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

Behind the paywall this week, one piece looks back at the history of youth culture in the age of the internet, while another ponders its present.

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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........

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