The hippie’s dissatisfaction, his dissociation from the old stereotypes, has resulted in his fabrication and adoption of new ones. Hip life creates and consumes new roles — guru, craftsman, rock star; new abstract values — universal love, naturalness, openness; and new mystifications for consolation — pacifism, Buddhism, astrology, the cultural debris of the past put back on the counter for consumption. The fragmentary innovations that the hippie did make — and lived as if they were total — have only given new life to the spectacle. . . .

Records, posters, bellbottoms: a few commodities make you hip. When “hip capitalism” is blamed for “ripping off our culture” it is forgotten that the early cultural heroes (Leary, Ginsberg, Watts, etc.) promoted the new lifestyle in the emporium of cultural consumption. These advertising men for a new style, by combining their own cultural fetishism with the false promise of an authentic life, engendered a quasi-messianic attachment to the cause. They “turned on” youth simultaneously to a new family of values and a corresponding family of goods. . . . The difference between the “real” and the “plastic” hippie is that the former has deeper illusions; he acquired his mystifications in their pure, organic form, while the latter buys them packaged: astrology in a poster, natural freedom in his bellbottoms, Taoism from the Beatles. While the real hippie may have read and helped develop hip ideology, the plastic hippie buys commodities that embody that ideology. . .  [Kenn Knabb / Bureau of Public Secrets, On the Poverty of Hip Life]

Die "Jugend von heute" - ich bleibe bei meiner Greisen-Terminologie - will nichts. Sie hat verraten, was die gequälte Kreatur am Leben hält: den Traum. Der Verdacht, daß sie mit ihrer Unzufriedenheit durchaus zufrieden sei, liegt nahe. So ist es nämlich nicht, daß die jungen Menschen, die in der Hoffnungslosigkeit unserer Epoche baden, vom Weltuntergang überzeugt wären. Sie wissen so gut wie wir, die Alten, daß es weitergeht, wenn auch auf das Unerfreulichste. [Ich, Hans Habe, ich kann diese Jugend nicht leiden, Twen 5/1961]