OK so this writer lays it on a bit thick, but I think he/she does have a very valid point. He doesn’t see any subculture with cajones, and he/she is right because there is nothing of that sort. Hipsterdom is very much connected, as he points out, to advertising—it’s bourgeois and consumerist at its core, even though the people involved often scorn capitalist labor and slum around.* More importantly, it is a subculture that is not really for or against anything, unless you count being “for fun” as a worthy cause.
And it’s true, to a extent, that point the writer makes about not having really lasting loyalties and affiliations: I think that in America and Europe, they are going to tend to be on the left, politically, but there might not be anything amounting to real, sustained, lasting engagement with the political. They are likely to boo George Bush, and to nod in agreement when Al Gore talks about the impending
environmental disaster, but they don’t really have an urgent need to change the world: in fact,
since that reminds me of Marx’s 11th thesis on Fuerbach, one could say that they don’t even bother much with interpreting the world, much less changing it. The hipster likes his fun as much as the rich man, he just prefers to have it with people who share his particular tastes and aesthetics in party, music, cigarettes, etc. People who know the joys of slouching in bed with a laptop, and playing around with Lomos and gasp, even iPhones.
