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.” Via Frank Webster
{ 3 comments }
I loathe hipsterism, but what else *can* there be in a society where most of the history of mass culture is a mouse click away and where everyone can broadcast their lives (also with a click of the mouse) in a way that only mass media personalities could previously?
And besides, the aim of youth culture has always been to upset the eldsters. 😉 Punk parents would need something pretty radical to upset them, and the laid-back ambient historicism of hipsterism certainly does the trick if its lack of something new is something new.
I remember watching a 1960s documentary from Swinging London that announced in a voice-over that “The Forties Are Back”. As a kid in the late 80s, 60s psychedelia was big with my cooler friends. The past has always been big. And postmodernism was an 80s thing.
If it’s not the case that hipsterism is just the usual 20-year cycle hitting 80s postmodernism then perhaps the hipster generation is just the first with both the economic and technological power to beat the twenty year limit.
I loathe hipsterism, but what else *can* there be in a society where most of the history of mass culture is a mouse click away and where everyone can broadcast their lives (also with a click of the mouse) in a way that only mass media personalities could previously?
And besides, the aim of youth culture has always been to upset the eldsters. 😉 Punk parents would need something pretty radical to upset them, and the laid-back ambient historicism of hipsterism certainly does the trick if its lack of something new is something new.
I remember watching a 1960s documentary from Swinging London that announced in a voice-over that “The Forties Are Back”. As a kid in the late 80s, 60s psychedelia was big with my cooler friends. The past has always been big. And postmodernism was an 80s thing.
If it’s not the case that hipsterism is just the usual 20-year cycle hitting 80s postmodernism then perhaps the hipster generation is just the first with both the economic and technological power to beat the twenty year limit.
I loathe hipsterism, but what else *can* there be in a society where most of the history of mass culture is a mouse click away and where everyone can broadcast their lives (also with a click of the mouse) in a way that only mass media personalities could previously?
And besides, the aim of youth culture has always been to upset the eldsters. 😉 Punk parents would need something pretty radical to upset them, and the laid-back ambient historicism of hipsterism certainly does the trick if its lack of something new is something new.
I remember watching a 1960s documentary from Swinging London that announced in a voice-over that “The Forties Are Back”. As a kid in the late 80s, 60s psychedelia was big with my cooler friends. The past has always been big. And postmodernism was an 80s thing.
If it’s not the case that hipsterism is just the usual 20-year cycle hitting 80s postmodernism then perhaps the hipster generation is just the first with both the economic and technological power to beat the twenty year limit.
Comments on this entry are closed.