A hipster or possibly mathematician

The Polish Hammer sent me this rad explanation of a recently published paper on the mathematical forces behind synchronized nonconformity. Contrary to Business Week, the paper does not prove that hipsters all look the same. The hipsters in mathematician Jonathan Touboul’s model look the same because he set it up as a binary: a field of othello tiles that can flip between two looks, punk and normcore. Some of the tiles are conformist—meaning they flip to adopt the same look as the majority of tiles around them—and others are hipster,¹ meaning they flip to adopt the opposite look from the tiles around them. The Washington Post explains it better than I do, but the upshot is that when Touboul introduced a one-turn delay in information about surrounding tiles, the hipsters began to simultaneously adopt the same look in waves.

We don’t want to look like everybody else, but we don’t know what everybody else looks like. We only know what they looked like yesterday. This effect does not explain why hipsters settled on slim fits and chunky glasses—again, Touboul’s model works with only binary “looks” in punk and normcore—but it does suggest a mechanism by which postures that were once rebellious become the norm.

I’m interested in another aspect of this article, though. Here’s how Guo describes the conformists and hipsters in Touboul’s model:

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who like to go with the flow, and those who do the opposite—hipsters, in other words. Over time, people perceive what the mainstream trend is, and either align themselves with it or oppose it.

If you had to select which of these descriptions describes the values expressed in entertainment, advertising, and other forms of American culture, “perceive what the mainstream trend is and…oppose it” would seem a better fit than “go with the flow.” Americans are nonconformists. That’s weird, since we use hipster as a pejorative term.

As vaguely defined as the word hipster might be, we can all agree that it doesn’t mean us. We might do hipster things like read Pitchfork or gentrify Brooklyn, but we are not ourselves hipsters. We have lives, and our behaviors that might coincide with hipsterism grew organically from them. We’re not like those hipsters we see on the street, whose biographies are limited to their clothes and haircuts. Those people all look the same.

If you accept that A) hipster is a pejorative term and B) contemporary American culture values nonconformity over conformity, our construction of hipsters is very problematic. Do we hate them because they defy the mainstream? Probably not, since that is officially the coolest behavior in America since 1968. We hate them because they defy the mainstream and fail by winding up the same.

In other words, we hate the hipster because he draws attention to how meaningless nonconformity really is—at least when it’s consumer behavior. When we watch hipsters construct identities around nonconformist dress and media consumption only to wind up a comically uniform subgroup, we worry that our own consumer gestures of nonconformity are meaningless as well.

That’s probably because they are. Maybe hipsters unsettle us because we only purport to value nonconformity when it actually freaks us out. That’s what hipsters would have you believe, if any of them were willing to self-identify. I think it’s more likely that we really do value nonconformity, though, and hipsters unsettle us because they draw attention to the denuded² ways we let ourselves express that value.

The hipster seeks to defy conformity as extremely as he can within the medium of consumption. He dresses the opposite of cool; he dresses like a nerd, but he confines his nerdiness to dress. He does not live as a nerd. He dates and goes to parties instead of staying home to experiment with a chemistry set. He eats artisanal cheese, but he does not become a dairy farmer. The hipster goes as far as he can to defy the mainstream within the boundaries of consumer behavior, and in failing he suggests that consumer behavior is not a good way to rebel at all.

That idea is anathema to American culture. Our collective psychology won’t accept it. To do so would undermine a consumer economy predicated on individual expression and a society predicated on submission. The hipster warns us that rebelling by buying stuff doesn’t work. If you dress differently, listen to different music, eat different food but live the same way as everybody else, you will wind up like everybody else. That’s the product, and it’s the opposite of the pitch. Maybe we hate hipsters because they give the lie to something we want to believe.

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