Business Week has a fun article on corporate America's triumphant co-option of hipster culture. A movement whose original uniform was peppered with "Corporate Rock Sucks" stickers now sends their bands on tours sponsored by malt liquor, grabs refreshments in tents sponsored by Levi, and has proved most successful at gathering a hard to reach demographic into the areas where advertisers can get them:
Marketers, likeparents, might spend sleepless nights worrying about not understandingyouth. But they miss the bigger story. Formerly hostile subcultures --yesteryear's punks and hippies and snowboarders -- now welcome them.Whether they've noticed it or not, marketers have won. Like Brickman,the hipsters are all buying in.
True that. And the blogs, which evinced the same anti-establishment ethos as they grew are following closely behind. Kevin Drum once told me that he didn't buy the big talk about our independence and detachment from advertisers. Corporate America always gets in sooner or later, the question is just what sort of influence it has. And that's turned out to be right. Hugh Hewitt publishes books under a major imprint, Glenn Reynolds writes for MSNBC, Markos does (did?) Democratic consulting, is a fellow at a think tank, and is writing a book, Duncan works for Media Matters, scores of bloggers from the left and right regularly descend on the cable channels to talk about the blogs and/or the issues they're discussing, Matt Yglesias is a rising start journalist, I've been hired by the American Prospect, Newsweek has a "blogwatch", The National Journal has a "blogometer", ABC's The Note links to blogs, CNN has "Inside the Blogs", and on, and on.
Blogs, like extreme sports, hippies, and hipsters before them, gained their currency and following by attacking the inequities of the MSM, but have decided that maturity, in large part, comes from acceptance. And blog readers, who grew attached to their scrappy favorites, are glad to see the writers they've followed finally finding recognition. That's how it always is, the establishment is hated because it doesn't notice. Once it does notice, it's benign, ready to be condemned or celebrated on a case-by-case, or story-by-story, basis.
