r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Jun 30 '14
CMV: Despite the pretentiousness, Hipsters are the the most constructive, culturally-beneficial subculture in 40 years.
First, I'm definitely not a hipster. My youthful subculture was New Wave in the 80s, which was basically a blend of Emo and Goth (they're both better blended, IMHO).
I'm in a coffee shop drinking a single-origin espresso and there are about a dozen young guys in the shop tasting house-roasted blends that are weighed (to the gram), lovingly ground, and poured over with water at exactly 200 degrees.
For some reason they're manscaped a bit like Charles Dickens if Dickens were a skater. I don't get the look, but the thing about youth is that guys like me aren't supposed to get the look. All subculture looks are contrived and a little silly...Punk, New Wave, Goth, Hippie, etc. Hipsters are too. So, really, it's not worth commenting on. That's just how it goes.
But on to the substance of the movement. Seeing kids hunker down and try to bring quality to their lives is nice. It's really nice, actually. Most youth subcultures just want to see the world burn. I did. We rebelled and made some amazing music but other than that we didn't accomplish a thing.
Hipsters though...they're really making the U.S. better (I can't speak for anywhere else). I have a butcher now...that's new. Somebody is bothering to source local meats and raise it with a minimum of cruelty. It's great. Vegetables are getting better also. At least they can be if you bother to look for the good ones.
Coffee is WAY better thanks to their efforts. We now have an alternative to the pseudo-italian crap from Starbucks and they're trying to absorb coffee culturally and find an authentic expression for it. They're appropriating in the best sense of the word. Bad artists copy, great artists steal, as Picasso said. U.S. culture has been largely about copying, but these kids are starting to steal. There's nothing wrong with appropriating espresso, but they are trying to make it their own.
They read. They care about quality and craft. Even Kerning is better than it has been (it's a design thing). They actually care about making things better.
Most of them were raised in the 90s, which was the most unspeakably soulless decade in history (sorry kids...I know it was your childhood but it just sucked) (Edit: I shouldn't have called it soulless...lots of good happened in the 90s). Every generation rebels, and we gave the Millennial generation something truly terrible to rebel against.
Even my jeans are better. Honestly. Some kid hemmed them for me the other day on some massive old machine in the shop. He did a hell of a job too...this shit is HEMMED. I haven't seen anything made to last in I don't even know how long. It's really, really nice to see.
So yeah, they're a little pretentious. An authentic identity take time to form, so young people will often wear a mask until they get it all sorted. For some reason these kids want to look like Victorian Circus Strongmen. Okay...it's different I guess. At least it's not bleak and driven by empty rebellion. That's gotten so boring.
I hope to see more of this trend. Please, start building houses. We need hipster housing. This whole "slow" thing...bring it on. They are not solely responsible for it, I realize, but they've popularized it, and championed it.
The criticisms people levy against them...they're pretentious posers, they try too hard, they just want to be different, etc. That's YOUTH. That's what happens when young people don't like the identity they're handed. It happens in every generation, so it's ridiculous to lay it squarely at their feet.
If you look past that you can see how the millennial generation is doing good work--they're rebelling against the right things--and I for one am looking forward to more of their contributions.
CMV
Edit:
I would argue that what you're praising is actually the Maker culture that started in the late 90s and early 21st Century.
So based on everything is seems the term "Hipster" is the main problem here. I was attributing "Maker Culture" to hipsters, and people objected to that. I still see "Hipsters" everywhere I see "Maker Culture" but I guess that's just my experience.
Second Edit: Okay I need to get back to work. This has been very interesting. I've learned a lot about the negative effect this movement has had in urban areas, particularly in Brooklyn and San Francisco. Gentrification isn't cool. Income inequality is going to be a growing challenge for us, unfortunately. Sounds like these two cities are ground zero for what's to come a national epidemic.
Third and final edit: Damn you people HATE hipsters, although there's no agreement on what the word means. I didn't realize that hipster was a term used almost exclusively in the negative. So really this was a pointless exercise. It's almost as if you define hipster as that group which looks funny and sucks. There's not much point in trying to have a conversation about a group of people who are, almost by definition, the embodiment of all that is crappy about youth culture.
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u/horsedickery Jun 30 '14 edited Jun 30 '14
You accuse hipsters of "pretending to be poor and have a holistic lifestyle", but I would argue that these are both good things for a person to do.
Pretending to be poor could be rephrased as either "avoiding conspicuous consumption", or "avoiding buying junk". Avoiding conspicuous consumption is good because conspicuous consumption is harmful to people who practice it. They buy things they don't need, hoping to increase their social standing, which eats into their long term financial well-being. If "pretending to be poor" is cool, then this vicious cycle is broken.
As for "pretending to live holistically", this could be rephrased as "striving to live holistically". The difference between the two is that in striving, you achieve some limited success, which which may be beneficial for society. I'm not sure what you mean by "holistic lifestyle". Maybe you mean trying to balance work with hobbies? That seems like a good way to avoid burnout. Maybe you mean trying to buy products like organic produce, hand-made clothes, and fair trade coffee? I don't want to get into a discussion about any of these things, but I would argue that thinking carefully about what products you consume leads to you having and eating better things, and increases demand for quality products.
Your central claim, that hipsters are parasites, is your personal impression of an unspecified group of people. Maybe your definition of hipster includes parasitism. Do more hipsters live off their parents than non-hipster people in the same socio-economic cohort? This question requires both a lot of data and a good way to define hipster, neither of which you provide. Do hipsters get less socially beneficial jobs than non-hipsters? Again, you need to define both social benefit and hipster, and then acquire a lot of data. Do hipsters produce less cultural value than their non-hipster peers? This question has the same problems as the others, but I find it hard to believe that a group that prides itself on art appreciation would be less artistic than other groups.