the hipster turned conservative?

SOURCES/RESSOURCES 📚

Wes Hill, Art After the Hipster: Identity Politics, Ethics and Aesthetics, 2017
Pierre Bourdieu, Questions de Sociologie, 1981

Other sources can be found throughout the video :)

SOCIALS 👩‍💻
Storygraph: @alicecappelle
Instagram: @alicecappelle_
Twitter: @cappelle_alice

[ronbarzilai]

It's spelled and pronounced "Bebop". Otherwise, great video!

[undeadalph]

wow surprised there was no mention of gavin mcinnes. he's considered the godfather of modern hipsterdom and co founded vice magazine back in the 90s. he maintained that OG hipster aesthetic after he left vice, started the proud boys, and became the neo fascist everyone knows him as today. he was doing this kind of thing before it was cool lol

[mikeg]

The term “Yuppie” was created in the 80’s by mass media to contrast with the “Hippies” of the ‘60s. The common trope was that the hippies had grown up, rejoined mainstream society, and become materialistic. BTW, the term “Hippie” was initially a diminutive of “Hipster” implying that they were just kids who liked to play hipster as opposed to the serious, deep, artistic hipsters of the ‘50s like Jack Kerouac.

[vernonmeidlinger]

I've been thinking a lot lately about the hipster friends I used to have who've gone down the alt-right rabbit hole. One other reason I might add is that hipsters and conservatives find value in some idealized past. Hipsters and conservatives are both equally likely to pick a decade past, point to it, and say "see, things were better then."

[elsamarks]

I was absolutely noticing this trend in the 2010s and particularly in churches. When the Lumineers, and Mumford and Sons achieved peak popularity was when Contemporary Christian Music adopted a similar sound (much in the same way they tried with U2 and Coldplay before it.)

I specifically remember the MOST rigid-calvanist churches picking up on this the most. These were the churches that would go to bat for hell, and God's plan to make people predestined for eternal damnation while also framing themselves as the "cool church."

Tattoos became okay, talking about how much you loved coffee and beer became cultural signifiers, and every man tried to adopt the beard and glasses look of a Gavin McGinnis. It really sucked and I think at the time it showed how toothless the aesthetic was.

[ztl]

I feel in many cases it’s less a transformation and more an expansion. Now that it’s been over a decade, the “hipster aesthetic” has gotten so mainstream that suburban conservatives have also adopted it.

The trends escaped Brooklyn and Portland years ago, every city in the Midwest and south now also has a craft brewery run by guys with mustaches and forest tattoos and a dozen old warehouses turned into brick loft condos.

[dissolvedhalcyon]

In my country, Argentina, the hipster aesthetic is associated with quasi-liberal pretentious millenials that think they're eco-conscious when they're really not and live on a daily dosis of speciality coffee and IPA

[middle_pickup]

I knew a guy in my friend group years ago who was the epitome of hipster. He was obsessed with picking all of his consumption habits to differentiate himself from others around him. It was infuriating to interact with him because he was so focused on showing how cool he was rather than building friendships with our group. I haven't thought about him in a long time, but it makes sense why no one wants to be called a hipster now.

[lucaskane]

Hipsterism is definitely very close to yuppieism and conservatism. If we consider the definition of hipsterism to be the obsessive cultivation of one's "brand" and image, that act is something closely related to privilege. Their ability to cultivate their image is closely tied with the maintenance of their privilege and the power structures that support it. Otherwise everything comes crashing down. A lot of these "tech bros" pretty quickly can rally behind fascism, or the rigid enforcement of the status quo, all in service of their egoism.

[kacybraying]

As far as leftists wanting to buy local, I think it's much less to do with a distaste for globalism as it is just knowing that it's easier to know that things are ethically sourced when they come from local distributers within our own communities. I think we want globalism in the sense of an interconnected and united world, but still with locally sourced and grown foods, goods, and services for ethics and sustainability purposes. I think this also simultaneously helps fight big corps and monopolies in certain ways as well.

