Review – The Hipster Economy

Taste and authenticity in late modern capitalism

By Alessandro Gerosa

Nostalgia is the cultural default of the 21^st Century. Any pockets of activity not explicitly retro-oriented are small experimental alcoves tweaking at the borders of preexisting genres, forms, and modes. Music, once used to mark the passage of time, now exists outside of the temporal dimension, giving rise to an eerie sense of stasis, paradoxically defined by a surplus of activity and content generation.

Major technological advancements in this century have largely benefited the end user as opposed to the generators of culture. Highly configurable apps and hardware encourage us to treat consumption itself as a creative act of self expression. This leaves the creative realm itself (along with journalism and publishing) without financial basis. Professionalism dissolves away at the behest of social media giants.

What does a brief 2000s fad defined by retro fashion, exposed brick, expensive coffee, and a chronically detached ironic sentiment have to do with all this? In so many ways the hipster represented the last subculture. A chimerical amalgamation of signifiers lifted from various times and places, crafting an existence seemingly outside of time and place itself.

Whilst it’s certainly true that previous subcultures underwent a process of mainstreaming through commercialisation and a pivot toward consumption habits over social messaging, hipsterdom was by its very definition a “regime of consumption”, one spanning food, music, film, and clothing. Over and above this, hipsters were defined by their reluctance to self-identify as such, despite the clear and obvious calling cards that – by the late 2000s – began to dominate significant portions of most major cities.

The ecosystem of small businesses with a distinctive ethos and aesthetic is perhaps the most lasting and dramatic impact hipsters have had on our daily life. I was therefore gladdened to stumble upon Alessandro Gerosa’s first stab at framing the economic theory behind the hipster. Not least as a way to reinject some theoretical clarity into this notoriously nebulous concept.

‘The Hipster Economy’ reads like Gerosa’s PhD thesis because it essentially is. It’s therefore jargon heavy and laden with academic references. But it remains accessible for a non-academic reader (despite the fact that it indulges in that academic tendency to bandy the word “imaginary” about as a noun and not an adjective far too much).

At its most basic level, Gerosa frames the hipster small business as a response to consumer capitalism’s tendency to homogenise identities through the lens of mass produced consumer goods. The hipster economy – largely focusing on food and drink culture – is therefore defined by the value placed on authenticity as both a unique selling point and a driving moral ethos. But this in itself raises contradictions. Despite the high value placed on bespoke products, micro production, short supply chains, and individual creativity within the hipster economy, every major city has an identifiable “hipster” district that – local quirks aside – often leans into the same aesthetic, language, and cultural signifiers.

The reason for this uniformity comes back to the fact that hipsterdom is not a subculture driven by values directly counter to the mainstream (in the way punk in its original form might have been) but a “regime of consumption”. Hence the broad but immediately identifiable aesthetic we recognise as hipster, from interior design, to fashion, to retro goods in vinyl records and fixed gear bikes.

Zooming out further, Gerosa locates hipsterdom as a post-Fordist phenomena. Fordism being the umbrella term for mass production and consumption that swept Western societies since the Second World War. Post-Fordism – despite disagreements over the term – is roughly characterised as the shift to increased financialisaton, from production to service based economies, wealth polarisation, and a rise in self-employment. In other words, the neoliberal turn from the 1980s onwards.

In this context, neoliberalism is understood as a capitalist adaptation to the growing backlash against Fordism and the homogenisation inherent in Fordist mass production. Post-Fordist capitalism removed the boredom, uniformity, and alienation of traditional mass production models. Creating a configurable, choose-your-own adventure approach to consumption, giving end users a degree of control and choice over what they purchase and in turn access to a feeling of authenticity.

As part of the bargain, capitalism developed a unique ability to constantly reabsorb apparent threats by turning them into regimes of consumption. Not only are the values and demands of countercultures stripped away and rebranded as regimes of consumption, but even the idea of authenticity itself, according to Gerosa, “has become one of the predominant paradigms that guide and organise consumption”.

A lengthy analysis of authenticity follows, tracing the concept back to the Romantic period in the early 1800s, conceived as a rebuttal to the fledging industrial revolution and the accompanying increase in bureaucratisation. It becomes in many ways the antithesis to Marxist alienation, bridging the political and cultural realms by connecting the individual with both their labour and leisure activities.

Linking this to the origins of the “hipster” reveals that the term – originating in African American counterculture – could be understood as a critique of modern European mainstream culture. More specifically, how capitalism at once expanded the middle class, only to imbue them with a deep sense of alienation from cultural and artistic values under Fordist modes of production, “The middle class, incapable of properly solving this complicity in commercialism, seeks refuge in either its acritical participation in the commercial logic to accumulate wealth, or in the formulation of a minority, a highly cultivated culture alternative to the one of the masses” (aka, any counterculture since the 50s).  

