Living your best life is intimately connected to how we spend our money and how 'real' we are to our values. But is the hipster economy something to embrace, or to be sceptical of? Alessandro Gerosa argues hipster authenticity is increasingly its own brand, co-opted by the social networks and financial interests it claims to evade but it does give genuine opportunities to shape society around us and support our communities. We must consider this balancing act if we are to understand our culture, economy, and capitalism itself.
Authenticity is the buzzword of the day, with its opposite ‘fakeness’ being a fate almost worse than death for social standing. Drake’s supposed ‘fakin for likes’ took pride of place in his and Kendrick’s recent rap feud while Taylor Swift decries the ‘fakers gonna fake…’, but what really is authenticity, how does it work, and how does it change over time? A famous sociologist from the 70s, Melvin Seeman, once wrote that the concept of ‘alienation’ had become during his time a ‘master concept – conveniently imprecise, empirically omnipresent, and morally irresistible when employed as a critique’. Fifty years later after Seeman’s statement, the same can now be argued about ‘authenticity’. It is indeed conveniently ambiguous, resisting any attempt to be defined. Empirically omnipresent, having become a buzzword permeating every sphere of life. And finally, it is also undoubtedly morally irresistible when employed as a value and an aspiration. This seemingly innocent idea, is at the heart of our relationship with the economy, society, taste, and ultimately, who we ‘really’ are.
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Today, displaying your most ‘authentic’ self is the core mechanism powering the support of digital platforms and social networks – with the application ‘BeReal’ going as far as literally carrying the injunction in the guise of their name.
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With his usual pungent style, philosopher Byung-Chul Han argued in The Expulsion of the Other that authenticity constitutes an ultimate tool of control and domination used by neoliberal capitalism. Its function is to make every person offer themselves as a commodity. It is hard not to take Byung-Chul Han's words at face value. Today, displaying your most ‘authentic’ self is the core mechanism powering the support of digital platforms and social networks – with the application ‘BeReal’ going as far as literally carrying the injunction in the guise of their name. However, such a one-dimensional interpretation of the modern call to authenticity as a mere capitalist tool would be misleading, erasing a multi-faceted history spanning hundreds of years. When considering the evolution of the concept, authenticity also appears as a fiercely polemical ideal for self-realisation against the constraining forces of all-consuming modernity.
This movement began at the very beginning of modernity, when proto-romantic British poet Edward Young asked himself with a certain melancholy ‘How come that born original, we die copies?’ In the same vein, Jean-Jacques Rousseau bitterly noticed how the course of modernity, while enabling some individuals to develop their most excellent qualities thanks to increasing access to knowledge, paradoxically ended up trapping them into the superficial and relentless ‘whirlpool of social life’.
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From this romantic perspective, what oppressed human nature was the dualism of money and machinery, which prompted lust for material possessions and the commodification of every aspect of society.
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This romantic idea of reappropriating one’s sense of authentic self against social vanities was prompted by the incipient signals of the two phenomena which subsequently characterised modern Western societies: industrialisation and capitalism. Here started the idea of authenticity, understood as a condition of self-determination and meaningfulness that inhabits human nature but is repressed by external societal forces. From this romantic perspective, what oppressed human nature was the dualism of money and machinery, which prompted lust for material possessions and the commodification of every aspect of society.
This fundamental uprising against capitalism and industrialisation paved the way for both reactionary and progressive developments. As such, it is most useful to interpret this romantic ethos in a dialectical relationship with the one that originated from the Enlightenment, sometimes conflicting and sometimes intertwining. It is Karl Marx himself, as reminded by Michael Löwy, who expresses the most clearly this dialectical relationship in a passage of the Grundrisse, arguing that ‘The bourgeois point of view has never advanced beyond this antithesis between itself and this romantic viewpoint, and therefore the latter will accompany it as legitimate antithesis up to its blessed end’. Or, that the owning class relies upon the expansion of industrialisation and labour value extraction, which undermines the artistic beauty it wants, and finds to be authentic, without recognising their internal contraction. The romantic viewpoint of a return to a state of self-realisation and embrace of nature is the inherent counterpart to the industrialisation of society and its subjection to the law of profit.
About half a century after Marx, William Morris, the British leading figure of the Arts and Crafts movement and a socialist himself, denounced in Art and Socialism how the middle class in their role of ‘gospel of capital’ destroyed the same artistic and cultural values that they proudly declared to prize and defend. The co-existence of these contrasting aspirations and the incapability of the middle class to come to terms with their complicity in this destruction has been a key component of many of the major mass movements of revolt against industrialisation.
This tension remains central to understanding how authenticity still plays an ambiguous role today, not reducible to being a simple tool of contemporary capitalism. To reach a deeper understanding of this phenomenon, let’s jump again another fifty years forward, this time to a different country and place: USA, New York, and more specifically, Harlem at the end of the Second World War. In this neighbourhood originated the idea of being ‘hip.’ This particular term and tendency carried a cool and positive meaning. As often as it happened in American cultural history, this was a trend born amongst the Afro-American community, subsequently appropriated by their white counterparts. The original hipsters were African Americans who developed their own style and way of life within the growing jazz, particularly bebop, scene, mainly as a response to the oppressive and racist white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) society of the 1940s. The conceptual opposite of being ‘hipster’ was to be ‘square’ – meaning conformist to the WASP society – and thus, boring. Soon, white, middle-class Americans who felt the same sense of alienation from the WASP upbringings began to identify as hipsters, effectively appropriating the label and ethos of the African American jazz culture. These individuals would go on to form the core of the so-called and famous "beat generation”.
