I was into MeTa before and after it was cool

May 13, 2013 12:27 PM

This post is a pretty sharp piece on how the constructed media of hipsters ends up displacing more salient criticism (including a good line about how obsession with limning the "hipster" has removed "counter" from "counter-culture"). What's the discussion? Immediately, it starts out with the same old hipster tropes of MeFi with too many folks who clearly haven't read the fucking article.

I admit that part of what grinds my gears is seeing this as a caricature of the "It's about the discussion" ethos some folks apply to MeFi; I think it demonstrates why reading the actual fucking links is important, instead of just grabbing some keyword and doing a LOL Hipster riff.

And in specific, if I never again have to hear whatever threadbare know-it-when-I-see-it notions Charlemagne in Sweatpants has about irony or hipsters, I promise to cut down my WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU EVEN ON ABOUT?!!!?! by at least 30 percent.

I wish I thought that we could talk about actual articles, but maybe "hipster" is too much circumcision/Israel/declawing to be posted here without a bunch of half-baked treatises on just what parts of Sydney are the hipster ones.

posted by klangklangston to Etiquette/Policy at 12:27 PM (415 comments total)

Yeah, I'd have to agree and say it's a problem for the site (and I'm guilty of it also). More reading of links along with intelligent commenting of them and less quips would be great.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:32 PM on May 13, 2013 [3 favorites]

I didn't read your post but I'd be 100% on board with banning hipster FPPs.
posted by desjardins at 12:35 PM on May 13, 2013 [13 favorites]

Reading the links before injecting a pre-conceived personal philosophy/gripe/complaint/dismissal related to the apparent subject is definitely good protocol, yeah.

And it's easy to get a little lazy/excitable and not do, for the same reason it's easy to pop into an askme to respond to the one above-the-fold sentence that reminds you of something you have something to say about; and it's similarly if not totally identically problematic when that happens, but we can't really moderate mefi discussions as much on those grounds as we do askme so it's a little more on folks to show some restraint and self-awareness there themselves.
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:35 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

Moi aussi. This is something we don't do well. It turns ugly every time and makes what should be interesting discussions into immediate "LOL Hipsters AMIRITE".
posted by Kitteh at 12:36 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

People don't RTFA, people never RTFA. Best practice seems to be blockquoting the FA they didn't R when people who obviously didn't RTFA make their underinformed assertions.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:36 PM on May 13, 2013 [6 favorites]

I thought 'His thoughts were red thoughts' summed it up nicely: FFS, CiS. RTFA.
posted by zarq at 12:36 PM on May 13, 2013 [6 favorites]

Wow, hipsters sure are a sensitive bunch, eh?

I'm kidding! People probably call me a hipster. Who cares? Meaningless term is meaningless.
posted by Grither at 12:43 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

It's not just hipsters and I/P; witness anything mentioning anarchists and you'd think Grand Pa Libertarian ran the joint. I regretted the damn post soon after it went live, but I guess the title I chose didn't help much. That;s what happens when you try to lighten up the mood before sliding the Marxian analysis across the desk.

(Thanks as always Klang Klang Klang. You are The Cutter.)
posted by artof.mulata at 12:53 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

Greg Nog: " This seems to be as good a place as any to say that if you DO read the linked articles on the regular before you comment, then thank you! I appreciate it!"

Well said. Seconding, thirding, fourthing, nthing this.
posted by zarq at 1:01 PM on May 13, 2013 [6 favorites]

gauche's Rule For Talking About Hipsters:

If your comment or joke contains or alludes to the word "hipster" it is automatically 50% less insightful or clever or funny than it otherwise would be.

One should therefore endeavor to make damn sure, before speaking, that one's comment is that much extra insightful or clever or funny.
posted by gauche at 1:03 PM on May 13, 2013 [5 favorites]

i dont even care anymore
posted by nathancaswell at 1:05 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

What gauche said. Basically, it's a pejorative. If your headline contains a pejorative, it's going to inflame people.
posted by selfnoise at 1:06 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

if you DO read the linked articles on the regular before you comment, then thank you!

Thanks to you, it's working.
posted by octobersurprise at 1:07 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

I read that thread (and part of another one linked), but I didn't read the article. I didn't read the article for the same reason as my particular response to the thread: WTF is everyone on about regarding 'hipsters'??

