There was apparently an n+1 forum on 'What was the hipster?' last year - but it doesn't seem like any of the talks are online. I would have liked to read Jace Clayton's piece as he's always good value. There is a write-up here, implying that the main idea was that the hipster is always someone else:
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/post/the-death-of-the-hipster-panel/
"[...]The hipster, then, is the boogeyman who keeps us from becoming too settled in our identity, keeps us moving forward into new fashions, keep us consuming more “creatively” and discovering new things that haven’t become lame and hipster. We keep consuming more, and more cravenly, yet this always seems to us to be the hipster’s fault, not our own.
"One must start with the premise that the hipster is defined by a lack of authenticity, by a sense of lateness to the scene, or by the fact that his arrival fashions the scene—transforms people who are doing their thing into a self-conscious scene, something others can scrutinize and exploit. The hipster is that person who shows up and seems to ruin things—then you can begin to ask why this person exists, whether he is inevitable, whether he can be stopped, and what it will take. The hipster’s presence specifically forms the illusion of inside and outside, and the idea that others will pay for the privilege of being shown through the gate.
"The audience didn’t regard the quest for a stable position from which to critique hipsterism as a challenge; ignoring it, it did not rise above postures of self-defense and projection. Instead, when audience members began to contribute to the discussion, it began to feel factional and accusatory, as if many had gathered to accuse everyone else of being hipsters, or at least to mock n+1 itself for presuming it had somehow escaped hipsterism and insult its editors to their faces and show them what pretentious hipsters they themselves are. They seemed to want to peg n+1 as a hipster vehicle, as failing to escape the trap it sometimes seems to wish to spring on others. (One audience member asked the n+1 editor if he was afraid the magazine would get too many readers, because presumably there are some readers who shouldn’t be allowed to subscribe, who would tarnish the brand.
"Somewhat inexplicably, these “wrong” sort of readers were associated in the questioner’s mind with Slavoj Žižek, his trendiness among philosophical name-droppers, and his alleged nihilism. Perhaps his question was whether n+1 feared becoming trendy and then thereby vulnerable to the nonsensical and non-comprehending attacks and dismissals that Žižek himself is subjected to by the likes of this questioner.) The faint air of self-satisfaction inherent in the premise of a post-hipster conference grew thicker and thicker, and the tacit and necessary agreement to use terminology in the same way to move forward was increasingly ignored. Some even seemed to confuse hipsterism with an artistic avant-garde when they are in fact opposites by definition (by my definition anyway, and by any that would make the hipster a discrete object of analysis).
"There was some discussion of the hipster as the embodiment of postmodernism as a spent force, revealing what happens when pastiche and irony exhaust themselves as aesthetics. But one could hear mutterings in the crowd that no one had the right to judge what cultural products were better than others, and it was clear that this audience was not ready to surrender cultural relativism and subjectivism, that they still wanted to remain mired in that endless fight. (Statement actually overheard in the lecture hall: “What gives you the right to say that Charles in Charge is not important!”)[...]"