In case you didn't read Adbusters this month

I will quote some of my favorites from Douglas Haddow's brilliant, sharp enough to make your eyes bleed article, The Dead End of Western Civilization:

"An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization - a culture lost in the superficiality of it's past and unable to create new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the "hipster" - a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society."

"...While punk, disco and hip hop all had immersive, intimate and energetic dance styles that liberated the dancer from his/her mental states - be it the head spinning of the b-boy or violent thrashings of the punk show - the hipster has more of a joke dance. A faux shrug shuffle that mocks the very idea of dancing or, at its best, illustrates a non-commital fear of expression typified in a weird twitch/ironic twist. The dancers are too self-aware to let themselves feel any form of liberation; they shuffle themselves along, shrugging themselves into oblivion."

Douglas Haddow listens to the thoughts in my soul

"In many ways, the lifestyle promoted by hipsterdom is highly ritualized. Many of the party-goers who are subject to the photoblogger's snapshops no doubt crawl out of bed the next afternoon and immediately re-experience the previous night's debauchery. Red-eyed and bleary, they sit hunched over their laptops, wading through a sea of similarity to find their own (momentarily) thrilling instant of perfected hipster-ness.
What they may or may not know is that cool-hunters will also be skulking the smae sites, taking not eof how they dress and what they consume. These marketers and party promoters get paid to co-opt youth culture and then re-sell it back at a profit. In the end, hipsters are sold what they think they invent and are spoon fed their pre-packaged cultural livelihood."

And ends it, as all good articles like this do, with a dagger in the heart

"We lost a generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy to 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."