That kind of thinking is precisely what I’m talking about, what lies behind the bland, inoffensive, smile-and-a-shoeshine personality — the stay-positive, other-directed, I’ll-be-whoever-you-want-me-to-be personality — that everybody has today. Yes, we’re vicious, anonymously, on the comment threads of public Web sites, but when we speak in our own names, on Facebook and so forth, we’re strenuously cheerful, conciliatory, well-groomed. (In fact, one of the reasons we’re so vicious, I’m convinced, is to relieve the psychic pressure of all that affability.) They say that people in Hollywood are always nice to everyone they meet, in that famously fake Hollywood way, because they’re never certain whom they might be dealing with — it could be somebody who’s more important than they realize, or at least, somebody who might become important down the road.

Well, we’re all in showbiz now, walking on eggshells, relentlessly tending our customer base. We’re all selling something today, because even if we aren’t literally selling something (though thanks to the Internet as well as the entrepreneurial ideal, more and more of us are), we’re always selling ourselves. We use social media to create a product — to create a brand — and the product is us. We treat ourselves like little businesses, something to be managed and promoted.

The self today is an entrepreneurial self, a self that’s packaged to be sold.

In “Bobos in Paradise,” David Brooks articulated the phenomenon of the bourgeois bohemians, a class that merges respectable incomes with countercultural attitudes. Where, I wondered recently, do the real bohemians — the hipsters, in other words — fit into the scheme? Some are just bobos in training; others are destined to remain bohemians for life. But whatever their individual trajectories, hipsters possess a relationship to mainstream society that is radically different from that of their youth-culture forebears, and they have the bobos to thank. Indeed, they have them to thank for their very existence.

The rise of the bobos in the 1990s (when creativity became lucrative and money became cool) put a new kind of pressure on the true bohemians. Now they no longer stood in opposition to mainstream culture, as the beatniks did to the company men or the slackers did to the business boys. Now they looked exactly like it. Mainstream culture had come to them, and it drew them to itself. Et voilà, the hipster. Instead of having to get a haircut and a new wardrobe, not to mention a new set of friends, if you wanted to go over to the man, you just kept doing what you were doing, at gradually higher price points. Hence the hipster as Bobo-in-training, bohemia merging imperceptibly with the bourgeoisie.

Hipsters and bobos are symbiotic. I should know; I’m a bobo in a hipster-bobo neighborhood — which is pretty much what I was looking for when I moved to Portland in the first place. We’re all into organic food and progressive politics; we just have different relationships to the commodities through which those attitudes are expressed. Hipsters create bobo culture. They make or sell or serve, or simply pioneer, what bobos buy. Try to picture Allen Ginsberg having a chat with Don Draper, across the counter at the local coffeehouse, about the latest Lady Gaga video, and you’ll realize how far we’ve come.

All this is why, unlike those of previous youth cultures, the hipster ethos contains no element of rebellion, rejection or dissent — remarkably so, given that countercultural opposition would seem to be essential to the very idea of youth culture. That may in turn be why the hipster has proved to be so durable. The heyday of the hippies lasted for all of about two years. The punks and slackers held the stage for little more than half a decade each. That’s the nature of rebellion: it needs to keep on happening. The punks rejected the mainstream, but they also rejected the previous rejection, hippiedom itself — which, by the late ’70s, was something that old people (i.e. 28-year-olds) were into. But hipsters, who’ve been around for 15 years or so, appear to have become a durable part of our cultural configuration.

Or maybe not. These movements always have an economic substrate. The beatniks and hippies — love, ecstasy, transcendence, utopia — were products of the postwar boom. The punks and slackers and devotees of hip-hop — rage, angst, nihilism, withdrawal — arose within the long stagnation that lasted from the early ’70s to the early ’90s. The hipsters were born in the dot-com boom and flourished in the real estate bubble.

Affability is a commercial virtue, but it is also the affect of people who feel themselves to be living in a fundamentally agreeable society. Already, the makings of a new youth culture may be locking into place.