The Radio Show about "Hipsters" to End all Radio Shows about "Hipsters"

Yesterday I made my solo on-air debut on Radio Student. I prepared a show about the word "hipster", and had the thing down pat... in my head. Nerves got the best of me, and some things didn't come out as clear as I would have liked. So, without further ado, a written summary of what I was trying to say.

It is impossible to define the word "hipster" by looking for a common trait among all phenomena to which the word could be attached, as they are too numerous and diverse and, as the word could shows, no one phenomenon can be unequivocally described with the word "hipster" every single time it appears. It follows that to get to the bottom of this now-common word, it would be a good idea to start by considering literature on the subject.
The relevant literature can be broken down into two groups: satirical or humorous works and negative/academic works. The former - The Hipster Handbook, Stuff White People Like, and the Do's and Don't's column of Vice magazine - are comical in nature. While they provide much interesting information on the subject and, each in its own way, plenty of insight, they are ultimately the product of a rich tradition of self-deprecating humour (they are written by self-proclaimed hipsters/white people), which itself has nothing to do with hipsters as such. They must be understood in this light.
The second group encompasses both lay critiques of hipsterism, such as internet content like Supernews' Hipsters in Space Cartoon and other purely negative outsider depictions, and academic criticism, which, with little exception, is almost entirely negative. Various academic works on the subject of the hipster have focused on: gentrification, class prejudice, the inability of today's youth to produce a real or viable culture, political apathy, a naive view of the past, etc. Most of these claims can be easily refuted.
One work that, in contrast to those listed above, is actually fairly helpful in understanding the hipster is Gavin McInnes' essay for the website Taki's Magazine. I perhaps should have pointed out that while I strongly suggest everyone read said essay, and I generally greatly enjoy the author's insights, I in no way agree with or endorse any of his political beliefs or social prejudices (slovenec, ki bo še naprej raziskoval dela tega avtorja, bo hitro naletel na skrajno desničarske ideje). Mr. McInnes' work is basically a summary of a conference he attended at UCLA on the subject of youth culture. He bases the essay around the assumption, almost universally voiced at the conference, that "today more than ever, youth is wasted on the young," an assumption he completely rejects. The part of the essay which seems key to me in understanding the hipster is where he points out how, thanks to the internet, young people today operate outside the system to create with greater freedom than ever before. In doing so, he claims, they are not "ripping off" the culture or style of underprivileged groups (as several academics had claimed), but are rather themselves constituting a DIY culture of their own similar to that once typical of poor or underprivileged groups, in particular blacks.
The two key points Mr. McInnes is trying to make draw us nearer to an understanding of this phenomenon. First, the almost universal negativity surrounding hipsters and young people which serves as a framework for his essay. This is in fact the one universal trait of all accounts of hipsters. In the satirical works listed above, this can be easily explained, as I have shown, by the fact that these works draw on a tradition of self-deprecating humor, and that it is this, and not any "information" they may provide on "hipsters", that makes them noteworthy. Of course, this hasn't stopped serious criticism from using these works as hard evidence. Although the accounts of serious criticism use a number of very different points of departure, and may ultimately take the form of a Marxist, aesthetic, ethical, etc. critique, the one thing they all have in common is that, in the final instance, they attribute to hipsters, as individuals and not as a group,  general bad manners.
The second point Mr. McInnes makes is the connection between "hipsters" and engagement in non-mainstream, alternative forms of consumerism.
I tie the two together and add a third element that to date has been entirely absent from the discourse on hipsters: the incredible expansion, roughly in the middle of the previous decade, that is at about the same time the hipster took shape, of the media to appeal to include wide range of perspectives and to include a very wide range of groups. I illustrate this using TV, although I believe that this observation applies to the entire world of consumerism. Whereas TV was once considered both an opiate for the masses and an ideological apparatus in the way it excluded certain groups and behaviours, today, TV has both widespread intellectual appeal, largely due to premium cable dramas, and is extremely inclusive, as evidenced by the once invisible groups who today have a significant presence on television: turbofolk culture in Jersey Shore, nerd culture in Big Bang Theory, G4, and "cult movies" based around nerd culture.
This shift has, however, meant that in it's efforts to provide an all-encompassing representation of the cultural sphere, TV specifically and consumer culture in general has had to forfeit its moral imperative; the sphere of mainstream consumerism is no longer a reflection of broader societal norms and morals. Whereas those who were once forced to create a culture on the fringes of the mainstream media that excluded them could be easily labelled morally questionable (all rap or RnB as "gangster rap", heavy metal culture as satanic, mods and rockers as a moral threat to the nation, etc.), today, the diversity of the media and consumerism makes this impossible.
"Hipsters" or, more accurately, young people, still continue to partake in forms of consumerism on the fringes of the mainstream. Even though ideological limitations and the exclusivist nature of the media have disappeared, the limitation created by the fact that "the media" and "consumerism" are in fact publicly traded companies with a commitment to create value for shareholders remains as strong as ever. When they engage in non-mainstream forms of consumerism or non-mainstream media, young people do so for a wide variety of reasons. Although a desire to set oneself apart (which, I also note, is more typical of certain age groups, eg. late high school, college students) by choosing an obscure or uncommon or non-mainstream product could be a factor in this engagement, it is only one of many factors. By choosing to eat organic, one could be exhibiting "snobbish" behaviour; however, it is equally likely that the person in question simply does not want to eat genetically modified slop (and if said person has used the internet to do a little research, this explanation is even more plausible), and the real answer could be a combination of both factors. Another example, which I wish I would have thought of when I was on the air: Ariel Pink, one of the few indie musicians I'd swear by, is often said to pursue a lo-fi, cheap-sounding aesthetic in his music, ostensibly for the sake of distancing himself from a mainstream, polished sound. He counters these claims by saying that this is reading too much into his music, and that for him as a musician, lo-fi elements are merely a tool,  something I feel is clearly borne out in his music. (Again, I borrowed this general observation from Gavin McInnes).
We can therefore conclude that "hipsters" can be broadly compared to past cultural movements in the way that they participate in forms that are not part of mainstream, big money, corporate consumerism. Gavin McInnes is even of the view that today's young people are much better at it than any previous generation of young people. However, as I have pointed out, the way the media now accommodates (as a viable profit-making strategy) a vast spectrum of cultural and moral views makes it considerably more difficult to portray the culture of young people as a moral threat. It follows that the only way that remains to discredit those who, even momentarily, partake in non-mainstream forms, is by attributing to individuals not socially dangerous attitudes, but generally harmless character flaws: egoism, narcissism, bad manners, etc.*