[frankenviews]

The Hispter lifestyle is something that requires a lot of free time and disposable income. Only the kids from wealthy families become the what is the most popular or familiar versions of what a Hipster is. Underneath the pretentiousness, they always knew that wealth was what made it all possible. With aging out of their 30's, they aspire to be more like their 1%ers parents.

[keiththorpe]

My experience with "Hipster-dom" (as an observer of the subculture here in America) leaves me with the impression that it has always been a somewhat derided and mocked aesthetic, with most people finding its adherents to be insufferably smug, self-congratulatory, trying way too hard to be "cool", and ultimately very superficial. It's no surprise, therefore, that Alt-Right conservative personalities have taken the lifestyle onboard, as many of them are much the same.

[francissquire]

I'm a veteran communist in my 60's and have seen many social trends and fashions in music, clothes; indeed all manner of lifestyle/image things aiming to project progressive views.
I've never been able to afford to follow any of them but have seen how they create divisions, often violent, between eco-warriors, anarchists, communists, socialists, ethnic groups, lgtb+ etc. At the fundamental level our fight is the same but these divisions via phoney appropriation of progressive causes are immensely profitable for conservatives.

[ryanjstannard]

I never really thought of the hypocrisy of the 2010s hipster. They’re so obsessed with being different that they all become carbon copies of each other. They become exactly what they despise.

[nathy]

A similar thing happened with the hipster's parents, the baby boomers/hippies. Their nonconformist subculture turned into the first tech bros (e.g., steve jobs) of the world. So it makes sense that the hipsters would go down a similar path.

[daxvena]

Could it just be that hipsters are getting older? Like when a lot of boomers who were a lot more progressive & anti-establishment when they were younger, over time became more and more right wing? Maybe it could also be related to how the word "libertarian" shifted from a left-wing term into a right-wing one in the US? It started around the 50s but I still feel like there's been a pretty dramatic shift in the past decade.

[dscc_atx]

I’m a self identified hipster, and have considered myself as such since about 2011, and as I’ve gotten older I’ve become more radically left wing. I would also argue that this is most probably the case for most aging millennial hipsters. Whereas I started out being a sort of “socialist” type, I’d now identify myself as an anarcho-syndicalist.

I think it’s also worth mentioning, that a lot of things that retrospectively have been assigned as being ‘hipster’, for me feel off the mark. A big one is this association with hipsters as being this craft beer and coffee consuming snobs. I can tell you that as a broke 22yo hipster living in Chicago during the craft beer boom I drank PBR and cheap whiskey almost exclusively, and recall this being the de facto choice for hipsters at the time. During that time I also worked at craft beer places and the clientele was almost exclusively regular cargo shorts wearing suburban dudes that made enough money to spend $9 on a beer. Just because you spotted some hipsters working at a craft beer bar doesn’t mean craft beer is/was a hipster thing. Likewise with coffee. Hipsters work at 3rd wave coffee shops, but the clientele imo is mostly tech bros/brodettes.

I’ve noticed in the comments that people are focused a lot on there being a specific aesthetic and I also think that’s off the mark. In my opinion the most important aspect of hipster culture is/was always the music. The hipster aesthetic imo was always informed by music, esp indie music, mixed with the general trends of the #menswear era, and has evolved as fashion has evolved. I think to just lump any person you see with a flannel shirt, tattoos, and doc martens into the category hipster is an oversimplification.

TL;DR the things you call hipster, might not actually be, and as the failures of capitalism become more manifest, hipsters are becoming more left wing.

[s.lazarus]

Plot twist: they've always been conservative.

[Drownedinblood]

For me hipsters never really had a political ideology one way or another. My first encounters I thought they were progressive because of their seeming counter culture anti tradition bend even though they were wearing traditional clothing via thrift stores, but I met more than enough of them which were conservatives who'd call me slurs as "jokes" and held less than favorable views on minorities and immigrants, and they were young fresh faced people who were still "cool", not the old craggly conservative that is often depicted. It was kinda the first moment I realized my preconceptions on who follows what political ideology were just wrong.

[thinkfirst]

Conservatives adopting slightly more "hip" attire doesn't make them a hipster, nor does economic nationalism- which they've always espoused.