in this post, i shall defend the hipster against various cultural slurs. in doing so before it becomes commonplace, i cement my position as alpha-hipster. 

in order to understand hipsters, i will employ a financial analogy: the hipster as derivatives trader. a man who trades frozen pork futures performs society the service of future price discovery. he is able to predict how much society will value frozen pork at various points in the future, which makes life easier for everybody who wants to buy and sell pork. the price this derivatives trader charges society is a small bit of value from anyone transacting or consuming pork products such as the mcrib. 

likewise, a hipster peforms the service of 'future cool discovery'. a woman who listens to indie music and knows what will take off before it does is like the derivatives trader, in that she predicts the future as a cultural service. also like the trader, the hipster extracts a bit of coolness from the music she discovers, making it slightly less cool to like the music after she has declared it worthy listening. 

at one point in my life, before i realized i was a hipster, i would have decried the derivatives trader as being a wasteful occupation; "it's just a bunch of men on risers shouting about strips of paper ostensibly bearing some relation to pork" - but such reductionist criticism is as glib as saying that hipsters just wear skinny jeans and drink pbr. yes, it may be true, but that's missing the point - hipsters do those things to signal to each other that they are, in fact, fans of vampire weekend too. 

everybody likes to hate the middleman - but the service she provides is akin to a merchant who moves goods from the source of their production to the place where they are needed. that merchant is like blood flowing in the veins of commerce; without him, there would be fewer producers of goods that are consumed far away from their origin, resulting in higher prices and less availability for all. that's why the mcrib only shows up occaisionaly - not enough frozen pork futures traders know what they're doing.

likewise, without hipsters, we'd have to rely on music labels to tell us which music to listen to, and everybody knows those guys are douchebags. is it really so bad for the hipster to inform you that you probably haven't heard of her favorite band - if that band happens to make music that you end up liking after it becomes 'mainstream?' is there no value in tributaries? are the hipster's skinny jeans really that different from the merchant's cart?

in a sense, the hipster serves as the modern culture hero - sifting through the endless sea of crap produced by the myriad hacky artists, writers and musicians of the world, to deliver back to the people this hot new vinyl. you're gonna love it, man.


(c) mark neyer, alpha hipster