We can therefore conclude that when someone who has been labeled a hipster says "I'm NOT a hipster," nine times out of ten, all the person in question is trying to say is "I'm not an anti-social, narcissistic asshole."

And most people who could be reasonably labelled hipsters are in fact not anti-social, narcissistic assholes.

Regarding the last part of the show, I greatly miscalculated the time I would need to present my thoughts. I now realise that even if I would have had the 20 or 25 minutes I had originally planned instead of the 10 or so minutes I got, it would have been insufficient. I plan on preparing a show dedicated to this topic sometime in the near future. In the meantime, you can find some of my thoughts on it in this short blog post.

 * This may sound greatly exaggerated. But to take one example that is in line with my observations about organic food as a part of "hipster" culture: The Simpsons episode where Lisa decides to become a vegetarian (The Simpsons played a big part in the shift that occurred in the media, among other things, by poking fun at staid moral attitudes). Lisa appears at a family barbecue with a large bowl of red liquid and says "I've made enough gespacho for all, now you don't have to eat meat!" The guests laugh loudly, and Barney Gumble (the town drunk) tells her to "Go back to Russia!" Which is to say only a Communist would be a vegetarian. I am aware I previously advised against using humor as hard evidence, but one need but read official documents on Satanic ritual abuse to see that, as an expression of a general attitude, this "joke" was not far from the truth.

