Visualizing the relationship between hipsters and PBR

One way to prove you're not a hipster is to be so out of touch with the definition of a hipster that you'd generalize that badly. Here, let me fix your list:

Ride a fixie? Wear tight pants? Listen to indie/obscure music? Finished one semester at an art school? Love dive bars? Live in seattle? Enjoy art-house and indie films? You're probably a hipster.

Hipster has become a ubiquitous and largely non-pejorative term. Watered down is a good description. Yes, all of those things are hipster, and yes, some people are still angry about it. But, for the most part, it's just a word that describes a cultural subset that has widened greatly. Over the past few years I've transitioned from "ugh hipsters" to "yeah you could say I'm a hipster."

This has been my experience, in Austin.

> for the world-of-warcraft set to apply to anybody that doesn't spend their time playing video games

"I hate how all video game players generalize everyone else."

It's a catch-all term for people who don't fit cleanly into one of the other archetypes 20-somethings still somehow get labelled as (such as jock or nerd or prep).

I knew this was going to be the top comment on this story.

I'm a comment hipster.

Your criticism is off-base. Yes, some people have watered down the label hipster, but the communities this article discusses contain a much more pure form of hipster than what's entailed in the ordinary things you list. I spend a decent amount of time in Williamsburg and Bushwick, and a lot of the people there call themselves hipsters and live a lifestyle consistent with the stereotype.

Your comment is analogous to complaining that Big Bang Theory has watered down the word 'nerd', so now someone can no longer extrapolate patterns he finds at MIT and comic-con and describe them as nerd culture. It's a bad argument because those labels still hold cultural meaning, regardless of how some people have abused the labels.

Miller High Life blows PBR away, FYI, and you can get it anywhere in the US. Its also cheaper than PBR, hipster. :)

In all seriousness, its a catch-all term, and I agree with you. Now go drink some High Life, put on some looser jeans, and go to a sports bar. And your fixed gear bicycle is an insult to the history of engineering.

Then why do you care whether the term "hipster" is meaningless?

"I swear it has become a catchall for the world-of-warcraft set to apply to anybody that doesn't spend their time playing video games."

I'm honestly confused. How did we start at hipsters and beer and end up with WoW players insulting non-video game players? How are the two related at all?

I'm guessing (wildly) you play WoW with older 30somethings who call you a hipster? I really have no idea, so someone please inform me if I'm off-base in my confusion about the connection between the two.

Of course this comment would show up. We get it. People overuse the word. You're offended because someone used it on you once and you only loosely fit the description. Instead of muddling the comments of every post that contains the word hipster simply because you take offense, at least have something to contribute to the discussion.

The same thing happened with punk, goth, emo, and now hipster. It will happen again. Either get used to it or actively avoid participating in the things that people stereotype as hipster. Since that is nearly impossible, just get used to it. People who get offended by labels are just as ignorant as those that use them.

And before you get all offended, you might want to think of every time you tried to label someone else as anything. It can be as simple as black, white, programmer, etc.

We're actually as interested as you in this. Doing data analysis on hipsters was fun, but we're hoping it's the start of much deeper and more meaningful studies. Joining our data with other macro- and micro-economic datasets will be awesome, as will looking at the data over time to build things like cost of living indices.

As to your chain question: they are included, and we're hoping to build a data explorer that lets folks like you filter down the data to make analyses more sound, as you suggest. You can do that sort of stuff right now on our API at http://dev.locu.com/. Let me know if you need help along the way!

PBR is certainly not a popular beer with lower income drinkers. It's priced higher than comparable lagers. It didn't used to be, but then it became popular with a certain group of people.

Awesome! We're looking into making a more general-purpose city explorer.

And thanks for the feedback---we're on it!

Thanks for the feedback! Sending to our designer!:)

Also trying to read it on an iPhone is a big fail. Full-sized site locked to a giant zoom level.

Should now be fixed — try refreshing (make sure to clear the cache)!

hipster is a subculture which has been around maybe ten years. It's fairly amorphous, and any dictionary which mentions it is almost certainly not quite correct.

I'd reckon that the key characteristics of hipster are some fuzzy idea of "authenticity", as well as a certain styling of preferred art. This often manifests itself in preferring bands that are just getting started and various curios that reflect a more primitive time. Unsophisticated bikes and a preference for 'irony' are also hallmarks of the idea.

Your mileage will vary.

Hipster is an older word that has been co-opted more recently to describe a contemporary subculture, so it's not surprising that dictionaries have it wrong. Also, the subculture itself is a little bit difficult to pin down because many of its members (as judged by outside observers) wouldn't identify as hipsters, necessarily. More can be found at Wikipedia, although the page is of mixed quality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_%28contemporary_subcult...

Add to that "gafapastas".

The pejorative implication is that it applies to someone whose tastes/fashions are outside the mainstream merely for the sake of being outside the mainstream.

There's a further implication that those tastes are just as much a result of groupthink as the mainstream tastes.

"Hipster" is basically just an insult. There is no group of people who calls themselves "hipsters", and in fact nobody agrees on who exactly the hipsters are. A tattooed bike messenger might insult a heavily bearded, Carhartts-wearing beer brewer for being a hipster, who might in turn mock the girl with the heavy glasses and the polka-dotted dress who works as a barista and spends her weekends digging through thrift shops for being a hipster, and she might then laugh at the couple down the street with the Subaru and the chicken coop in their back yard for being hipsters, and they might groan when they see the bike messenger and his friends at their local bar and complain about how all the hipsters have taken over. None of these people would think of themselves as hipsters, but someone two states away might refer to them all as hipsters when making fun of the neighborhood they all live in.

You can get a bud light on South Beach for $25.

At fancy bars they want you to buy the $15 cocktail, but they'll begrudgingly give you a $10 Bud Light if you insist.

Also, stadiums and strip clubs.

Things in parts of NYC are extremely expensive. Doubly so if you're in an upscale club.

It's not that the beer is more expensive, it's that the cost of the labor involved in serving it to you and the real estate you're consuming it in cost more.