My problem with hipsters is that as a subculture, they tend to steal bits and pieces of other cultures to make up their culture instead of inventing their own.
As far as I know, they're the only culture that does this, and more often than not simply because what's being taken is "cool".
Some may say that every culture does this, but I would argue that other cultures will generally expand upon something being taken from somewhere else, where hipster culture will take something for what it is (never expanding upon it) and eventually discarding it once it's lost its "cool" factor.
Overall I consider hipsterdom to be a mostly parasitic and pro-consumerist culture, which is why it should be destroyed
Like every other culture ever, I mean? At least, so long as culture existed in human conception -- that is, so long as we were like, hey, there's this thing that begs us to create a word to understand. It's our collective identity.
Thing is culture is as much defined but the common uniquities people have, as well as the individual idiosyncrasies they have. So, hipster is just another way to understand a general trend of tastes and preferences. Sure it varies, is subjective and all, but it is of practical human purpose.
We all steal bits and pieces. Let's get some crude analysis going on here: Punks are so varied, and varied according to who/where they get the values from to which to fill their vision of an anarchic world: punks are really just the following with a cultural twist: homosexuals (gender-punx), wanna be indigenous (anti-civ punx), homeless randoms (gutter-punx), metalheads (crust-punx), faith people (Christianarchists), post-punks (hipster punks), hippies (dirty kids), etc.
Punk is saying something. So are the other descriptions like hipster. There are a ton of hipster types if you think about it: fixed gear hipster (good friends of the bike-punx), the feminist hipster (good friends of gender punx), homeless hipsters (backpackers), doom-rockers and post-metalers (friends of crust-punx, but definitely more hipsterish), post-hipsters (once-cool parents), etc.
Most likely, we are a series layer of multiple cultures and subcultures -- Like an onion. None of us fall right near the tree of a single trunk of a single culture. We're all on a map.
I'll agree that hipster is way more liberal a word, used to describe a way larger range of cultural traits -- that's wierd as in it loses it's meaning, but also perhaps a better thing to identify with if there is more freedom. I think that i I'm being honest, any punks that are trying to be up with the trends in punk, and not failing at it, are a type of hipster. Hipster is a product of globalizing culture (and let's not have to start the conversation about how much America and UK are in most global punk subcultures), but also, as a word, indicate we're prefering to use singular descriptions for a wide cultural array of people.
So hipster means everything and nothing at all -- in theory. Mostly, its a word that self-conscious hipsters use to describe other people (rarely themselves) that they have enough in common with to get really defensive with and try to point out the differences (relatively few, in the eyes of society) they feel they are there.
I am probably a hipster. I call other people hipsters when I'm just trying to remind myself and others that we're up for cultural critique (like anyone else), and that none of us is better than the other, or when people clearly use their cultural "progressiveness" and constant "irony" to say in many words/actions nothing useful at all. I think most of us are hipsters, but also feel there's no point in bringing it up unless people are being self-righteous, "I'm better than the rest of society because of my tastes" people.
And yet, I have no authority to define hipster. It probably one of the more vague words of our time.
