Flavorwire hosts a forum on what subculture will follow hipsters. Robert Sloane's take:
Predicting what comes after the hipster is almost as impossible as predicting the hippies would have been in 1959, or predicting the punks in 1967 (unless you knew that the Velvet Underground’s mostly-unheard debut album would give rise to a whole scene of like-minded folks a decade later). Subcultures usually form in response to some sort of perceived cultural conformity or hegemony. For me, today, that’s technology and the Internet, and in a way, some of today’s hipsters participate in some activities that try to eschew modernity (craft food and spirits, knitting, canning, etc.). However, I can’t see a youth subculture forming to react against modern technology, since it has become so intertwined with modern life.
William Deresiewicz wonders if politics will replace consumerism:
The best bet for the next thing would be for something to emerge from the Occupy movement: less concerned about music and clothing, more concerned about politics; less concerned about differentiating yourself from the people around you, more concerned about working with them; less concerned about status, more concerned about social change; less ironic, more earnest; less polished, more grungy.
Touching on many of the ideas above, Aaron Lake Smith revisits Richard Linklater’s 1991 film Slacker:
The same question can be asked about subcultures that Jared Diamond asks about civilizations in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel: why do some survive and others perish? A college in town ensures a continuous flow of warm young bodies to the scene—idealism on tap. It takes successive generations of people sticking around, suffering and dying off like the first Pilgrims, to finally cement down the freak flag. And then just as quickly as a culture rises, it can return to dust. Places like Williamsburg, Austin, Portland, Oregon, and Athens, Georgia rose to prominence fueled by their lively, yeasty subcultures. Today these places, like Britain after the Empire, live on in an afterglow, preceded by their own loud cultural legacy. They become museum-like, historical Meccas of hipsterdom. That mysterious youth alchemy that once drove them slowly atrophies and becomes parody.
The Dish 