
The hipster effect: When anticonformists all look the same - p4bl0
http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.8001
======
kelvin0
For what it's worth, there is also a hilarious sample of the 'hipster'
population in this Youtube video (Jimmy Kimmel 0:53 mark)
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frjaQ17yAww](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frjaQ17yAww)
Of course interviewees in this video are probably paid actors playing dumb,
but boy it doesn't the stereotype ...

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justaman
"Obey"

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DubiousPusher
> Hipsters avoid labels and being labeled. However, they all dress the same
> and act the same and conform in their non-conformity. Doesn't the fact that
> there is a hip- ster look go against all hipster beliefs?

Wow, begging the question much?

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bengarvey
Anti-conformists aren't trying to be unique, they're trying to be different
from you.

~~~
baldfat
AS a former record label owner and recording studio of mostly Punk and
hardcore music I say 100% it wasn't different. It was for the majority of
people the desire of the same and acceptance.

Acceptance is the reason why anyone dresses (99% of the time) so if you dress
this way to make certain people mad your doing it to be accepted by the people
who are happy you did.

I just wore plain Levi's, Doc Martin shoes (Still do) and polo shirts. I stood
out in the crowd and the pit as "The Old Guy". I was accepted by the tattooed
and the pierced just the same as accepted by the main stream. Point being
everyone just ends up fitting in somewhere that will accept them.

That's the reason people dress as "Nerds" and coders dress as coders and CEOs
as CEOs.

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DINKDINK
These articles miss the point of "hipsters" being anticonformist in that
"hipsters" aren't anticonformist, they are merely alternative. Meaning they're
ok with someone having tatoos and giving you legal advice, that you can look
atypical and not be a boogie-person.

It seems that either writers tend to ignore the rich history of counter-
culture movements in the society (the beats, hippies, off-griders, Latter Day
Saints, MOVE, Black Panthers, goths, punks, anarchists) or are simply ignorant
of them.

~~~
eevilspock
Quite right. Hipsters are far from genuine counter-culture.

Adbusters (the mag that sparked Occupy Wall Street) has a great piece on this:
_Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization_. It's subtitle is
_Counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum, stripped of
its subversion and originality_.

[https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html](https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html)

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chrisBob
I have always heard that no one self identifies as a hipster. Is there anyone
here who can tell me how someone riding a fixie and wearing a hipster hat
describes themselves?

~~~
maxerickson
To the extent I think the label means anything, my definition of it includes
not being very thoughtful.

So there is a sense where following a trend is less thoughtful than doing
something you like (but I also think pretending that you can know this when
you see it is the worse thing).

So my usage of it wouldn't really expect self identification, it would be a
(slightly) negative judgement of the person.

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azinman2
Hipster is so overused that it's essentially meaningless at this point.

~~~
morley
While the first part of your assertion is almost certainly true, I don't agree
with the second part. The name explains what it is. A hipster is a person
who's concerned with being hip.

~~~
azinman2
That's so inexact I still don't know if I should bother continuing this reply.
So would a popular 8 year old who is into Paris Hilton be called a hipster? Is
each of the real housewives a 'hipster'?

The term originated in the 40s in a very specific subculture, and of recent
years has re-emerged with a new subculture that particularly originated out of
New York. Wikipedia does an ok job [1] but obviously like any actual
subculture entire books are written on it and even still won't fully capture
the meaning the same as being integrated into it socially and authentically.

Hipsters themselves wouldn't consider themselves seeking to be hip -- that's
something that an outside person such as yourself is labeling. In fact the
hipster subculture is anathema against 'trying' to be 'anything.'

I'm remarking that at this point the term blends beyond the actual subculture
so much that this random physics paper is using it to describe anything that
isn't mainstream, as if hipster is the only subculture that exists outside of
mainstream.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_(contemporary_subcultur...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_\(contemporary_subculture\))

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twic
This is a brilliant theoretical advance. But it will remain a purely paper
discovery until the experimentalists can confirm it. Accordingly, it is
imperative that we immediately start construction of a high-energy hipster
collider.

