Science & Tech Quote by Hilary Rosen

The line is a deliberately clunky analogy meant to puncture a familiar piece of spin: that enforcing rules is the same thing as opposing innovation. Rosen reaches for the ATM because it’s mundane, widely understood, and morally uncomplicated. No one confuses “don’t steal the machine” with “stop progress.” By choosing an example where the villainy is obvious and the victim is an institution people love to hate, she flips the usual script: even banks, in our cultural imagination, are entitled to basic protection from theft. That’s the rhetorical judo.

The intent is to reframe a debate (almost certainly about piracy, copyright, or “disruptive” tech) away from ideology and toward conduct. She’s not arguing that technology is bad; she’s arguing that illegality doesn’t become virtuous just because it rides in on a new gadget. “Lifted” does work here: it’s slangy, physical, almost comic, yanking the conversation out of abstract talk about “information” and back into property and force.

Subtext: tech evangelism can be a laundering mechanism. Call something “the future,” and suddenly criticism is framed as reactionary rather than pragmatic. Rosen’s comparison exposes that move by showing how quickly it collapses in a different setting. The context is an era when new distribution tools were challenging legacy industries, and public sympathy often tilted toward the disruptor. She’s asking the audience to notice how easily “innovation” becomes a moral alibi.