Dear Hipster:

Why are all you such pretentious douches? Is it wrong of me to want to hit all of you in the face? What is especially troubling is how you guys are now starting to show up at the “hippie” concerts that I love. Why don’t you just keep listening to Mumford and Sons, you have already stolen them from us, and, frankly, we don’t want them back.

— Jack

What flavor Haterade are you drinking there? I at least hope the chilling callousness with which you disregard an entire subculture keeps it icy cold! Nobody likes warm bitterness.

Besides, hating hipsters is so mainstream.

You see what I did there? By pointing out how unoriginal your anti-hipster platform is, I deflect your rage. Your anger glances off my Wayfarers as I crash your hippie concert. Did you catch O.A.R. at the BellyUp? I was at a Terrible Ivan house show in South Park that night.

But, seriously, who doesn’t hate hipsters these days? There’s a glut of blogs, a tumult of Tumblrs, a concussive mass of YouTube videos all vitriolic toward hipsterkind. People go so far as to wish death, or at least collective face punching, upon total strangers. And for what? The common complaint goes like, “those fucking hipsters stole my x,” where x can be hippie concerts, fashion, or beverage. An old, but still Google-popular, post from a blogger (the ironically named and not-very-wise, “Unconventional Wisdom”) accused hipsters of stealing her favorite beer, Pabst Blue Ribbon. So what if she hadn’t even been born yet when Pabst sales experienced their historical peak in 1977? I would illustrate here that people hate hipsters because they perceive us as malignant cultural pirates, carelessly co-opting other people’s coolness, thereby robbing said cultures of any “authenticity.”

I would ask you this: is x-culture so flimsy that it collapses beneath the weight of gentle homage (and occasional pastiche) at the hands of ironic urban youth? Are the hippie concerts you love of such fragile cultural capital that sharing them with a few mustachioed, fixed-gear-riding baristas could dilute the universal artistic sentiments of smoking weed and not working too hard? Perhaps, instead of being so territorial over your stuff, you and the rest of the hipster haters could just accept the flattery of imitation. We’re cool. We like your stuff. Ergo, your stuff is cool. Dig?