midnight motorway noises

This seems to be the topic of the day, I didn't really see what all the fuss was about until I read the article in AdBusters and it made me seethe a little. I had actually been thinking about counterculture and, more precisely, about what our generation's is. This rambling is edited from an email to LMF.

I found myself wondering about the people I know and feeling optimistically certain that these people would have been involved in, if not at the centre of any countercultural activity that was happening fifty years ago. So, I pondered, why not now? If even we can't find anything to dig our nails into before we slip skull-shatteringly down the rock face then what is to be done? I think it's fine to talk about theatre or art and trying to make a difference in your own small way but really, what's our movement? Definitely not the hipsters.

Any decent counterculture needs a unifying force to radicalise mass movements - from flowers in your hair to force and brutality stemming indignance and unrest. With these hipsters that unifier is their fashion - the aesthetics of their "movement". So what counteracts this failed counter culture? What mass unifying force do we have? And if we can't find one, who can?

Whoever described "hipsterdom" as counterculture anyway? Since when has it ever been classed with the great counterculture movements? What about this generation's goths, technogeeks and anti-folk nerds? Or the climate-change warriors, the immigrant millions or the anti-war masses? What happened to them? Surely they would do more for counterculture than the hipsters in the article? Surely, then, it is just the media - and AdBusters - who are reinforcing this lie: that a fashion trend among wealthy city socialites somehow has something to do with politics or rebellion.

Is hipsterdom "the first 'counterculture' to be born under the advertising industry's microscope" as the article suggests? Or, if we take it as it is - a rapidly spreading fashion trend among vapid club kids for dressing expensively tatty - surely, it's just another trend initiated and proliferated by advertisers and media?

The hipsters are a nonentity. The sooner we all accept that the better. It's nothing more than eighties Madonna-wannabes, Cobain-cool grunge chic and global hypercolour t-shirts. It's a fad not a movement, it's just that we are so desperate for protest and for our unifying force that we've pinned ideals to a trend that doesn't exist.

But what is it?!