The hipster study that led to a threat of legal action
A man who threatened to sue researchers looking into why all “hipsters” look the same ended up adding weight to the researchers’ study.
Last month’s MIT Technology Review featured a photograph of a man in a flannel shirt and a beanie above an article headlined, “The hipster effect: Why anti-conformists always end up looking the same.”
The article looks at how a newly published mathematical theory may explain why “hipsters”, or nonconformists if you prefer, in their eternal quest to defy mainstream trends, end up conforming to a trend themselves. They all just end up looking the same, the study by Brandeis University mathematics professor Jonathan Touboul concluded.
One reader, who thought the image was of him, emailed the MIT Technology Review, complaining that: “You used a heavily edited Getty image of me for your recent bit of clickbait about why hipsters all look the same. It’s a poorly written and insulting article, and — somewhat ironically — about 5 years too late to be as desperately relevant as it is attempting to be, by using a tired cultural trope to try to spruce up an otherwise disturbing study.”
But the photo was of someone else.
After receiving the email Gideon Lichfield, editor in chief of MIT Technology Review, immediately launched an investigation, the findings of which came to light this week. He started by asking, Would his magazine really misuse this bearded man’s photograph without his permission and without a Getty Images licence? No way — his art team would never do that, Gideon thought. Was this even the same guy? And also, had “hipster” really become such a bad word that you could now sue someone for slander over it?
“My first response was: ‘Did we do anything wrong’?” Lichfield said. His next thought: “I also don’t think you can be sued for slander for implying somebody’s a hipster.”
To be fair, when MIT staffers pulled up the man’s Facebook page, he really did look like the man pictured with the article about lookalike hipsters. But with the threat of legal action dangling, the magazine contacted Getty Images and the legal team before taking any action, such as removing the photo.
Getty Images completed its review on Wednesday. Its response was decisive: Definitely a model — a different bearded, beanie-wearing guy.
“Wow, I stand corrected,” the litigious bearded man wrote back to the Technology Review after learning his mistake this week.
“In other words,” Lichfield wrote in a widely shared Twitter thread on Thursday, “the guy who’d threatened to sue us for misusing his image wasn’t the one in the photo. He’d misidentified himself. All of which just proves the story we ran: Hipsters look so much alike that they can’t even tell themselves apart from each other.” Lichfield said it was “an extraordinary coincidence”, given the research that was the subject of the article, the “hipster effect”. Touboul’s hipster-effect theory revolves around a few basic questions: How do you know what you’re wearing right now is fashionable? What is it that makes you realise it’s no longer fashionable? And what makes you so sure?
His research splits a hypothetical world of people into two groups: The mainstreams (conformists) and the hipsters (the anticonformists). The mainstreams have a “strong incentive” to switch their styles constantly, based on what they view to be, well, the mainstream fashion of the day — they like to sense an obvious “consensus”. The hipsters “will feel compelled to keep their originality”, Touboul wrote, so they may switch their style only when they sense that too many people are catching on.
Of course, how you sense the fashions changing depends on how much you pay attention to various factors — fashion magazines, Instagram influencers, style vloggers. Maybe you don’t care about any of it. In any case, the degree of your exposure to these “trends” will influence how slowly or quickly you adopt a new style. Using these numerous variables, Touboul created a computer model that, as the Technology Review put it, “simulates how agents interact when some follow the majority and the rest oppose it”. What Touboul found is that the hipsters ironically end up “synchronising”, sensing the transition away from a conformist trend at roughly the same time, then abandoning it altogether before starting a new trend — that the mainstreams will inevitably encroach upon again. And so on and so on.
The result: They “conform in their nonconformity”, Touboul wrote, quoting a HuffPost blog written a decade ago that “seems to stand the test of time”.