The Death of Counterculture

I really wanted to talk about this in class today but the opportunity never arose.

Recently, while using stumbleupon, I came across an article that really interested me. It was about the modern "hipster" movement, a self described counterculture that went against all things mainstream. Here is a link to the article:

http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html

There are some really valid points raised in the article, namely that through endless photography of themselves and the events they attend, hipsters are making there very culture even more easy to dissect and reproduce by corporations. Even though hipsters as a whole are decidedly anti-corporate and mass production (believing that true "coolness" can never be sold), they allow themselves to be analyzed and taken advantage of through their own narcissism. Brands like American Apparel and others hire "coolness" monitors, whose job it is to peruse photo blogs and pick up on trends that are happening within the hipster "subculture". Such trends are then incorporated into style designs, and sold to the hipsters.

While such things may have happend to counter-culture movements of the past (punk, hippies etc.), I doubt that marketers were able to use the media in such a way to take advantage of a counterculture and make it borderline mainstream in the way that we see today. The success of a counterculture movement is the ability to rally support of individuals who feel that the current "mainstream" culture does not work for them. But what happens when counterculture is instantaneously separated from any political or social activism and sold through fashion and music outlets? The movement becomes devoid of any intrinsic meaning, and is rendered useless, a causality of hyper capitalism.