What follows is a lengthy discussion of the hipster as a neoliberal recapitulation of the craft movement in the 1900s, itself a response to the industrial revolution. Followed by the specific ways hipster businesses – usually leaning on a premise of single issue causes such as sustainability, organically sourced products, or ethical business practices – approach entrepreneurialism.

It’s at this point that the laymen reader can’t help but get frustrated at the academic’s reluctance to weigh in. Gerosa, as an academic, is positioned as mediator, bringing together research and theory as a way to understand the problem, casting judgement on the hipster economy – positive or negative – only in the most qualified, caveated terms.  

But assuming this book is a retelling of a PhD thesis for a non-academic public, it’s not unreasonable to demand some more reckless interventions on the part of Gerosa. The hipster economy is in many ways the most visible example of neoliberalism’s relentless ability to subsume countercultures into regimes of consumption. This is because neoliberalism is a system that not only tolerates deviation, variation, non-conformity, but actively welcomes them as opportunities to create and capture new markets (“they’re selling hippie wigs in Woolworth’s man”).  

In this sense, the hipster short circuits the culture/subculture dichotomy by both asserting principles counter to the mainstream whilst simultaneously realising these principles by accepting the premise of free market capitalism. The hipster makes no list of demands, no call to drop out, no violent rebuttal of an apparently repressive system. There is only an adherence to some vague notion of authenticity – meaning anything from organic ingredients, short supply chains, non-standardised production processes, or commitment to some single issue cause such as animal welfare – negotiated and expressed by starting a small business, thus submitting to the economic logic of the petty bourgeoisie small business owner.

Underpinning this is the ceding of real political territory – collective action through trade unionism and membership of political parties – in the name of a regime of consumption.

Despite the tangible goods realised within the hipster economy of small business owners, from the environmental to the social, Gerosa acknowledges that as a result of submitting to neoliberal logic the hipster economy “sees the individual, as the consumer or entrepreneurial self, as the protagonist of social change”. This essentially lets the hipster off the hook. In macro-economic terms they are characterised as a small actor capable of only limited gains when acting in isolation. Again, we are left with a vague suggestion that building a socialist utopia is the only way to really combat the ills addressed by the hipster economy (mass production, poor environmental practice, poor working conditions).

But the hallowed socialist utopia will never arrive if anyone willing to follow through on their values are encamped in small startups as opposed to engaging in concrete political action (trade unionism, mass party membership etc.).

In and of itself then, ‘The Hipster Economy’ succeeds as a thorough analysis of hipster culture as an aesthetic regime of consumption concerned with authenticity. It effectively weighs the well documented shortcomings of this movement – gentrification, the irresistible pull toward homogeneity despite the alleged authenticity, and the appropriation of working class modes of production and consumption in the name of this authenticity – with an acknowledgement that this is merely one symptom of a wider malaise experienced under neoliberalism.

Gerosa has therefore elegantly framed the question with the necessary tools of analysis. But as a non-academic reader I am in search of a bolder intervention. Maybe one that ties the loose threads together into a broader explanation of why the hipster signalled the end of counterculture. How Fordist alienation gave rise to a desire for authenticity, and how the hipster facilitated the reduction of this desire to a regime of consumption.

For instance, how the 2000s saw the entrenchment of changes triggered in the late 1970s, from the gradual dismantling of social safety nets, to free or state subsidised higher education, to the erosion of public spaces. And how all this was normalised through social engineering that made other forms of economic and social organisation not only impossible, but inconceivable (Thatcher’s “there is no alternative”). All were the price of the Faustian bargain society made with neoliberalism.

In order to remove an economy based on Fordist production, uniformity, and homogeneity we accepted insecurity, precarity, and the devaluation of non-economic (cultural) activity. Why was there no mass cultural response to the Iraq war beyond that Greenday album, or the 2008 crash, or the upheavals of the 2010s, or COVID, or the many and severe crisis now facing us? Because younger generations enjoy none of the social goods available to their parents in the post war period. They are all forced to embrace the axioms of entrepreneurialism to combat their social and economic precarity. They are all too busy hustling, posting, and bargaining their way into the next pay cheque, constantly harangued by the growing pressure of making rent or paying off student debt.

The lack of meaningful public spaces (both online and off) privatises this alienation under the ambient requirement to “get therapy”.  This renders counterculture unable to envisage new and radical alternatives outside of capitalism as creativity becomes the exclusive preserve of the leisure classes and part time hobbyists, and replaces genuine political engagement with regimes of consumption, and the (understandable) but toxic impulse to respond to social ills by setting up microbreweries, coffee shops, and artisanal burger joints.