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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!
Lady Gaga could write a book about this topic. I wonder if she could write a challenge to the mathematical model too.
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.
If we're lucky, no. Most of 'em aren't in nearly as good a shape as Tim Curry. Most look more like Meatloaf.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
"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.
Yes, lets take advice on cool form someone on /.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
Everyone knows the real non-conformists are the Goths.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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.
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."
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."