Why hipsters are bad

Remember me. Forgot password? Log in. Log in with Google Log in with Facebook. Followers Following. Julia S. On Pexels. Kate Brunotts Dec. Share tweet pinterest reddit email. Extensive Coffee Knowledge is Expected Before moving to New York, I had no clue about what the difference is between a macchiato, cortado, and cappuccino was. Hipsters are Characteristically Bad At Budgeting For some reason, being financially insecure has become somewhat of a norm, especially in trendy areas with high concentrations of hipsters.

View Deal. Show more deals. Jennifer Pacheco 26 Oct Read more. Samantha Toner 07 Oct Read more. Samantha Toner 05 Oct Read more. If envy is the central fact of American life, then envy is also central to animosity toward hipsters. In our economized culture, we treat coolness as a scarce resource, and we see hipsters as robber barons, hoarding all the cool for themselves while twirling their annoying hipster mustaches.

If anything, hipsters sacrifice their own chances of coolness so that we might become just a little bit cooler. Edit Close. How does this kind of synchronization occur? Is it inevitable in modern society, and are there ways for people to be genuinely different from the masses? Today we get some answers thanks to the work of Jonathan Touboul at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. Touboul is a mathematician who studies the way the transmission of information through society influences the behavior of people within it.

He focuses in particular on a society composed of conformists who copy the majority and anticonformists, or hipsters, who do the opposite. And his conclusion is that in a vast range of scenarios, the hipster population always undergoes a kind of phase transition in which members become synchronized with each other in opposing the mainstream. In other words, the hipster effect is the inevitable outcome of the behavior of large numbers of people.

This delay is important. People do not react instantly when a new, highly fashionable pair of shoes becomes available. Instead, the information spreads slowly via fashion websites, word of mouth, and so on. This propagation delay is different for individuals, some of whom may follow fashion blogs religiously while others have no access to them and have to rely on word of mouth. The question that Touboul investigates is under what circumstances hipsters become synchronized and how this varies as the propagation delay and the proportion of hipsters both change.

He does this by creating a computer model that simulates how agents interact when some follow the majority and the rest oppose it. This simple model generates some fantastically complex behaviors. In general, Touboul says, the population of hipsters initially act randomly but then undergo a phase transition into a synchronized state.