if i called andy samberg and asked him if this was targeting hipsters and he said “yes,” would you recant your lengthy “critique” of this comedic note?

more importantly, i refuse to let you define hipster for me… after all…

I'M AN ADULT!

(… and my dad's not a phone… duh!)

if i called andy samberg and asked him if this was targeting hipsters and he said “yes,” would you recant your lengthy “critique” of this comedic note?

more importantly, i refuse to let you define hipster for me… after all…

I'M AN ADULT!

(… and my dad's not a phone… duh!)

If anything, these two positions are opposed to each other, and isn't it clear that the hipsters win the debate with the video? AdBusters wants counterculture to be “lifestyle activism”, a site of revolutionary potential, of inventing new ways of existing outside of consumer capitalism; The hipster response is that this is just a pretense – it's just an excuse to adopt another stylized, aesthetic performance, self-importantly justified with meaningless moralizing against “the system”, never actually achieving anything.

The interesting thing is that virtually every counterculture can be mocked by pointing out how they take themselves too seriously – that's what the video does. Hipster culture is the opposite – they are embarrassed when you take them seriously, which is why they reject the label “hipster” – it misattributes to it some critique of mainstream society, plus a positive alternative vision. But actually, hipsterism critiques the countercultural movement, and its failure in countering right-wing authoritarian politics since the 60s, and it does this by fully assuming what classic countercultures strenously try to deny: they're just lifestyles. They fail at achieving their officially stated ends because the real goal is to conservatively preserve their own cultural distinctiveness.

Man, you can't tell me what to do.

I'm not going to tweet or retweet.

I'm an adult.