Q: What do you call someone who looks just like you, who you’ve never met?
A. A stupid fucking hipster.
Yes, the hipster has long served as a convenient scapegoat for people who aspire to be hip without the “-ster”. Onto them, we project our insecurities about our own superficiality, inauthenticity, and even insecurity itself. What better way to spackle over one’s embarrassing desire to be cool, then to point at some guy wearing pants a millimeter skinnier than one’s own and say “see that guy? He’s obviously desperate to be cool. Sad, really.” But hipsters aren’t just a collective figment of our neurotic late-capitalist imaginations; they’re also a trend. Since hipsters are defined by trendiness, this represents a meta-trend, a trend in favor of trendiness itself. In “The Hipster Trap,” Steven Kurutz grapples with the contradictions and Derridean aporias created by his own internally incoherent mental conception of the “hipster.” Continue reading “Trend of the Week: Hipster Ubiquity”
I Hate the New York Times 