Everything new is bad again

In her article "Can we live without irony" in the Stone Reader,  Christy Wampole writes about hipsters and their world view. If life becomes "an endless series of sarcastic jokes and pop references, a competition to see who can care the least (or, at minimum, a performance of such a competition), it seems we’ve made a collective misstep. Could this be the cause of our emptiness and existential malaise?"

Ms. Wampole's anguish is understandable, but months after reading her essay I suddenly remembered that I had heard the argument before, and often from Roger Scruton who is one of the contributors of Stone Reader, too. In 1994 in "Upon Nothing", Mr Scruton had this to say about Derrida "The Derridean style refrains from stating anything. [.. ] Derrida’s style abounds in childish wordplay, in invented words and deformations of syntax, in a wild and seemingly pointless erudition."