Hipsters Have Doomed Us All
Sofia Coppola slouches in a red damask banquette so battered and torn it's practically held together by duct tape. She twists the end of her "Go Metric" t-shirt around her forefinger, staring blankly into the middle distance. Finally, as the flash of yet another polaroid camera goes off and Yo La Tengo's "Deeper Into Movies" comes on the iPod at the long abandoned DJ station, she looks pleadingly into my face and she says, "I never wanted this to happen." Hey, so did you read the one in Adbusters about how hipsters spell the end of Western civilization? Scummy pints of cloudy beer, V-necks, kaffiyehs, and fixed-gear bicycles (no cheese doodle baskets at Bushwick Country Club?), all lamented in earnest New Journalese and questionable pronoun-antecedent agreement. And in what was once an eminently read hipster lifestyle handbook. TNR apologized for the war; this was inevitable, too.
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.
