I drive to Portland. I grab a Vinegar IPA and some kimchi at a street food van in the rain. Down the block is a Brazilian place that does Tomahawk steaks fried in buttermilk, the locals love to share them as they walk down the waterfront. The city is busy, alive, and I’m ready to sample some of the local delicacies that run through Portland like the Willamette River.
Portland is a place of opposites. Up and down, black and white or loud and quiet could all be experienced on the streets the locals call “the ‘ort”, and you can’t help but feel that at any moment a good night can become a bad night. Or vice versa!
The city was perhaps most famous for its hipsters. The main subculture of the 21st century, hipsters arrived on the scene in early 2011, opening up coffee shops and vinyl stores. They also had little moustaches and those hats that Bavarians have, and ride around on penny farthings. But what used to be widely ridiculed has now become mainstream, with many aspects of hipster lifestyle (buying products) being injected into every facet of modern-day culture. Once upon a time a hipster would be chased down the street in tight, black jeans with full cans of soda thrown at his head as crowds jeered at them. Nowadays the crowd also wore tight, black jeans and little green hats. We have become Hipster, gentrifier of worlds. But what is the new Hipster?
The answer, dear reader, is obvious. So obvious that I find it offensive to suggest that my readers would need it explaining to them. But for those who aren’t as adequately blessed as my average reader, let me explain.
Its woke.
Hipster transformed into two separate things; the aesthetics
of the hipster, being absorbed and adored by many, and the hatred for the hipster,
finding nowhere to go. It wasn't as if feminism or anti-racism was widespread amongst the 2010's subculture. But if everyone had become a hipster, then the aspect of
enjoyment most people got from hipsters – making fun of them – needed to be
directed somewhere. Simultaneous to the rise and digestion of hipster
subculture was the increase of awareness in political and social philosophy, in
part due to Gamergate. The scorn felt towards hipsters could be displaced onto
people who were critical of computer games. These two ideas were like converging
lines that intersected in 2016, when hipsterism was absorbed into the
over-culture, simultaneously the hatred of these people was displaced into wokeism.
Due to this pattern, wokeism will ultimately be absorbed into everyday thought and speech, with a new idea ripening to become the idol of hatred. We know this as prior to hipsters were metrosexuals, with the idea that putting slime on your face and carrying a bag made you the antithesis of masculinity. Yet every day men look after their skin or carry things – the metrosexuals have been absorbed so thoroughly there is almost no trace of them left.
At a motel room and I can’t sleep. The conversation in the room next door is too loud. Turn on the pillow, yawn, the voices get louder. I close my mouth and they go quieter. Sit up in bed, opening and closing my mouth, as if I am opening and closing a door. I get up and walk around the room, finding out that the voices are coming from inside my mouth. Standing in the middle of the room, I open and closed my mouth, trying to work out what was happening to me by trying to make sense of the voices. But they are speaking in words I can’t understand or remember.
