Rise of the hipster capitalist.

• Author: Brown, Elizabeth Nolan
• Position: Millennials

Selling out? Formillennial butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers, that's the whole point.

POPULAR WISDOM about millennials seems to come in two varieties: They are either an entitled, narcissistic group of basement-dwellers, gazing at their selfies while the world burns, or they're a perfectly upstanding young cohort who got a raw deal from the recession economy. Millennials make awful employees because their boomer parents gave them too many soccer trophies; or maybe they can't find jobs because those same boomer parents aren't exiting the workforce. The one thing everyone can agree on is that millennials are probably screwed.

If there is a single cultural avatar that has come to represent today's young adults, it's the hipster, a much debated and often reviled construction built on skinny jeans, music snobbery, and urban chicken coops. You can find them tending their beehives atop graffiti-covered warehouses in Brooklyn; opening craft breweries and Korean-taco food trucks in Portland; or ditching the cities to get back to the land--in a farmhouse with high-speed Internet service, six laptops, three iPhones, and a heavy-duty Vitamix blender.

The hipster mixes hippie ethics and yuppie consumer preferences, communal attitudes and capitalist practices. Unlike prior generational stand-ins--from flappers to beats, punks to slackers--hipsters aren't rebelling against their parents or prior generations; they're mixing and matching the best of what came before and abandoning the baggage that doesn't interest them.

The hipster ideal today is neither a commune nor a life of rugged individualism. It's the small, socially conscious business. Millennials are obliterating divisions between corporate and bohemian values, between old and new employment models--they're not the first to do this, but they are doing it in their own way. Armed with ample self-confidence but hobbled by stagnant prospects, millennials may be uniquely poised to excel in an evolving economy where the freelance countercultural capitalist becomes the new gold standard.

"I think people used to be very wary of business, and still maybe are wary of business," says 26-year-old Mark Spera, who quit a corporate job with the Gap to launch an eco-friendly fashion company called BeGood Clothing with his college roommate. "But profit isn't seen as such an evil thing anymore. It's more about how that profit is used."

Beyond 'Selling Out'

In the '90s musical Rent, a Disneyfied depiction of Gen X bohemians, a group of aimless artist/rebels coalesce around the AIDS crisis, a shared passion for "hating dear old Mom and Dad," and their widely held generational opposition to "selling out." From riot grrrl 'zine publishers to Nirvana's Kurt Cobain, anxiety over selling out to the mainstream dominated the cultural discourse of people who came of age in the '80s and '90s. Baked into the concern was an intrinsic sense that art and social change could only be corrupted by capitalism.

Millennials, generally considered to be those in the late teens to early 30s right now, simply do not wrestle with this issue. "Hipsters may be stylistically similar to earlier youth movements," wrote The New Criterion's James Panero in a 2012 New York Daily News story. But "they strip away the anti-social and anti-capitalist qualities of these groups and replace them with entrepreneurial drive."

William Deresiewicz, a Yale English professor turned Portland-based author and cultural critic, argues that the whole idea of a hipster "movement" is absurd, because modern youth culture lacks elements of radical dissent or rebellion. "The hipster world critique is limited. It's basically a way of taking the world we have now and tweaking it to make it better," he says. David Brooks' 2000 book Bobos in Paradise argued that two formerly distinct baby boomer classes--the hedonistic, artistic, and socially tolerant bohemians; and the conforming, capitalist bourgeoisie--had combined to form a new category he christened hobos. Hipsters, Deresiewicz argues, are the bobos' literal and metaphorical children.

"I suspect that a lot of these hipsters are going to be bobos in 20 years," he says. "There's a symbiosis." Hipsters make and popularize the things, material and cultural, that bobos consume--from nitrate-free salami to the indie bands that make it into Rolling Stone.

"Millennials and boomers don't recognize how much they're like each other," he says, but this generation has "absorbed the values of the boomers. " In a 2011 New York Times essay, Deresiewicz dubbed millennials "Generation Sell."

Much of this entrepreneurial spirit...