The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption

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Given that hipsterdom has been reduced to empty trend-hunting, it’s difficult to remember that the original hipsters were the original advocates of minimalistic consumption –

It’s really ironic that a subculture with a liberal/ anti-establishment/ anti-brand philosophy has transformed into become a an empty, recursive, self-referential focus group for marketers.

In Chapter 2 of ‘Hip: The History’, John Leland lays out the history of this connection between being hip and saying no to consumption —

Within hip’s juggernaut is a quest for the real, a belief that enlightenment involves stripping away sophistication, not adding it… Hip promises truth received, not constructed… This call to primitive experience resists (America’s) cult of progress. In place of status or achievement, the writers offer non-material values by which people could define themselves. This impetus — repeated by bohemians, beboppers, action painters, hippies, punks, hip-hoppers etc. — has been remarkably resilient over American history. Though we often think of these as discrete responses to the mainstream, they are really an ongoing part of what makes America American. They are not footnotes; they belong to the story. By our rebellions are we sometimes best known.

Consider Henry Thoreau, who removed himself from society, retreated to the countryside, and build a crude house in the woods around Walden Pond, the setting for his best-known book ‘Walden‘ –

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life… I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world.

Then, there is Walt Whitman, whose 1855 preface to ‘Leaves of Grass’ can stand as a “founding hipster manifesto” –

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but n the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

Perhaps, like Thoreau and Whitman, I’m a hipster myself, even if I don’t look like one.