Insights: “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.” “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.”
Bibliography: Haddow, Douglas. "Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization." Adbusters 29 Jul 2008: Web. 6 Mar 2011. <http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html> In his article, Haddow posits contemporary hipsterdom as an appropriation of post World War II counter-cultural aesthetics without meaning. Haddow uses several anecdotes to highlight this suggested irony of hipster culture. According to Haddow, “Hipsterdom is the first ‘counterculture’ to be born under the advertising industry's microscope” (Haddow). Because the aim of the hipster is credibility, Haddow finds the aesthetic of this culture constantly changing to stay ahead of mainstream influence. Haddow notes that hipsters, in escaping mainstream and upper-class identity, rob the adopted aesthetics of revolution of meaning and are effectively destroying counter-culture.
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