Non-hipster blindness

Remember when globalisation was bad because it made everywhere the same? Now globalisation can take many different forms. There's World Cup fever in every country, a Crossfit-industrial complex, Chinese globalisation and a global hipster culture that is the same whether you're in Brooklyn or London or North Fitzroy or Adelaide. It doesn't change.

There was once a time when people thought hipsters could either change the world or destroy it. What we were all forgetting is that hipsters are just a consumer group. It's like thinking the Friday night after-work drinks crowd are destroying civilization, or that my Mum's friends hanging out at Chadstone are going to  start a revolution. Consumer groups! That's it!

White Melburnians no longer seeking the approval of their parents now look for approval from hipsters. And just like they did with their parents, white Melburnians pretend to hate hipsters when we all know they love them. Just as the child who has learned a new word keeps repeating it, Melbourne white people must keep using the word 'hipster' no matter what - even if  hipsters have got nothing to do with what they're talking about.

Yes, white Melburnians have hipster Tourette's. Which brings me to non-hipster blindness.

Non-hipster blindness is:

- when hipsters get the credit for inventing fashions that influenced them.

- when people in photos taken fifty years ago get labelled as hipsters decades before the term was coined.

- when an opinion piece in the New York Times argues that hipsters have 'ruined Paris'. Not even the fucking Nazi war machine could ruin Paris but now the entire city is suddenly vulnerable to hipsters? Paris is not that fragile!

(and this is the The New York Times! It's meant to be a serious newspaper not the Northcote Leader!)

- when a borough of 2.5 million people gets cast as the 'hipster' part of New York. Surely there are other types of people there?

- when a vaguely hipster-ish guy at your work is universally known as 'the hipster guy' when he has a name! He's a human being!

- when festivals get called 'hipster festivals' just because some of the people there are hipsters. It's like calling the Carnivale in Rio an Aussie festival.

But Melbourne needs hipsters because they don't get violent as easily as other Melburnians. Your chances of being smacked in the face in a hipster neighbourhood are almost zero. And even if somebody did manage to land a punch it probably wouldn't even hurt.