We’ll Miss U, BB
Back when Uffie still mattered, when Cory Kennedy was the it-girl of the moment, when your sister—now probably deep into whatever drug habit she picked up—was just getting dragged against her will to her first dubstep rave, Hipster Runoff was the most important website in the world. For me, for anyone trying to figure out what actually mattered in that scene, it was the template.
Carles, probably someone no one has ever actually seen in real life, took the current indie darlings and dragged them through the mud. He hated the trends everyone was buying into, especially the early attempts from Lana Del Rey, Grimes, and Lorde to make something of themselves. His hate was irony, his love was cynicism, and the truth lived somewhere in between.
I’m not going to write some earnest essay about what Hipster Runoff even was, because it doesn’t matter anymore. The site is dead—as dead as the weird subcultural category it named. After a year of silence, Carles decided to auction off the whole thing online, which feels about right. That’s how everything ends up these days.
In his farewell, Carles reflected on going back to the old scene locations and finding the same people years later, still wearing the same stupid clothes, still proud of themselves. He wondered if the scene had ever existed or if he was the only one actually living, if maybe he was just naive the whole time. All those feelings about youth and hope and something better had crystallized around this arbitrary cultural immersion. The scene looked identical to how it had always been—same kids, still asking each other if you’d heard this band or caught that opening where they were pouring free drinks. Was the scene real? Had it only existed in their heads? It was nothing and it was everything. He’d lost himself somewhere in it.
The auction of Hipster Runoff tore a hole in my internet heart. It made me realize what I’d been avoiding: those values and hopes from back then are just ruins in my memory now, and most of the people who were there are gone or dead. Carles was my model for how to think about this stuff, and I never even saw his face.