In his famous thesis published in 1899, American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen suggested that it was the conspicuous demonstration of free leisure time, as opposed to the strict commodity value of a given object, that served as the new status symbol.

He dubbed those made wealthy by the rise of industrial capitalism, and distinguished by their visible avoidance of both labour and its emotional and psychic repercussions, ‘the leisure class’ – a strata that was free to pursue interests of a more Epicurean variety, and to become connoisseurs of taste and good manners. Veblen detailed the many ways in which the communication of surplus time—and by extension, care, attentiveness, and interest—was being used in the exertion of soft power. In doing so, he began to identify the many ways in which power and wealth were becoming stubbornly concentrated within a small community whose tastes and tendencies would become a litmus test for anybody else seeking a portion of the pie.

Veblen’s theory offers a pragmatic objection to the principle of social mobility, showing as it does the rigged state of play even beyond material inequality. His thesis has found a new audience in those who have rightly identified the recent resurgence in conspicuous consumption, aided by the popularity of social media – and the catch-22 of our human capital being tied to the demonstration of superfluous free time, cultural immersion, and refined taste. At one end of this spectrum lie the Instagram influencers who build entire empires out of sharing Henri Matisse images online. At the other end are the Uber drivers being scored by customers according to their musical tastes, choice of air freshener, or style of conversation.

Veblen would have found fertile ground for analysis in many aspects of modern life and consumer society: none more so, perhaps, than the notion of ‘fuck you money’ that I recently learned about while watching the documentary Sour Grapes (2016). The documentary tells the story of Rudy Kurniawan, who was released after serving seven years of a ten-year prison sentence this November. He was the first man in American history to be charged with the crime of ‘wine fraud’.

Peddling counterfeit wine actually mixed in his kitchen sink, Kurniawan established himself as a disrupter in a space dominated by old-boy networks and aristocracy. He reputedly sold up to $24.7 million worth of wine per auction; by the time he was caught, the number of fake bottles shifted was believed to have reached 12,000. Among his victims were brat pack writer and former literary enfant terrible Jay Mcinerney and billionaire businessman Bill Koch.

The mainstay of Kurniawan’s client base, however, was in northern California, with its concentration of money-to-burn tech workers. Unlike the pin-stripe bankers of yesteryear, these yuppies were of a more casual variety, their crewnecks and jeans belying staggering amounts of wealth and a habit of blowing million-dollar bonuses on devil-may-care purchases – the ‘fuck you money’ mentioned above.

Veblen’s theory of the leisure class didn’t negate the desirability of high-value items, but highlighted the necessity for them to also convey a degree of cultural immersion, particularly if the purchases were to play a role in securing wealth and power long-term. Wine, it becomes apparent through Sour Grapes, is one reliable investment for the conveyance of both wealth and cultural capital. As a finite, depleting commodity, its monetary value is staggering – the right vintage from 1945 can now fetch over half a million dollars. Beyond that, it also offers the status of the connoisseur, which can pay dividends both socially and professionally.

In the 1980s, Pierre Bourdieu advanced his own theory of cultural capital, detailing the class signifiers contained within certain objects, pastimes, and aesthetic preferences. He identified a complex—sometimes even inverse—relationship between the commodity value of a given object and its measure of cultural capital: the high-minded tastes of a penniless academic and artist class, compared to a naïve bourgeoisie who lauded whatever was popular. Extrapolating from Bourdieu and Veblen, ‘taste’ boils down to the ability to convey wealth and possess a pseudo-intellectualism that aestheticizes, and therefore debases, the genuinely literary and learned cultures it seeks to emulate.

The wine bottle looms large in the public imagination because of its ubiquity. Most people can drink wine, compared with the level of initiation that might be required in understanding the value of a Rothko – but only a few can both recognise and afford the best quality. Many of Kurniawan’s associates sought the kudos of the latter. It wasn’t enough to be rich: one also had to display the superlative judgment of a refined palate, a rarefied experience, and a worldly perspective. Even after being swindled, Bill Koch proudly shows the cameraman his collection of ‘impressionistic’ paintings, Samurai swords, and Greco-Roman statue replicas. At the point where wine culture collides with American consumerism, the results are distorted and clownish, the original point of fascination blown out of all proportion as Koch leads us through a veritable theme park of wine collecting, where the wine cellar boasts replica medieval chandeliers and the toilet’s walls are inlaid with the carcasses of wine bottles past. There’s a point to prove. A ‘fuck you’, perhaps, to the naysayers who have labelled him a dumb brute.

But one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, and while Kurniawan might have technically breached a slew of federal laws, he also crashed the price of wine collections around the world, publicly humiliating some of the greediest profiteers of human exploitation and exposing the sham that underpins a billion-dollar industry. While legally transgressive, ethically speaking, he was operating in neutral terrain. In fact, the Kurniawan case highlights the ethical limitations of a criminal justice system that punishes exploiters of the wealthy, but seldom ever punishes the wealthy for exploiting the poor: where endemic low pay and dehumanizing work conditions pass as valid, while isolated incidents of opportunism are dealt with with an iron fist. It’s a broken system that makes an arch villain and global pariah of a petty criminal, and an innocent victim of Bill Koch.

The asymmetry doesn’t inspire sympathy, but it does compel some understanding of Kurniawan. I use the freedom fighter analogy here in jest, but it doesn’t quite fit – not least for the fact that Kurniawan seemed to genuinely harbour aspirations of acquiring ‘taste’, and by default, social acceptance. His main crime, in fact, was in obeying the laws of aspiration and moneymaking all too religiously: the laws insisted upon by American, and much of Western, society.

As in the case of Anna Sorokin, the fake heiress who extorted thousands of dollars from the American art scene, the story of Kurniawan hinges on only the slightest re-adjustment of the rules in two industries both governed by hot air, deception, price fixing, and showmanship. In the few instances where I have encountered theft in my own life, it has been at the hands of people—a former work colleague and university associate—who stood at a considerable disadvantage to their peers. The tenacity that would otherwise be lauded had spilled over into criminality only on account of socially-engineered insecurity: an insecurity that insists on assimilation, encourages many people to play the part of a character from a young age, and pushes them to dispense with whatever integrity they might have once had in order to survive – let alone to thrive.