I attended a small liberal arts college that had a strong hippy bent.  I would often encounter freshman or sophomore guys at parties who wanted to tell me all about the ‘revolution’ that they were were a part of or planning.   It seemed that they read the first half of the communist manifesto, attached it to some kind of organic farming bent, and then watched the film “Zeitgeist.”  Not long after they discovering “Zeitgeist” they could be found running around at parties trying to change the world, blindly threatening violence against the “status quo” with protests and false threats of violence against corporations and religion. After running into a few of these guys I started calling them “college revolutionaries.”  Having read a substantial bit of Marx, Gramsci, and so on, I often argued that it was time to hit the books instead of the riot gear.  Unsurprisingly, they often tried to fight me physically instead of verbally.

This anger isn’t restricted to liberal college students who read half of a blood stained Marx essay, it can be seen all over the United States since the so-called ‘economic collapse’ of 2008.  The quarter life crisis has become the norm, and millions of college students graduate every year to dead-end jobs and little hope of long term success.  This has sparked nihilistic twenty-something cultures of coffee fueled inquiries into novelty and an embodied sense of postmodern murkiness.  Digital hipsterati have proclaimed themselves liberated of the status quo and free to pen the neo-manifesto’s of the cybernetic age without concern for whose work they bastardizing or the rhetorical traps in which they are ensnared.  I will term these self aggrandizing rebranded self-help digital hipsters ‘dipsters’ throughout this essay. (more…)