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Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization by Douglas Haddow, the lead story in this month's magazine and online at Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters. The blurb for this anti-manifesto:

We've reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum. So while hipsterdom is the end product of all prior countercultures, it's been stripped of its subversion and originality, and is leaving a generation pointlessly obsessing over fashion, faux individuality, cultural capital and the commodities of style.

[(The Hipster Handbook)]

Where Haddow ends:

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.

Comments are most interesting, and include this inevitable pushback:

Gnash less.

And maybe read a history book --> folks have been wailing 'this-generation-is-the-end-of-history!' since before Socrates downed hemlock. Seriously. We're talking Akkadians here.

I mean, when you're retro-ed out, the only way to go is forward. And it's a big world, so something will come along.

Ooo, maybe it's already here.

La Maison Moderne, 1907, Manuel Orazi (French graphic designer, 1860-1934), color lithograph.

Art of the Poster 1880-1918: 162 searchable, browseable, downloadable, high-rez public-domain posters, including much Mucha, 17; a digital collection at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisc.

 Tags  culture public domain

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