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One subjected to the corporate, postmodern reheating of the beat culture, following in the footsteps of subcultures such as punk in the reappropriation of earlier cultural artifacts to create a sense of identity and meaning in the neoliberal post-cold war era. It is embraced by a relatively small cross-section of broadly liberal, bourgeois and metropolitain young people, because this group is the advertising industry's target demographic for items of conspicuous consumption. The hipster labours under the illusion of vitality, agency and difference, when all the subculture can aspire to is another iteration of post-industrial, postmodern consumer culture, and one exceedingly more open to co-option, repackaging and branding than punk or hip hop because of a political passivity, and the disposable income of its largely middle-class advocates. What defines the hipster seems to be merely material, but also pathological introspection and self-consciousness, perhaps amplified by the fragmentation of society in a free market, and the rise of the self-centred 'apsiration' culture of the noughties; one that hipsters often think themselves very much apart from, but very much engage in.

Overall, it is a youth culture borne lifestyle choice rather than any meaningful social struggle and is, with every lenseless spec frame, every thread of distressed denim and bottlecap of Pabst, irrevocably part of what it so petulantly but naively dismisses as mainstream culture.

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