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In the following decades, a number of different 'hip' countercultures emerged, each claiming uniqueness in opposition to the standardised mass production and consumption of American society. The 1960s also marked a time when ‘alienation’ became a central theme in American sociological debates – as the opening Seeman’s quote exemplified. While debates on alienation in Europe were predominantly influenced by Marxism and in particular by the re-discovered Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in the USA, they were more aligned with a 'Weberian' approach, focusing on the individual's struggle against societal bureaucratisation and conformity. From different perspectives, books such as The Lonely Crowd and The Organization Man excellently illustrated this focus: the idea that American society promoted bureaucratisation and an ‘other-directed’ culture, hindering individuals' autonomy, creativity and self-expression. The global revolts of the 1960s and 1970s saw these two critiques of alienation, one focusing on the oppressive nature of capitalism's commodification and the other on the bureaucratisation of industrialism, converge and intertwine. However, as the idea of an alternative lifestyle to the mainstream became more widespread, it eventually became a new mainstream itself and ended up being ingrained in the emerging capitalist system.
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Middle classes on both sides of the Atlantic were offered a new way to consume – and work –more ‘authentically’ whilst remaining anchored within the boundaries of the consumer society.
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This latter process occurred in two ways. On one side, this ethos began to permeate the marketing and management departments of companies, which largely consisted of middle-class young people imbued with the idea of remaining ‘hip’. On the other side, this taste and aesthetics aligned with the emerging new production philosophy of ‘flexible accumulation’, which was gradually replacing Fordist factories. Capitalist forces seemed to embrace the same values of their critics – freedom in expressing one’s authentic self, autonomy in work, and distinctiveness of life experiences – albeit they bent themselves to the ultimate goal of commodification. Freedom is therefore about becoming individual, work autonomy turning into entrepreneurship of oneself, and the distinctiveness of life experiences transformed into the datafication of everyday life for the never-enough ‘granular’ profiling of consumers. Middle classes on both sides of the Atlantic were offered a new way to consume – and work –more ‘authentically’ whilst remaining anchored within the boundaries of the consumer society. The ambiguities and contradictions once highlighted by Marx and Morris had come full circle. The pervasive diffusion of the appetite for the ‘authentic’ largely led industrial producers to frame their products as such, producing tons of copies of the same ‘authentic’ products. Was it all the snake biting its own tail in the end?
Not completely, one could say. Indeed, on the other side, this quest for ‘authenticity’ also opened new market opportunities for alternative, small and independent producers led by the will to contrast mass-market consumerism with more ethically grounded approaches to production and consumption.
This has been particularly evident in the neo-craft businesses that dominate today the currently ubiquitous urban ‘hipster economy’, such as craft breweries and pubs, cocktail bars, ‘typical’ restaurants, and such. They source their ingredients from carefully selected local producers or retailers of trust, instead of wholesale retailers. They recover traditional ingredients, final products, and cultures to re-valorise and popularise them. They often offer themselves as meeting spots for local organizations or associations. They also offer a fairer alternative to industrial products and ephemeral access pathways to more ‘authentic’ forms of consumption. Still, the neo-craft phenomenon needs to be understood in the broader evolution of capitalist processes and their intrinsic connection with the quest for remaining ‘unique’. To be successful – or just remain afloat – these small businesses must adhere to a specific hip aesthetic and imaginary.
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To simply ‘escape’ its logic is as unrealistic as to fully ‘escape’ from society.
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They are entrepreneurs, even if small and independent, who can variably contribute to the further commodification of these values for profit-making interests. They are ultimately a middle-class economy, produced by middle-class retailers for an audience of middle-class consumers – for instance, those who look for romantic and ephemeral reconciliations with their idealised vision of nature despite mainly living the urban life. An admirable testament to the prophetic nature of Marx and Morris's words, which more than a century later on, apply perfectly to the flourishing of neo-craft businesses. This testifies to how authenticity remains a controversial concept, at the centre of both projects of commodification from above, and of freedom from below.
This tension is intrinsic to the process, at least under the current socio-economic scenario. To simply ‘escape’ its logic is as unrealistic as to fully ‘escape’ from society. However, no matter how strong the grip of capitalism, industrialism, or any structural force at play may be, there is always space for agency, organisation, and resistance. Each neo-craft entrepreneur has a variable degree of freedom to tweak the imperative of authenticity in the direction of an alternative to consumer capitalist logic. Even more significantly, each neo-craft entrepreneur can organise and gather collectively, to enhance their agency and space of freedom against structural constraints. What is at stake, overall, is the survival of authenticity as a subversive concept, capable of inspiring alternativeness to the system, or to resist its complete domestication.
The author wants to thank Camille Allard for her precious feedback on the first draft of this article.
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