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The Math Behind the Hipster Effect
rossgneumann writes If everyone always wants to look different than everybody else, everybody starts looking the same. At least, if you use a recently published mathematical model describing the phenomenon. "The hipster effect is this non-concerted emergent collective phenomenon of looking alike trying to look different," in the words of Jonathan Touboul, mathematical neuroscientist at the College de France in Paris.
I love it. Hipster-hate, in all it's forms, is the latest new thing! It's the latest trend.
Which makes you a hipster. And if you were disparaging hipsters *before* it was cool, the you are definitely a hipster.
Quick, get on board the hipster-hate train, before it becomes uncool!
Hipsterism was "uncool" the moment someone gave it a name, that's how these things work.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
or you could, you know, not be a 15-year-old with an existential social identity crisis at age 35. You could also stop defining yourself around your consumption habbits.
the real problem with hipsters, is beneath the beard, beneath the "ironic" whatever, or whatever knickknacks, and chockskies, are still empty soulless yuppie shitheads.
That's not really the same thing. I don't expect that any guy is going to walk around generally wearing a corset, especially a rainbow-colored one that is as revealing as a Dinka corset. A big problem with this argument about unintentional conformance is that there are a lot of rather narrow social rules than mandate conformance and thus limit the range of expression people actually have. So, rather than the problem being that everyone becomes so eclectic that everyone ends up looking roughly the same, it's more of a matter of people choosing various fashions that are considered "appropriate but quirky". That's not the same thing as true anticonformance. There are things that aren't even as popular as bare butt male corsets that people can wear if they want to be different.
Not rocket science -- we saw the same thing in the sixties. Association with a movement -- "hipster" in this case, "hippie" back then -- although intending noncomformity, in truth only means conforming with a different set of rules. Or as Frank Zappa said decades ago, "Everyone in this room is wearing a uniform, and don't kid yourself".
But -- and I don't think that having married a hippy has colored my judgement -- hipsters are a LOT more annoying. Especially if I get stuck behind one at Starbucks.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I'm 41 with a gigantic oustache. I work in tech, live in San Francisco, like craft beer, and bike to work, all things associated with being a hipster (except my age). I don't define myself around my consumption habits; I just am. I like to bike. I like to drink craft beer. I like working in tech, and my facial hair rocks. It's the idiots out there like you who feel it's necessary to label folks different than themselves as " empty soulless yuppie shitheads." If you think that having a mustache or liking craft beer is what makes a person a shithead, then you are part of the problem.
In my day, we called them posers.
And so you think hipsters, as you define them, are unaware of why those things are cool at one time? or are you just pulling this out of your ass?
Do you realize that David Lee Roth's "Just a Gigolo" was a remake of a 1929 song by Irving Ceasar? So all those people who loved the remake in the 80's were just ignorant and being "ironic" for liking the song without know the original context?
And the original Irving Cesar version was a remake of an Austrian song, "Schöner Gigolo, armer Gigolo", composed in 1928 in Vienna by Leonello Casucci. So all those "hipsters" in 1929 who liked the remake were too cool for their own good for liking a song without knowing the original context?
This is the stupidity of the anti-hipster "movement". Virtually everything put out these days is a rehash, remake, or takes something from something that came before it. Liking those things without knowing the original "context" of it doesn't make you less of a person, or more importantly, worthy of ridicule.
Cool-hunting has been around forever and is done by all kinds of people, not just hipsters. Were hipsters in at the start with glam rock? Disco? New Country?
Yet all those things were "cool" (for a certain value of "cool") once upon a time.
So hipsters are at best a subset of cool-hunters, and not a very interesting set, because they differ from other cool-hunters in their stupidity, insularity and arrogance. Many cool-hunters want to find the cool and share it with others. Hipsters want to find the cool and keep it to themselves, to the point of denying that anything that has become popular is cool any more.
Furthermore, you don't understand futures trading, even a little bit. Futures trading is about hedging, not discovery. They literally have nothing to do with each other. Futures markets are not predictive, they simply represent the mean of trader's expectations. They are an essentially homogenizing force. So if you think hipsters are like futures traders you are saying they are trying to make everyone the same bland and boring type.
Another clue that hipsters have nothing interesting to say is their proclivity for using unconventional typography--such as eschewing capitalization--to draw attention away from the vacuity and falsehood of so much of what they say.
Hipsterism is the practice of misdirection. Hipsters are lame people who have learned that attention is the scarcest human resource, so they can hide behind a few attention-grabbing quirks. It saves them from having to do anything actually interesting, useful or productive.
It's kind of sad, really, but the hate they get is well-deserved, because they are socially useless people who are deliberating soaking up our precious, limited attention on completely pointless self-aggrandizement.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
we perform a service for society akin to that peformed by record or film studio executives - we watch shitty movies and listen to shitty music, so you don't have to.
Are you actually serious? How about starving the shitty movies and music out of the market by not giving them a fucking audience? You're part of the problem, not the solution.
This paragraph alone is enough to make a +5 post:
Hipsterism is the practice of misdirection. Hipsters are lame people who have learned that attention is the scarcest human resource, so they can hide behind a few attention-grabbing quirks. It saves them from having to do anything actually interesting, useful or productive.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."