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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.
This is not true anticonformancy. If you want to truly look different from most people it's not that difficult.
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."
I guess that's why all iPhones look exactly the same then.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
That reminds me of a demotivational poster. "Goth Kids, being lonely.....together."
I was pointing out how hating hipsters before it was cool makes you a hipster, before pointing that out was cool.
My wife often decides to hate things because everyone is “into” them. My daughter gets caught up in liking what others like for no reason other than that it’s the trend. Then there’s me who like many Slashdotters decide what to like based on what seems like good empirical evidence and an ability to just judge for myself.
I think it is the dynamic between the hippster and trenders that give the wild oscillations in popularity for things and why trends come and go. Ironically it is the trenders that undo the hippsters as when the hippster/hatters reach a certain critical mass, then boom the trenders hate it to.
Letter To Iran
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.
"Hipster hate" makes a great deal of sense compared to disliking other subcultures, because those other subcultures may not appeal to you but they're marked by their own clothing, behavior, and ritual. Hipsters however don't embrace a particular ethos beyond mocking other cultures. They appropriate symbols and cruft from different eras and movements and display them in a mocking 'irony' to underscore how 'uncool' is item X or garment Y. Of course their Ray-Ban sunglasses and Smurf lunchboxes are stripped of context but there isn't much cogitation involved, just peacocking. Put simply, hipsters are reviled across cultures because those hipsters are already hating you.
maybe we can get a vaccine.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yes, lets take advice on cool form someone on /.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It has ALWAYS been cool to hate hipsters.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The main differentiation is that hipsters are pussies.
Fixed that for you.
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.
Everyone knows the real non-conformists are the Goths.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I like the idea that they're putting forward, but I think it would be a mistake to try to explain this behavior with math like this without dealing with other constraints. For example:
As you can see, a clear tipping point is recognizable in which all lovers of small goats suddenly see that everyone is wearing Clarks, after which it takes a while for the lovers of small goats to all wear Timberlands. Until they notice that, and switch to something else, et cetera, until infinity.
So what they're saying, I think, is that there's Event A, which is people recognizing that everyone is wearing Clarks, followed by Event B, where 'hipsters' rebel by switching to the less popular brand of Timberlands. Because there's a delay between Event A and Event B, people have all switched to Timberlands, making it the new popular brand, before the 'hipsters' realize it and have time to react by choose a new kind of shoe.
However, it doesn't explain why everyone switched to Timberlands instead of various people switching to various other brands. Part of the issue must be some kind of market constraints, where there's some limits on which shoes people will realistically choose. More importantly, there is some level of social conformity going on in all of these groups. It's not clear to me who the 'hipsters' are, but I'm sure that among people adhering to the 'hipster' trends, there are some who are just following the crowd, as is normal. Part of the great irony of social movements that are superficially rebellious is that there must be a conformist aspect, or they wouldn't form a cohesive movement.
More to the point, it seems to me that a lot of the phenomenon of what people call 'hipsters' are actually very mainstream. The real 'hipsters' were the cool kids doing this stuff several years ago. Most people wouldn't see it enough to complain about 'hipsters' until it became common and mainstream enough that they see it in their normal daily lives.
i'm a hipster, and i don't hate you.
the things you ascribe to hipsters - those are more caricature than reality. if being a hipster is really about liking things before it's cool, you can see us as cultural forecasters. 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. you may call it peacocking, but if you think there's value in predicting the future of the culture - and shaping it - i'd suggest that hipsters play a useful role in society. no need to hate us.
yes there are hipsters who are assholes - but that's not cool. everyone seems to agree that hipsters are interested in being cool, so i'd suggest that those hipsters who are dicks about it - they're just not that great at being hipsters, either.
Hipster is all about defining oneself as a hipster.
The rest of the world actually doesn't care.
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. you may call it peacocking, but if you think there's value in predicting the future of the culture - and shaping it - i'd suggest that hipsters play a useful role in society.
DO NOT WANT.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
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.
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.
"If everyone always wants to look different than everybody else, [then] everybody starts looking the same."
Whoa. Probably the most insightful thing I've read all year. Worthy of putting on a T-shirt and wearing around (like a hipster).
(It's turtles all the way down...)
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."
Why did the hipster burn his tongue? He sipped his tea before it was cool.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
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.
I want to turn this sentence into a song.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Hipster != indie. Hell, Vampire Weekend isn't even indie. Hipsters are not prophets of "cool." They're not some required demographic to seek out lesser known media. They're the bandwagoners who jump on to the latest retro revival trend and pretend they're the only ones doing it and nobody else has ever heard of Can or Sonic Youth because their parents weren't playing those tapes. But even if mommy and daddy only listened to pop and 80s hair metal, at least they still paid your rent and gave you the financial freedom to express your counter-culturedness in a tastefully kitschy way. That's why we hate you. Miles and Monk were true first-definition hipsters, and they'd despise the lot of you posers.