Hipsters

A bit of link-curatorship from Torrez draws my attention to a Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization, a typically doom-laden yet typically fascinating article from Adbusters, a magazine I used to read a lot back in the early 2000s but fell out of love with for various reasons. Maybe I got old and jaded, I dunno. I still believe in a lot of things the mag stands for but the furrowed brow and hand wringing got a little tiresome after a while. But I digresss. It was the hipster thing that grabbed me, just as the seminal and underrated Nathan Barley did a couple of years ago. It forced me into a situation of almost aggressive denial as I like and do a number of the things that these hipsters like and do, but I don’t think I’m one of them, and yet that’s what hipsters do – they deny they’re hipsters. Ergo, I’m a fucking hipster.

I do think you can draw a distinction though. It’s not about what you do and like – it’s how you do and like them. Or, to put it another way, an idiot is not defined by what they do but by how they approach stuff. This puts me into terribly thin ice now and I’m reluctant to start laying down the boundaries of stupidity in relation to the appreciation of stuff, mainly because such things are relative. I’m an idiot when it comes to wine, for example. I also like stuff for no particularly intellectual reasons. And while I do, at times, think that elitism is not necessarily a bad thing this sort of elitism strikes me as pretty wankerish.

But the fact remains that the stuff I do and like is also done and liked by idiots who, by their patronization of these things, could cause me to be banded amongst them. If you think lofi photography is cool but can’t be bothered to put any effort in you can spend a lot of money on a Lomo, or you can put a bit of effort in. It’s notable that the wanker-ratio on the Through the Viewfinder group is pretty low because the relatively small amount of effort needed to partake acts as a barrier to idiots. There’s nothing wrong with Lomos, by the way. I’d just rather hang with the Vivitar crowd.

It’s not a question of wanting to be cooler. It’s more a strategy, often subconscious, of wanting to be in an idiot-free zone. And it’s tricky because by not wanted to be associated with a certain sort of person you find yourself starting to get a little self-conscious about what you do rather than just doing what you do, and then you become a wanker, judging things by the sorts of people who do them rather than for their own merits. And nobody wants to be like that.

I’ve gone on a bit, which I didn’t intend to. I wanted to just link to the Adbusters piece and then follow it up with this response which provided a handy get out for those of us who find ourselves in this predicament. If I might quote the conclusion…

Adbusters noted the signature peculiarity of hipster culture: hipsters refuse to identify as hipsters. They failed, however, to explain this phenomenon. The explanation is that hipsters are the mainstream, and the mainstream is incapable of identifying itself as such.

Nobody places the sort of political demands on mainstream culture that are placed on subcultures. The majority is too big, too lumbering, and too anonymous to politicize. Extract hipsters from the species of subculture and move them one higher in the cultural taxonomy. Their political burden is lifted.

Western civilization isn’t doomed because it’s never depended on the majority culture for forward progress. Progress emerges on the fringes and gradually impacts the majority. Hipsters will continue to be the young reflections of the dull majority culture and it doesn’t matter. Put your hope into that which hasn’t yet emerged.

And that makes a lot of sense. It’s not so much a category error that’s happening here, more a filtering error. To go back to the lo-fi photography example, you don’t want to be judging people by what camera they use. You want to be judging them by what they do with that camera. There are a lot of idiots out there and you’re not going to filter out the interesting people simply by judging what they wear and what they like. You need to get a bit deeper. Thankfully the idiots don’t tend to get deep, what with them being idiots, so it’s not impossible to find them. It just takes a bit of work.

Point of this post? Oh, I dunno.