Gainsaying the gainsayers:

By defining hipsterdom as "...an artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras" the writer is essentially saying that a style from the 70's--say the flannel shirt--was more genuine or authentic during its introduction because it was worn in a way that expressed creativity or youthful rebellion; ideas that hipsters now, because they have "stolen" them, somehow lack.

Instead of deriding the current state as a meaningless rehash of "true" meaning from cultures past, why not strive to understand it as the highly mutating, overtly self-conscious meta-culture it really is? It feels cheap to dismiss the hipster's dance party on the basis of its lacking a "dance style" because this view assumes that we can judge the groups that have developed what are considered compelling dances (seen in the krumping below) alongside those that (seemingly) haven't (the goofy hipsters even further below).





To be sure, I enjoy watching the guy krumping more than I enjoy watching the hipsters bounce around, but I also understand that the second video is just that--kids having fun, getting drunk, rebelling for the sake of rebelling. The writer, in his insistence that hipsterdom is nothing more than a vacuum of originality, misses out on the interesting things they do/create:



It seems to me that more accurately, we have a culture where information--in the form of fashion, music, dancing, blogging or whatever--is in an unprecedented state of availability, making informational melting pots, where, like the writer said, "formerly dominant forms of counterculture (merge) together," the new norm. In other words, internet kids are taking canonization to the new medium. Hipsterdom is what it looks like when a group luxuriates in its significance, when a group becomes its canon.

A cultural critique is relevant if it finds immoralities in a group's behavior, if it highlights the inhumane, but correctable. Hipsterdom is a minor mash-up of innocuous self-definition. That's it. This guy's critique is not only ugly, but unhelpful: it implies that some cultures are more creative, more original, and essentially, more important than others (We don't want to be ethnocentric, but we're human and humans, though sometimes inhumane, are still human. The real deal lies in the limits of cooperation--can we teach lions to think like gazelles? It can't hurt to try.)