Facebook "sucks" and will continue to "suck" until it starts charging me

It's obvious that Facebook isn't or won't be able to make money. I should add "for investors". Because unlike what CNBC would have us believe, they're the only ones unhappy about Facebook.
Amid all the "buzz on the Street" or "squawk" or whatever, that's something that nobody is really noticing. It all goes back to what Thorsten Veblen noted a long time ago: the root of any financial turbulence can be traced to an unhappy capitalist(s) (the x-treme paraphrasing is mine). What exactly said capitalist is unhappy about is of little concern, it could be a tooth ache for all we know, but the fact is, he isn't hitting the trading floor until he feels better. Since Thorsten Veblen's time, this monitoring of how rich people are feeling has been extrapolated into countless indices and indicators generally known as "the market", and since about 2000, these have come to be a real time representation of, well, the life pulse of all existence. But they aren't, and what makes the people who use or buy stuff happy isn't necessarily what makes the coloured arrows go up on the Street.

In other words, Facebook is fine, there is nothing wrong with Facebook. Before the failed IPO, I could impress pretty girls I haven't seen in 5 years with my ironic use of 50 Cent lyrics just as well as I can now; before the shares missed their target price, the people I used to work with could post pictures of neglected and abused animals and make me feel bad just as easily and effortlessly as they can now.

That's because Facebook has what I call a "culture of usability". "Usability" implies that for most people, the product or technology in question is and can only be relevant during actual use and interaction. "Culture" implies that when a new product or technology appears, lots of different people converge around a general pattern of use.

To take an example, for many people, owning a car is about getting from point A to point B when they need to get from point A to point B, and owning a drill is about being able to drill a hole if and when they need to drill a hole. At the same time, and in opposition to cultures of usability, there exist cultures of identity: the guys from Top Gear use cars to define who they are even, or especially, when they are not going from point A to point B; Tim "the Toolman" Taylor (yes, I had to go there) needs more power, arrgh arrgh arrgh even, and especially, when there's no particular need to drill a hole. Note that while cars and drills are not free, the person who needs a car only to go to work and back (for simplicity's sake, let's say our worker works at a company where what you drive doesn't impact your chances of promotion or having sex with coworkers) will be less likely to buy a turbo-charged something-or-other (I'm not a car guy), and the person looking to hang up a picture on the wall will in all likelihood not be bothered by the 20 or so seconds of loud noise the drill makes to the point that he or she would shell out an extra fifty dollars for a drill with a noise-muffler. And it's the turbo charged widget, the noise muffler, that create added value, which, if you're a producer of goods, is "where the real money is."

That's the seat of Facebook's financial woes, not the fact that not enough users are clicking ads or the ones that are clicking aren't buying enough stuff. As the market-based discourse enshrouds Facebook in negative hype, what it's really trying to do is break the bad news: we don't really like Facebook as such, we're just "using" it to stay connected. To illustrate, let's take a look at a historical example of how big money has generated and perpetuated the myth of the transition from "dark ages" of usability to the "golden age" of identity with another technology that, once the differences are cancelled out, was in a position similar to the one Facebook now finds itself in.  

The myth I'm referring to is the "North American Video Game Crash of 1983" (note the caps and the quotes). As the adding of the year to the end of the phrase shows,  the whole concept was invented well after 1983. And invented is the right word. Yes, on the level of making tons of money on fads, a severe disruption occurred when Atari, then basically a synonym for video games, got too greedy, overpaying for licenses which it converted into shitty games; also the Atari 2600 had no lock-out mechanism, so anybody could make games, and anybody did, and they were shit. But then the story continues: The result was a glut of unsellable game cartridges. Retailers sent back the games they had already ordered, the video game "fad" was seen as just that, cue the stock footage of the angry early-1980s mob that VH1/CNN uses for half-hour documentaries about Disco Demolition/Ryan White. The whole of North America took a vow never to play video games – not just from Atari, but from any manufacturer – again, which ultimately didn't matter, because, having been pushed to brink of bankruptcy by the shittiest fad ever, retailers were adamant in their refusal to stock them.

Far from being merely the "mainstream" account, this is the only version of the story. The problem is that regardless of whether a particular account is targeted towards the business crowd or towards video game nerds, whether it's being told by CNBC or G4, the protagonist remains the same: profit; profit for Atari and Activision, profit for the countless other companies who had gone from manufacturing kiddie pools to manufacturing consoles in the hope of cashing in on the trend, profit for retailers. Of course, the huge sums of money involved are what make the story of the Crash generally interesting. But at the same time, the money angle is a one-sided account (the rough outline of which I sketched above). A broader account that includes non-official sources, i.e. childhood memories from yours truly, paints a different picture, one that challenges the generally accepted story on several points.

