All this is why, unlike those of previous youth cultures, the hipster ethos contains no element of rebellion, rejection or dissent — remarkably so, given that countercultural opposition would seem to be essential to the very idea of youth culture. That may in turn be why the hipster has proved to be so durable. The heyday of the hippies lasted for all of about two years. The punks and slackers held the stage for little more than half a decade each. That’s the nature of rebellion: it needs to keep on happening. The punks rejected the mainstream, but they also rejected the previous rejection, hippiedom itself — which, by the late ’70s, was something that old people (i.e. 28-year-olds) were into. But hipsters, who’ve been around for 15 years or so, appear to have become a durable part of our cultural configuration.
Or maybe not. These movements always have an economic substrate. The beatniks and hippies — love, ecstasy, transcendence, utopia — were products of the postwar boom. The punks and slackers and devotees of hip-hop — rage, angst, nihilism, withdrawal — arose within the long stagnation that lasted from the early ’70s to the early ’90s. The hipsters were born in the dot-com boom and flourished in the real estate bubble.
Affability is a commercial virtue, but it is also the affect of people who feel themselves to be living in a fundamentally agreeable society. Already, the makings of a new youth culture may be locking into place.