~~~
JonnieCache
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roller_derby](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roller_derby)

~~~
aepearson
Just about spit my lunch out on the screen @ that. HAHAHAHAHA

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guard-of-terra
I think that hipsters are not about nonconformism but about being new normal.
Old normal is boring and stupid but new normal is nice. Explains all the same
look.

~~~
pessimizer
Exactly. The characterization of 'hipsters' as nonconformists ruins the
mathematical metaphor for me. 'Hipsters' are simply conforming to a more
attractive group, filled with better looking, younger people, more attuned to
their own concerns, that are more interesting to them than their parents.

Actual nonconformists are both common and very dissimilar to each other. Most
people know a few. They rarely take pride in their lack of conformity, but
just can't seem to pick up on the music that everyone else is dancing to.

------
michaelochurch
I find that this often comes from a very shallow understanding of a deep
issue. This ardent noncomformity seems to occur when a problem is discovered,
no one knows what to do about it, and it becomes "cool" to take an
antithetical stance to its superficial faults.

For example, it's now "cool" to hate suburbia. Most of the kids in
Williamsburg go on about how much they hate the suburban environment they grew
up in. Now, there's a lot to dislike about the typical suburb: whether it's
the low-quality and unattractive housing, the racism and classism behind it,
the restructuring of life around child-raising that (paradoxically) results in
it being done poorly-- kids are better socialized if their parents have adult
friends who _aren 't_ all parents-- and finally the expensive environmental
catastrophe of billions of unnecessary, pointless driving miles. And yet...
hating suburbia is _about as "suburban", in the negative sense, as it gets_.

The hipsters are rebelling against middle-class conformity and insularity by
taking attitudes and tastes from the lower and upper classes, often
haphazardly without knowing what they're doing. It's a vote of no confidence
in the old, mostly suburban, middle class... maybe it's also a bet on peak
oil, and the unwinding of car culture is one thing I really like (but you
don't need to be a hipster to ride a bike) but... mostly it's about class. The
problem is that this rebellion strengthens many of the bad things that it
seems to be fighting. Jersey suburbs may be out of style, but Williamsburg
landlords are making out like bandits. No real change. On the whole, most of
what's billed as "hipster culture" is just lame Cali suburb culture in an
urban environment.

~~~
coldtea
I'm not sure you got that right. Tons of hipsters in Sheattle, Portland
(Portlandia, duh!), Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, etc. As in, downtown. And
of course tons of them in London, Paris, Barcelona, Denmark, etc.

So why there might be suburban hipsters, hipsterism itself has nothing
specific to do with the suburbs.

~~~
gohrt
Parent poster didn't say hipters live in suburbs. He said hipsters have a
"suburban" mindset.

~~~
coldtea
Which is also incorrect. Plus you have to live in the suburbs to have a
"suburban mindset" \-- the notion that a Bronx hipster has a "suburban
mindset" because "he hates the suburbs" is frankly BS.

I think his explanation is fixated on the suburbs, but hipsterism with all the
essential characteristics it has now was always a thing (minus inconsequntial
specifics on stuff lile clothing brands, facial hair preferences, music group
affiliations, etc that change over time). Heck, even back a century ago:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Negro](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Negro)

~~~
ForHackernews
> the notion that a Bronx hipster has a "suburban mindset" because "he hates
> the suburbs" is frankly BS.

The idea is that Bronx hipsters have a "suburban mindset" because they grew up
in the suburbs. They're upper-middle class kids whose parents raised them in
the 'burbs, and that's where they had their formative life experiences. They
hate the suburbs because they're self-consciously rejecting their upbringing.

------
Isamu
Actually the seeming paradox of nonconformity is because the term is
misapplied.

It is mostly a rejection of the mainstream tribe, not all possible tribes. One
is choosing not to conform with the mainstream, and so chooses some smaller
niche.

It's not like they are trying to signal their otherness to every group they
come across - this is how they signal their self-selected group.

And the term "hipster" is another "not my tribe" label.

~~~
gohrt
And in the modern Internet-driven society, with unlimited diversity of music,
TV, entertainment, and games, there really isn't a "mainstream" culture any
more.

