sirens doppler back and forth every few minutes. My street is one of the quiet ones. The looting is restricted to areas with high street brands.

The irony here is so thick it could cure anemia. London is overrun by looters, smashing in windows, tearing open shutters and making off into the night with armfuls of tracksuit bottoms, DVD players and flat screen TVs. The streets are strewn with hangers.

The purported flashpoint of this widespread disorder? The shooting of a young man in Tottenham, North London, named Mark Duggan. He was shot by the police in what can generously be described as an opaque incident involving an exchange of fire that may or may not have involved the police accidentally shooting each other and blaming it on him. Duggan who? I want Burberry!

The people smashing into sports shops and electronics stores probably don’t even know Duggan’s name. They’re too busy, in the words of this girl, “getting [their] taxes back.”

With Duggan’s death fresh enough to be bandied about as a cause, the rioting could be somehow explained as a form of protest, an eruption of vitriol from the disaffected youth inhabiting the poorer districts of this city, struggling to find a role in society that won’t involve performing oral sex on abandoned railway platforms, or stacking shelves at Tesco.

How is this anti-establishment sentiment made manifest? By what can only be described as violent shopping.

Rampaging through the communities they grew up in, rioters take out their frustration over unemployment and boredom on the shops and businesses that provide jobs in their area. They smash-and-grab the luxury items which are supposedly the fruit of all the social climbing, work and effort society enshrines. Their generation’s grand gesture of disobedience is straight-up Western-style consumer-capitalism, pure and uncut, direct from the amygdala. Take whatever you can get your hands on for yourself and trash the commons with impunity.