The Null Device

The Portland (that's Portland, Oregon, btw) Mercury's Chas Bowie looks at the amount of vitriol focussed at "hipsters":

The truth is, it's all too easy to conjure a mental image of what people mean when they use the word "hipster" derisively. We likely imagine someone overly concerned with fashion, possessive of a condescendingly dismissive attitude toward everything outside their insular realm, a sheep-like trend follower, and an infuriatingly non-individualized personality who likes whatever band Pitchfork tells them to and whose shoes cost more than a day's wages. When I think of the worst end of the hipster sliding scale, my mind goes straight to the too-cool-for-me guy at my video store, who's always too involved in watching the collected music videos of Hall & Oates on the overhead TV to make eye contact while I rent my movie. He's always wearing lame ironic T-shirts, and his attitude reeks of smug... hipsterness. There's no other word for it. And if I perceived the city to be overrun with hipsters like him, I'd be an angry, I, Anonymous-writing citizen, too.

But the truth is, what rubs me the wrong way about this guy has nothing to do with his relative level of hipsterdom. The fact is, the guy is a self-absorbed narcissist who's overly vain about his wardrobe and hairstyle, and is generally unfriendly. As evidenced by sororities, law firms, sports teams, country clubs, sewing circles, and virtually every other social group the world over, this is by no means an exclusively hipster phenomenon. The fact remains that every demographic is composed of roughly 10 percent assholes. Buddhists

Bowie then looks at the "hipster" stereotype (or rather, the "hipster" stereotype minus the "narcissistic asshole" stereotype), as described in a book titled The Hipster Handbook, which suggests that a hipster (in the US, at least) is someone who studied liberal arts, does not vote Republican, and has eclectic tastes in music:

By and large, the term "hipster" is used to point to somebody who enjoys art, good films, and music that you won't hear on most Clear Channel stations. They are generally uninterested in climbing corporate ladders and would instead rather work somewhere that allowed them the freedom to pursue creative endeavors, like their band/crafts/activism/MP3 blog/whatever. They're probably down with recreational drug use, prefer bikes to cars (at least ideologically) and have more interesting homes than decidedly suburban non-hipsters. As it stands right now, we have no term to designate this group of individuals, except for the word "hipster."If I ask somebody what a bar is like, and they tell me it's a hipster bar, instead of recoiling, I figure there will be good music, as well as a lot of people who share my interests. I won't expect it to be full of BMW-driving fatcats with McMansions in the West Hills, or guys who want to chug beers and yell at the football game on TV. If I'm crashing on a friend-of-a-friend's couch out of town, and I'm told in advance that my host is a hipster, I'll breathe a sigh of relief that they'll probably have a good record collection, a lot of books, and a healthy hatred for George W. Bush. If it turns out he has a serious attitude problem and acts like he's the king of Williamsburg, then the problem isn't that he's a hipster, but simply that he's another generic fuckface.

He comes to the conclusion that, while the term "hipster" has been bandied about and abused so much that the only thing that any two people labelled as "hipsters" have in common is "a general distaste for mainstream popular culture" (well, that and a hatred for George W. Bush, though that's more or less moot nowadays). By which token, hating on hipsters looks more like the atavistic herd mentality of bullies, the tendency to reflexively strike out and attack difference, on the gut feeling that difference threatens group cohesion or "values".

Bowie then signs off with:

I'm sure this essay will prompt plenty of emails calling me a hipster (or the charming variation "hipster fag"). So preemptively, I say to you finger-pointers: "Sure, I'm a hipster. Call me that all you want. In the meantime, enjoy your Olive Garden, your Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway, the Tim McGraw and Faith Hill show coming at the Rose Quarter, the Da Vinci Code, Rachael Ray, bloomin' onions, your middle management job that you'll probably die with, the new Rod Stewart box set, and Renée Zellweger's upcoming movie with Hugh Grant. I'll be back here in the middle of the city with my hipster friends talking about art and books, going to see live bands, searching for new experiences, and drinking better coffee than you. Signed, Your Hipster Friend, Chas Bowie".

(via MeFi) ¶ conformism culture hate hipsters metaphorical homosexuality 10

Christian lander, author of the Stuff White People Like blog (and book) visits Melbourne, pronounces it to be "white":

'MELBOURNE is definitely whiter than Sydney," says Christian Lander, before taking a sip of organic Fair Trade coffee. "In Sydney, most people seem to spend their days jogging around large bodies of water," he adds. "Melbourne is more chilled. If I lived in Australia, I'd live here."

And the "whitest" part of Melbourne is apparently North Fitzroy, my old 'hood:

We're in North Fitzroy, huddled over a small table in a trendy cafe-slash-grocer. It's the sort of place that sells organic vegetables, bio-dynamic meat and expensive pots of jam. On weekends, it's overrun by couples with babies on their chests and The Age under their arms. It's the perfect place to begin our search for Melbourne's Whitest Spot.

We leave the cafe and wander down Scotchmer Street and St Georges Road. "This place ticks all the boxes," Lander says excitedly. "Organic bakery! Cafe with retro furniture! Vintage clothing store! Authentic Thai restaurant! And old-school pub! Another organic bakery!"

