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Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters: “An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the ‘hipster’ – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.”

Overwrought much?

It seems to me that claiming “hipster” is a sign of the coming societal apocalypse is handwringing at its worst. Every youth movement has had its critics, claiming it (whatever the current “it” was) exposed a dangerous bankruptcy among the youth of the day. Hippies were dead-enders, punks were nihilists, grunge and Gen-X were composed of slackers.

Only in retrospect can people look back and point to the truly innovative parts of the movement, and too often that retrospective view ignores the vast majority of the movement which was just a bunch of kids doing what everyone else was doing. Hipsterdom in this respect is no more or less a victim of this tendency.

Additionally, this is just false:

Hipsterdom is the first “counterculture” to be born under the advertising industry’s microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation but also forcing its participants to continually shift their interests and affiliations. Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group – using their capital to purchase empty authenticity and rebellion.

Anyone who remembers the grunge explosion of the 90s surely remembers that within a season or two, even the catalogs of JC Penney’s and Sears were full of plaid shirts and baggy, ratty jeans. “Lumberjack chic” was adopted so rapidly by some of the biggest names in fashion and advertising that it quickly became a cliché, much to the chagrin of many a person in the American Pacific Northwest.

Countercultures and underground cultures are always a reaction against two things: what is going on in the broader society and the prior generation’s counterculture. If there’s one thing I’m absolutely sure of, it’s this: the hipster scene is not the end of youth culture; its’ just another step along the road. The next “scene” will come along (and, probably, is already developing even as we speak).