Culture 11's James Poulos writes about sad slackers of the type among whom he lived in LA as the kind of people we might all start to emulate once the thing crashes. Excerpt:
The radical cultural magazine Adbusters caused a stir this summer with its bleak cover story that declared the hipster "the dead end of Western civilization." They scored all the points there are to score against the floozies and dingbats of Silver Lake and Williamsburg. But the smackdown raised a deeper question: what if our hipsters are, in some strange way, our conscience? Our cultural chickens coming home to roost? What else, given the world we've raised them in, do we expect from them?And how weird, wearying, and warlike can that world get before our love for it, too, will crack?
Reminds me of Dmitry Orlov's idea that the post-Soviet crash Russians fared a lot better amid the ruins of their order than we will should we find ourselves in similar dire circumstances -- this, because their expectations were already so modest.
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Mont, E. Law. It might be a good idea to read more than the title bofore posting. Your hubris, or incomprehension knows no bounds.
The hipster lifestyle and ethos are now and have always been predicated on an economic prosperity that hipsters do not contribute to themselves, but which they benefit from parasitically.
Hipsters will be hit -- if anything -- *harder* by an economic downturn than everyone else.
If nothing else, such a downturn will reduce the size of their periodic checks from M and D.
It takes a great deal of money to keep a "hipster" hip.
I've never paid much attention to these poseurs before. I see no particular reason to pay overmuch attention to them now.
Your servant,
Lord Karth
As a student of the social sciences, I'm not at all surprised that 'hipster' culture should have an intuitive awareness of this sort of thing. 'La vie boheme' was born as a way of putting a brave face on youthful poverty and instability.
If I'm pale from working night shift, and dress in black because it's hard-wearing and I have no money or time for fashion, maybe I can add a little eyeliner and call it a 'look'. If I'm over-educated and under-employed, a house in the suburbs and a family are out of my reach, but a tiny shared apartment and evenings with friends at a coffee-house are attainable. And the obscure struggling bands that play in coffee-houses will be my favourite, because they aren't yet successful enough that I can't afford tickets to their shows.
Of course, once this aesthetic has established itself, people with money will pay handsomely to dabble in it, like Marie Antoinette playing milkmaid. But the sentiments behind it - that mainstream society is a hostile wasteland, and middle-class life is an unattainable mirage - remain.
Aquari,
People in genuine -- as opposed to imagined or self-chosen -- economic straits can't afford to go out for coffee or out to see bands, even the crappy ones that hipsters go to see.
In any event, the concept of being "hip" or of being "cool," the concept of rebelling *against* consumer culture, is itself the main motive-force *behind* consumer culture.
One has constantly to buy the latest "cool" commodity fetish to prove to oneself and to others than one is "hip" and not "square," that one is "subversive" and not "mainstream."
Hipsters have it half-right.
They are losers, but not beautiful.
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