But then we encounter a pub with — oh no! — pokies. "Everything about this place is problematic. It's definitely not white. But, paradoxically, it makes this suburb even whiter because it reminds everyone that working-class people still live here, which makes it more authentic."

Lander has some other observation on the "whiteness" of Melbourne:

We hop on a tram and spend the next three hours strolling around Brunswick and Fitzroy. Lander asserts that Smith Street's grungy vibe makes it slightly whiter than Brunswick Street. But Gertrude Street, with its record shops, handmade toy retailers and natural cosmetics stores, is the whitest of the lot. It is here his wife Jess buys a funky koala doll for a friend's baby. "That koala was made by someone who lives in Fitzroy," the assistant tells her. Big white tick.

(Smith St. is "whiter" than Brunswick St.? I'm guessing that he hasn't encountered its significant Aboriginal community. Or is Brunswick Street by now gentrified and suburbanised and changed to a different colour (perhaps pink, after the SubGenius usage)?)

Of course, by "white", he undoubtedly means "creative class" or "bourgeois bohemian" or somesuch, with an undertone of opprobrium, a hint of latent racism or sharply wielded and insufficiently atoned-for privilege. Note: merely having the privilege of not having been oppressed for one's skin colour doesn't seem to qualify one as "white"; otherwise, why is having a preference for organic food, vintage clothing and authenticity any more "white" than, say, NASCAR racing or country music, or the default option of honestly vegetating in front of a suburban plasma screen with a bucket of KFC? Lander seems to be identifying whiteness as the hypocrisy of pretending that one is something other than an oppressor whilst maintaining privileges derived from oppression. At least people who drink instant coffee, listen to commercial radio and get their clothes from K-Mart are honest, he seems to say.

Landers doesn't put the case directly in this fashion, and doesn't actually level a serious accusation. Instead, he asserts that "white people" here are "hipsters". Which brings us to the question of what is a hipster. Originally it meant a jazz enthusiast in the 1950s (and, coincidentally, Norman Mailer described the hipster as "the White Negro", in reference to their embrace/appropriation of African-American culture). Now it seems the word is used in several ways. It is used by people of low cultural engagement saying "those people are weird, I don't get them, heh heh", sometimes in a pejorative sense. On the other hand, you often get people who are engaged in creative cultures self-describing as "hipsters", in quotes, because it saves having to explain themselves, and in the next breath using the word pejoratively for superficial fashion victims (or perhaps those whose subculture they don't get).

When the word hipster is used in the pejorative sense, at its harshest it becomes synonymous with pejorative uses of the word "gay"; an aggressive assertion of the metaphorical homosexuality of the subject.

Incidentally, this is not the only parallel between hipsterism and homosexuality. Richard Florida, author of The Rise Of The Creative Class, pointed out a correlation between locales with gay scenes and locales with creative activity. As such, Lander's "whiteness" could be a repackaged form of "gayness", and if one can argue that being a "hipster" is latent racism, one could also argue that hipster-bashing is latent homophobia.

¶ creative class culture hipsters metaphorical homosexuality north fitzroy race stupidity whiteness 9

Griefers attack epilepsy forum, post flashing GIFs, trigger seizures, showing that they've totally pwn3d those epileptics (who presumably deserve it because epileptics are totally ghey or something). Looking further into it, the following detail emerges:

Circumstantial evidence suggests the attack was the work of members of Anonymous, an informal collective of griefers best known for their recent war on the Church of Scientology. The first flurry of posts on the epilepsy forum referenced the site EBaumsWorld, which is much hated by Anonymous. And forum members claim they found a message board thread -- since deleted -- planning the attack at 7chan.org, a group stronghold.

A lot of people are saying that this attack was actually planted by Scientologists seeking to discredit Anonymous, an utterly cynical and callous course of action that, given the Church of Scientology's "Fair Game" policy, does not seem entirely inconsistent with the organisation's history. Though others (in threads such as this one) are pointing out that, before Anonymous took up the anti-Scientology banner and restyled themselves as champions of those victimised by sinister cults, they were essentially a collective of sadistic sociopaths who did a good line in griefing less publically acceptable targets, going well beyond spamming forums with Goatse images and into actual stalking (massively distributed), death threats and highly targeted psychological warfare.

Another possibility: what it the rabbit hole goes deeper, and the whole Anonymous anti-Scientology campaign was engineered by the Church of Scientology to reclaim the moral high ground, discredit critics of their organisation by association, and perhaps even undo some of the damage to their image that Tom Cruise's increasingly bizarre behaviour has done? If so, then it was impeccably timed; the anti-Scientology protests hit the media, latching onto adorably innocuous internet memes (LOLCats, rickrolling) to get maximum traction, and overshadowing a decade of boringly thoughtful criticism of the CO$; with the church's feeble anti-Anonymous campaigns being little more than tinder to parodists, soon Anonymous was equated in the public's eye with criticism of That Weird, Creepy Celebrity Religion. Enough time passed for this to sink in, and then this, and looking into Anonymous/4Chan's history reveals that, actually, they are sadistic sociopaths. Suddenly, rubbishing the Church of Scientology (however justifiedly) seems in rather poor taste, much in the way that toothbrush mustaches were after 1945.

¶ anonymous deception griefers metaphorical homosexuality scientology 1