Dammit, I wasn’t going to comment on this article… or at most I was gonna chime in with a TL;DR and leave it at that.  But since this is turning in to a vancouver tumblr reblog orgy (™), and since the article has real holes… here’s my 2 cents:

• the article makes a few heavy handed assumptions: society can only have one - and only one - counter culture. A bunch of ill-dressed drunks in a bar is not counter culture… to me, people like cameronR with his bike valet thing for 10’s of thousands of people appear to be engrossed in “authentic counter culture” (to use AdBusters’ phrase)
  
  
• it doesn’t matter what scene/lifestyle someone identifies with at 17 years of age… they’re going to be a useless little fuck.  I’m sorry, we all were… in the 90’s at 17 years of age I used fake ID’s to go to bars, I wore baggy hip hop clothes, my biggest concern in life was getting wasted, looking cool, and touching boobs… pretty much exactly like the anecdotal example used in the article, which argues we’re going to hell in a handbasket (on a fixed gear bike).

A single scene that’s perceived as shitty or apathetic is not representative of a generation AND NEVER HAS BEEN.  The mass majority of people in the world don’t actually create change/art/greater good, it’s a select few individuals who feel compelled to do so… these people span across sub-cultures… it could be someone who hangs at the Biltmore or someone who just hits the books at SFU or some suburbanite from Surrey.

seanorr:

God, why am I always defending this magazine?

But this is what they do. If anyone has a mandate, nay duty, to write about hipsterdom and its self-obsession. Perhaps however Quinn, your definition of hipster is a bit broad for this article. What I mean by this, is that in Vancouver, and I myself am hyper aware of this, hipsters are on the defense. Just look at this article. What we need to realize however, is that most hipsters, most of our friends, are actually quite poor, politically active, artists/musicians, vegans, bike riding, spontaneous young people. We are not the sneaker-obsesses, coke snorting, skate-wiggers I believe the article is referring too.

blownspeakers:

Regardless of what you think of “hipsters,” I hope you’ll agree that Adbusters doesn’t have any business calling anyone out for being shallow, “culturally barren,” and almost wholly style over sustance.

They should start the revolution by having a mass burn of their vapid, poorly written magazine.

Fan the flames of discontent!