I got my Atari 2600 in 1986. 1986? That's right, three years after the video game crash supposedly made the situation in the US similar to the current situation in China (where consoles are banned). And I loved my 2600. I'd play it all the time. My neighbours and friends to this day, Mike and Greg, would come by to play my 2600, then I'd go to their place to play Donkey Kong Jr. on their Colecovision. Again, in 1986. And our enthusiasm had surprisingly little to do with the actual games: for us, those consoles meant the giant leap from not being able to play games on a TV to being able to play games on a TV. Firing up an emulator today, it's easy to concur that there were terrible games... but to an 8 year old in 1986, the world of difference separating E.T. or Pac Man for the 2600 and not being able to play games on a TV was incomparably greater than the relatively minor (the Atari 2600 was very primitive) differences in quality between Chase the Chuckwagon (A game about dog food published by Purina) and Frogger (a decent port of a good game). And that's usability. I didn't know the pixelized adventurer in Pitfall was named "Pitfall Harry", or even that Mike and Greg's Colecovision was much more powerful than my Atari 2600. It was all just video games, a fun, novel way to spend the tons of free time we had.

And this state of indifference, of playing video games because they were something new and because as such, they had an immediate appeal to our young minds, continued well through the era of the NES, that is, the system that supposedly brought the "dark ages" of the crash to an end and sent video games on the path to the glorious, multi-trillion dollar future that awaited them. James Rolfe, the Angry Video Game Nerd, is the author of a series of videos that presents a fascinating, game-by-game analysis of the terrible games we played throughout the NES era. And by "played", as James makes abundantly clear, I certainly do not mean – as in many generic tales cited in accounts of the Crash – that we played these games for five minutes, realised they were junk, and threw them in the trash. No, we actually sat down and tried to play through these horrible abominations of mankind: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Ghostbusters, Fester's Quest...

Instead of a climactic arc with a dramatic crash ending in miraculous rebirth, therefore, the actual, lived history of the "Crash" is one of continuity for many people my age. So why is this angle, which for many people is the only one that actually affected their relationship towards video games (kids don't know what share prices are, or at least they didn't in 1986) systematically ignored? Watch any E3 press conference, go on any gamer forum and the answer soon becomes clear. When the NES ended the "Crash", that is, when it made video games attractive to capital, what it did that mattered was take the first step towards molding the loose, ad hoc cultures of usability that had taken shape around video games since the time of Pong into profitable cultures of identity closely managed from corporate HQ. Already with the 16-bit era, supporting a console meant, ipso facto, supporting and identifying with, from bottom to top, the organisation that made it: its supply chain, its board, its advertising and PR departments (hence the cult following that's sprung up around Sega's advertising)... and of course its business results. Today, it's not uncommon for arguments among gamers about a particular console or game manufacturer to feature Q4 data from said manufacturer; similarly, it's CEOs (as opposed to people actually involved in making the games) that take center stage at E3, to the uproarious applause of legions of fanboys. It's a situation that, I can imagine, works out well for game manufacturers (and their shareholders), who are constantly thinking of new, legally questionable ways to "lock in" players' wallets. (It is interesting to note that the next generation Xbox and Playstation consoles will be designed so as to prevent used games from being played, thus shutting down another culture of usability, that of the exchange and rental of used video games).

Twenty years from now, we'll probably be telling the same tale about Facebook. The purely fiduciary slump Facebook is now in will be retrospectively reworded to imply that we the users were in fact dissatisfied with Facebook before it started charging us. Once a new pay-to-play version comes out (probably as a "free" feature of a pay-to-play service like Xbox live or Apple TV), it will be outwardly recognized as superior from the perspective of the user and, less outwardly, as assuring for the investor in its focus on brand identification as a basis for added value.

So there you go, Mark. If you aspire to be a trillionaire, convince me I love Facebook more than I love my friends.