The Hipster in Me Is the Hipster in You—This Week On VICE: Members Only

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Perhaps more than any other generation, millennial culture is doomed to erasure and misremembrance. Between the global financial crisis hitting as most of the demographic tipped into adulthood—as technological advances shifted youth culture into digital spaces that, it turns out, did not lend themselves well to archiving in the long run—a lot of millennial-produced art and entertainment has either been cut down in its prime or washed away by the corporate monopolization of the internet.

The lion’s share of reporting done by millennials on music, film, and TV existed on websites that were sold to venture capitalists, stripped for parts, and taken offline by the end of the 2010s. With the exception of Greta Gerwig and the Safdie brothers, there is a gaping void where millennial auteur directors should be, because for the first time in history, Hollywood executives suddenly decided that retiring was for twats and it was actually much cooler to staunchly remain in your job well into your eighties. Millennials did alright with TV, because the “golden age of the prestige drama” was the only area of late 2000s and 2010s pop culture that was having any money pumped into it, but the totality of an age group can’t be summed up by Girls. As Lena Dunham’s own protagonist would have it, she was busy becoming a voice of a generation, not the voice of a generation.

All that to say: everyone has been discussing the “hipster era” recently, and as a direct result of the above, a lot of what’s been said has been—pardon my French—wrong. It felt like an argument that was made for us to step into and settle, so we put together the Definitive VICE ‘Hipster Music’ Timeline 2000–2014 to set the record straight forever (or as long as the piece remains available online). Our Editor in Chief, Kevin Lee Kharas, writes:

“The first 14 years of the century was a boomtime for silly new microgenres […] the relationship between music and synthetic drug consumption is perhaps underplayed in this era, and—for a fleeting moment at least—Animal Collective really did feel like the biggest band on Earth”

Read the full epic odyssey below, from (what is now known as) Indie Sleaze Pt. 1 to Future Islands on Letterman:

The Rise and Fall of the ‘Hipster Music’ Era, 2000-2014: VICE’s Definitive Timeline

With the old internet dead and the new internet struggling to be born, people of all ages are being forced to hang out together on the same social media platforms. This has led to all sorts of unfortunate situations—like millennials, who are still mentally stuck in the 2000s when the internet was almost entirely for them, getting rage-baited by “cool girl” content that is obviously aimed at teenage girls, or being forced to watch your uncle hit on an AI-generated girl in a Facebook advert. But it can also be extremely funny, strange, and touching.

Owen Williams has explored this in his excellent new book, Atrocity Exhibitions: Grieving in the TikTok Underworld. Written in the wake of his mother’s suicide, Williams basically finds a way to grieve through the doomscroll, surveying the most extreme corners of the internet like a critic wandering an art gallery. His findings are rendered like a 5G-borne Bosch painting—“a blend of end-of-the-pier campness, extreme sport, melancholy, paedophilia and neo-Sadean paganism,” where trauma grifters run amok and Bonnie Blue appears as “the female Marquis de Sade.”

Amongst it all, though, there is a strange beauty to be found. Honesty, too. In Owen’s words:

“I did find that when it happened, with my mum, everyone sanitized it a bit, which is natural. I think for a lot of people it’s a taboo subject, but I found that quite suffocating. So I suppose writing about it wasn’t so much a form of rebellion, but not being able to deal with the silence around it. Then again, if you write and something like that happens to you, you’re always going to write about it, aren’t you? But I think I’m past the cycle where I feel the need to make stuff about it now. I think I thought I could figure it out somehow, but I can’t. So I wrote about TikTok instead”

Read our full interview with Owen, which covers everything from TikTok artificially creating pedophiles to the utopian potential of AI slop, below: