Anti-establishment types are latching on to yomango, in which items are taken from one store only to be put back in another, writes Derek Scally in Berlin.

The silly season sparks silly ideas. Once it was flash mobs, where groups of strangers met at an appointed public space at an agreed time to do something idiotic and then vanish. Now flash mobs have spawned yomango, a kind of guerilla shoplifting performance art coming soon to a store near you.

Meaning "I steal" in Spanish slang, yomango began in Spain three years ago when groups of people met to "liberate" products from stores, put them on display and then later return them to a different store.

Of course it's not just random stealing; there is a highfalutin' ideological concept behind it, as long and laborious as a Star Trek back story.

Organisers describe yomango as "a promotion of shoplifting as a form of civil disobedience and direct action against multinationals".

"Capitalism has always exploited your work and your energy; now it wants to colonise what you think, feel and desire. If you're sick of seeing your desires trapped into marketable objects, you need yomango," wrote the founders three years ago.

Now visitors to the yomango website can read the "10 style tips for a yomango life".

A quick read will tax even the sturdiest suspension of disbelief.

"Dare to desire: yomango is your style: risky, innovative," says Style Tip No 2, borrowing heavily from every perfume commercial of the last decade.

"It is the articulate proliferation of creative gestures."

No, I don't know what it means either.

The authors of the style tips then descend into a sub-Naomi Klein rant which, unlike the No Logo author's writings, is riddled with poor translations, laughable spelling and increasing incoherence in an attempt to get readers to cast off existing brands in favour of the yomango brand.

"The yomango style is an open-ended process, generating tools, prototypes and dynamics which flow and proliferate, waiting to be reappropriated and to circulate," conclude the style tips, sounding like an overtired Yoko Ono.

After Spain, yomango has caught on in Germany, where locals have taken the concept one step further to steal food and organise a free picnic, nicknamed a Vokü (from Volksküche, people's food).

German police raided a yomango group at an anti-capitalist rally near Hamburg earlier this month.

Officers confiscated computer equipment they suspected was connected to organised looting networks, but have yet to say what charges, if any, they intend bringing.

The raid is described in indignant detail on the German yomango websites where, a few clicks later, pictures show organisers unselfconsciously wearing Adidas T-shirts, using Apple computers and drinking Vittel water.

It all cements the suspicion that it's either a big joke, a waste of time, or both, organised by well-off twentysomethings with enough time and money on their hands to care.

"Capitalism sneakily manages to create needs that are then costly (in every sense) for us to satisfy. Don't renounce your desires: just don't let the market determine how you manage them," write the yomango idealists on their website, before ending with an interesting observation: "capitalism currently works through the exploitation of collective intelligence and creativity."

You could say the same of yomango.