Hipster beards and plaid shirts for all – it’s scientific fact
Some research published last week has put the fear of God into ordinary folk around the country, who have learned they will now have their ideas led by bearded hipsters. <Italic> Science </Italic> magazine reported that sociologists at the University of Pennsylvania had conducted an experiment in which 200 people were shown a face and asked to give the person a name – any name.
To win, they had to come up with the same random name that an anonymous partner picked. After a while, the discarded names, which were later revealed to the players, grew in popularity (suggestion working its power) until the same names started to crop up again and again. Within 25 rounds of one game, everyone had called the face Simone.
Then the twist: a new group of people was planted in the experiment and secretly instructed only to use the name Mary. Different quotas were used, until it was discovered that if the group had 25% or more Mary stooges, the name would go on to widespread approval. If it did not reach 25%, the name would not reach a tipping point.
Now you might be wondering what any of this has got to do with hipsters, so let me explain. The researchers concluded that for society to adopt new trends or ideas – anything from facial hair to recycling – about a quarter of people need convincing first, and then others will follow their lead, giving it a good chance of becoming the norm. Which is why most people now pick up their dog poo, and why gay marriage is widely accepted. Which may all sound great, until you think it through, and realise that this means that east London hipsters, who show no signs of fading away but only growing in number, will soon have spread their ideas to a quarter of the population, and then we’ll all be doomed.
As someone who has lived within walking distance of the hipster HQs of Shoreditch and Dalston for 20 years, apart from a few years spent in the Los Angeles hipster zone equivalent, I am here to warn the rest of you to stand guard on your tipping points. And don’t, please, let us name anything.
Because if hipster nomenclature is allowed to become the national norm, you’ll be lucky to see a Simone or a Mary or a Vikram ever again. Here in the borough of Hackney, I’m surrounded by so many hipster parents that my six-year-old daughter’s peers include children called Lyric, Neon, Sailor, Story, Perseus, Odin and Echo, and one of those names is actually hers.
Yes, I have already been 25-percented, sucked into the cult of east London trendy mums that I quietly think of as the Hallouminati. “Come and eat your spiralised courgetti, Dagobert,” we mutter at a mini-me dressed in the gender fluidity of overpriced Breton stripes, “and as a special treat you can have gluten for pudding.” Then the kids toddle off and play make-believe games in which they serve imaginary green tea and piping hot chai lattes.
Their birthday parties are held not at McDonald’s but in the woods, where the little darlings learn to forage for controversial opinions, and rub sticks together to create poster art. Our menfolk tend towards the lumbersexual look, with their facial hair and aspirational workwear – the aspiration is that they do any real work, the sort that would require them to wear such clothes. The reality is that they sit in front of a revolving number of Apple products all day, cultivating their beards in the light of the screens.
We’ve forgotten how to do anything useful at all, which is why I recently made the mistake of hiring someone from a trendy app called TaskRabbit to put up some shelves. I might as well have hired an actual rabbit.
First, he turned up after the agreed time, clutching a miniature skateboard. “Sorry I’m late,” he said, in a voice entirely lacking in sorrow, “but I didn’t skate all the way.” He then put down his rodent hoverboard, and spent a few hours putting up the shelves – I said he should do them with brackets, but he insisted that floating shelves were amp; #xa0; best.
After he finished, we stood and watched them float right off the wall again, taking a good chunk of plaster with them. “That wasn’t supposed to happen,” he said, profoundly.
So I am telling you, mainstream folk of Chelmsford and Worcester and Stirling and Merthyr Tydfil: save yourselves from being 25-percented, before it’s too late. And God help us if there’s a war.
• Sophie Heawood is an Observer columnist