~~~
Exenith
Mainstream culture doesn't exist? That's hilariously wrong. Kanye West would
like you to twerk to some Hunger Games and The Hobbit, and take a selfie on
Snapchat while #hashtagging about it on Twitter. Just don't take a naked one
like Jennifer Lawrence. And don't forget to catch The Big Bang Theory next
Sunday! Isn't the Harlem Shake so last year? And Psy, oh my God, who listens
to Gangnam Style anymore?

If you think mainstream culture doesn't exist, you're probably stuck right
inside it -- or so far from it that you don't even realize it's there. Oh
well, back to playing some CS:GO.

~~~
gohrt
I've heard of most of those things (except "CS:GO"). I have directly
experienced some of them. My parents

I don't think "famous" is the same as "mainstream". For one thing, anything
captured in digital form can break out to "famous" from any niche, using
Internet's multiplicative effect. Is Psy mainstream because _one_ of his
hundreds of songs got a billion views on YouTube? Or is "Gangnam Style"
mainstream, while Psy is niche?

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typedweb
I think it was in 'The Century for the Self' that described research in the
70's regarding the counter culture movements of the 60's. What they found was
that there were a number of alternative cultures that the people not following
the standard culture would adopt into (hippies, outdoorsy people, etc) to find
like minded alternative individuals. They called each of these alt-cultures
'lifestyles' and found that although a majority of people claimed to be
counter culture, there was only a small set of about 12 or so lifestyles that
most of these people fit into.

I think 'hipster' is just one lifestyle under the above criteria.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
I think hipster, at least in the modern sense, is an umbrella term for people
who don't subscribe to the standard mainstream culture. There are outdoorsy
hipsters, with expensive bikes and their own lingo, that are just as
pretentious as the typical urban hipster with his fixie.

I tend not to equate the two, myself. In my mind a proper subculture differs
from a lifestyle in that, typically, a lifestyle comes from above. A lifestyle
tends to be given to us by Madison avenue. The outdoorsy guy gets his opinions
from magazines and buys super expensive toys from mainstream sporting goods
with large advertising budgets.

The urban hipster we usually decry, picks up fashion at the thrift store,
whose second hand sale does nothing for Madison avenue's masters. Music
choices, reading, etc comes from the trenches of like minded fans. Politics
comes from, typically, marginalized outlets via books easily had at the
library or second-hand book store. There's a real crowdsourcing element to
traditional hipsterism. Sure, they're all wearing black and listening to the
same 50 or so indie bands, but the crowd made that happen, not marketers. I
think there's a real value there and this type of person is really the only
socially acceptable avenue to curb, what I consider, mindless consumerism.

If anything, the internet and its ability to tie us all together has made us
all urban hipsters to some extent. Now we're getting opinions from 1,000
people on goodreads, not the NYTimes reviewer.

~~~
trhway
>hipster, at least in the modern sense, is an umbrella term for people who
don't subscribe to the standard mainstream culture.

hipster is the standard mainstream culture today. Just look around.

>the typical urban hipster with his fixie.

"i was biking fixie way before it was cool". 30 years ago in USSR the geared
bikes were much less available even if you had money for it - it costs 130
rubles - 2/3 of an engineer's monthly salary vs. fixie costing "only" 64
rubles. Going uphill on a fixie i dreamed about unreachable gears :) With wide
availability of geared bikes here biking a fixie in SF is a cool way to beat
those self-whipping monks.

Another bunch of urban hipsters on fixies feeling cool :)
[http://english.people.com.cn/mediafile/200906/08/F2009060815...](http://english.people.com.cn/mediafile/200906/08/F200906081501106528371523.jpg)

~~~
ScottBurson
Are you really talking about a fixie, or just a single-speed bike? A fixie has
no freewheel.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-
gear_bicycle](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-gear_bicycle)

~~~
trhway
o! what i was talking did have freewheel. I guess it is my detachment from the
hipster/fixie culture shows here as what i accidentally recently read on it
was actually touting ability to have freewheel as among the advantages of
fixies over geared ones.

