Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization

This article, Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization, appeared in Adbusters. It is a critical look at one evening in hipsterdom. No idea what a hipster is? Take a look. His point in the article is that "cool" is made up of a patchwork of styles from taken from counter-cultures... with the coolest being the most counter-cultural. This could only happen in a postmodern culture, which is completely comfortable lifting a manner of speaking, of dressing, of living from it's native context regardless of its original meaning. The underlying belief here is that those symbols have no meaning, thus, taking them from their original context is not a problem.

An excerpt from the article:
"It’s an odd dance of self-identity – adamantly denying your existence while wearing clearly defined symbols that proclaims it... We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new."


If you are really interested in diving in to postmodernism and its influences on culture check out Jerram Barr's lecture: Postmodernism and Style.

Also, here is a blogger who wrote a post about this article. The Style of Subversion by Mark Van Steenwyk. He offers some interesting criticisms of the tyranny of cool.