Unfortunately the pip developers had the genius idea to add a "user install" mode which pip will default to in this situation. So if you're not root, you won't

Unfortunately the pip developers had the genius idea to add a "user install" mode which pip will default to in this situation. So if you're not root, you won't be able to mess up your system-global Python, but you can still mess up your user-global Python (deleting some ~/.local subfolders takes care of this).