We Made a Blog

London busker Lewis Floyd Henry covers Wu-Tang Clan’s “Protect Ya Neck.”

This has been a bad week for hipsters.

n+1 has announced it’s working on “What Was the Hipster?“, a book on “the rise and fall of the hipster.” It’ll cover what happened to sneaker shop Alfie Rivington and weigh in on that age-old debate, Hasids versus hipsters.

American Apparel lothario, um, CEO Dov Charney maybe got his hands on an advance copy. “Hipsters are from a certain time period,” he told the Village Voice. “The stereotype of a hipster is not something people aspire to anymore. Do you want to be a hipster? Nobody wants to be a hipster.”

And The New York Times is declaring even the word itself over. “In any case, hipster’s second life as hip slang seems to have lost its freshness,” Philip B. Corbett writes. “It may still be useful occasionally, but let’s look for alternatives and try to give it some rest.”

Looks like that hipster remover may be working.

Sweet, funny, sexy, sad, touching, reverential – everything life is is summed up wordlessly via word association.

“Words” by Everynone

New Yorker cartoons are famously not funny. Kanye West is famously not (intentionally) funny. Both think a little too highly of themselves. And both are getting taken down by comedy team Paul and Storm in #kanyenewyorkertweets.

Once Google became a daily and unconscious part of the day, I started getting the feeling that somehow it would be possible for search results to show, well, results…of things that had not yet happened. Ridiculous, no? Maybe not so much. Google (and a little outfit called the CIA) have invested in Recorded Future (Orwellian by way of Disraeli motto: “What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens.”).

Recorded Future is a search engine (it seems to prefer to call itself a “temporal analytics engine”) with three boxes: What, Who/Where and When. The “When” is where things get interesting. Instead of the usual search field date restriction of the present, the “When” goes boldly into the future to scan everything from Twitter feeds to government documents to map patterns and forecast an outcome.

As you may have already predicted, the future isn’t free (it’s $149 a month).

Street art gets sweet.

Art by Ack!
Video by PR!MO