The hipster effect: When anticonformists all look the same
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
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.
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.
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?
It seems the root cause and motivation of many people who get classified as "hipster," who aren't simply reacting to or against whatever is the prevalent culture around them, comes directly from this Internet-driven, information-saturated, always-on media environment. It also directly results from how identity politics and marketing are dovetailing to constrain peoples' ideas of self-agency. People performing whatever actions are considered "hipster" are doing so from a position of ambivalence toward being constrained in such a way. They are resisting categorization, specifically because 1) it seems to immediately lead to someone trying to sell you something based on limited or superficial evidence, and 2) because, like the above commenter mentions, there is no longer a "mainstream". It's dissolved into countless iterations of pastiche. The people who have seen this all happening have determined that they'd rather select from the detritus of cultures past, as it's all being recycled anyway, and not subscribe to ideologies beyond what interests them in the moment.
All this also comes off as quite superficial and easily derided. But beneath the derision, I think the loudest anti-hipster voices are upset that this kind of person doesn't seem to attach themselves to an Ideology. This must terrify some people.
I think 'hipster' is just one lifestyle under the above criteria.
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.
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...
This is what bothers me so much about the term. Nobody calls themselves a hipster, and in my area at least, nobody who could be accused of being a hipster goes around thinking of themselves as some counterculture special snowflake. I ride a fixie because they're cheap and our city is flat, and I live downtown because I like to be able to walk to work, and so on. These are just normal things that young people do, generally without any pretention. Hearing people making ridiculous sweeping generalizations about how pedantic they think young hipsters are is just the same shit as complaining about Elvis and his dancing.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2010/10/how-pbr-co...
I can spot people following that trend on the street but I can't tell if they'd label themselves as hipsters.
Hippies, grunge, punks claim to be hippies, grunge or punks.
That's why people hate hipsters - what they call irony is actually "being an asshole".
'The Century of the Self' is excellent. It explained to me how my commune-dwelling, sandals-made-from-old-tires wearing parents were converted back into happy consumers. It also cleared up a few other questions like: Why was the V-Chip was such a huge deal and then was suddenly forgotten?
Pay for it http://www.amazon.com/Century-Curtis-producer-Power-Nightmar...
Or not... https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAD989035A4E8883D
There are people who primarily seek to be different, and that can devolve into self-parody, but that is not the only kind of member of counter-culture.
We already have apple stores but we need data scientists to analyze the results. Perhaps a nosql database would help. Or a tattoo.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wow, begging the question much?
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.
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.
First a dramatic drop in crime. In many ways there were similar rates of criminals in the suburbs, but the lower density defused their impact. EX: Kids throwing rocks through car windows spend more time walking and less time destroying things in the suburbs. But the same applies to pickpockets or home invasions etc. Coupled with local reporting looking at the absolute numbers of crimes vs and ignoring the rate of said crime. (That's 5 blocks from here fells vary different than that's 20 miles from here.)
Second, dramatically increased air quality due to the loss of the manufacturing sector and improved pollution controls on cars.
PS: One of the more interesting ideas on urban renewal basically goes like this. The Gay community does not care about local schools and is willing to trade poor schools for cheaper housing. They raise the rates slightly and push out the poor population. Fewer kids and higher property taxes improve schools which attracts young people who further drive up rents pushing out the Gay community who don't care about schools. And the cycle continues. Crime rates can be dramatically different over just a few blocks, but having a stable buffer zone is very important. (You can substitute young people without kids in the model they serve the same function but they tend to spread out more diffusing the impact.)
So why there might be suburban hipsters, hipsterism itself has nothing specific to do with the suburbs.
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
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.
As in, not from here but moved here within the past few years from a comfortable middle-class existence in the suburbs or some small town, in the case of Chicago at least. Chicago has always been this way, though; any hip cultural history that it has had in the past 40 years was produced by people not from here (like New York.)
What's the most obvious indication that someone is not from Chicago? A tattoo of the Chicago flag.