This is some sort of weird culture war thing that I feel fortunate to have missed, both generally and during my years away from MeFi. I read the arguments and I can see various interesting or controversial things that, in isolation, I can make sense of. But the impassioned debate about hipster is, to me, like some hotly contested cultural matter in a foreign country involving which end of the egg to break. I'm all, okay, I can see the practical sense of breaking the smaller end and ... whoa! what was that diatribe about? It can't possibly be about what it claims to be about.

So, yeah, this weirdly may be comparable to the other topics that MeFi "doesn't do well". It's apparently one of those topics where people immediately jump onto their competing hobbyhorses and then chase after each other with sharpened knives. And with regard to those topics, people are especially less likely to read the linked content ... but even if that weren't the case, it wouldn't matter. The threads would still go the way that they go.

More specifically, the topic clearly, unambiguously involves cultural capital and an essential thing about cultural capital is to attack people both below and above one's perceived cultural capital "class" stratum. People below are ignoramuses. People above are poseurs. People are offended by the tastes of those above and below, they're compelled to attack them both as a defense of their own accumulated cultural capital and because, well, they're self-righteous in their attack of things which offend them.

Art and music threads have this problem; but this "hipster" stuff has the problem in spades because the notion is explicitly about class and status and making distinctions. More so than is the case with other identity groupings that involve cultural taste because, as best I can tell, "hipster" is this cultural capital class thing with all the confusing detail of particular tastes mostly removed. That is, any given particular taste is just expressive, it's not perceived to be definitive. So it's inevitably reduced to the brass tacks of attack and defense with regard to social identity. Which, you know, people take personally and find upsetting.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 1:08 PM on May 13, 2013 [14 favorites]

You know, it's possible to read the articles and completely disagree with them. Reading them does not mean sympathy and it does not mean you need to talk about them in the way people Intended You Talk About Them.

Thus, it is possible to read the links, roll your eyes at the tired "It's All About The Capitalists" monotone, and still talk about the sociological phenomenon of hipsters.

And I have no idea why anyone is this freaking defensive about it.
posted by corb at 1:10 PM on May 13, 2013 [3 favorites]

If you (general you) don't RTFA and then say something in the FPP that TFA actually totally refutes or undercuts, you look like a jerk. A jerk who hasn't bothered to click any links, and a jerk who just wants to say whatever they want to say, never mind the post. That is tiresome. I'd bet that everyone has done that at least occasionally, but certain topics attract not-reading-the-fucking-article people in droves.
posted by rtha at 1:16 PM on May 13, 2013 [14 favorites]

"Why are you being so defensive?"
"Why are you being so defensive?"
"I asked you first."
"Well, why are you being so defensive?"
"Shut up."
"See."
posted by octobersurprise at 1:18 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

Sure, corb, but having read an article about how "hipster" is meaningless, you entered the thread with a specific and undefended definition for the word. What reaction did you expect?
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 1:22 PM on May 13, 2013 [4 favorites]

Thus, it is possible to read the links, roll your eyes at the tired "It's All About The Capitalists" monotone, and still talk about the sociological phenomenon of hipsters.

Sure, but I think there's a couple different ways for that to go and one's fine and the other's problematic.

Good scenario:

1. Read the article.
2. Find that you disagree on specific points with what the article is arguing.
3. Go into thread and discuss the specifics of your disagreement with the article.

Bad scenario:

1. Read the article.
2. Find that you disagree on specific points with what the article is arguing.
3. Go into thread and just vaguely gripe about the subject.

A lot of that second sort of thing may be happening, or a lot of people not reading the article at all and then vaguely griping may be happening, or some mix of the two. It doesn't make much difference because the end result is the same: vague, unsubstantiated griping that doesn't engage with the actual article.

This is part of how we get to the weird "why didn't you say that in the first place" thing sometimes with threads where someone will say something flip and dismissive, get called on it, and then eventually come out and say something like "my point is that [actual substantiation of an argument that's way, way more nuanced and discussible than the original flip dismissiveness]". And it's like, okay, next time start there. Being annoyed about or tired of or disenchanted by a subject, or even just being in a hurry and posting from your phone, is not a good excuse to take the meh route with a comment. Decide to engage or not before you start typing.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:22 PM on May 13, 2013 [13 favorites]

it is possible to read the links, roll your eyes at the tired "It's All About The Capitalists" monotone, and still talk about the sociological phenomenon of hipsters

First of all, what you're describing here is functionally indistinguishable from not reading the article, and in any case, acting this way contributes nothing desirable to the site. If someone read that article so poorly that they found it "tired" and can only summarize it as "It's All About The Capitalists," they should, first of all, RTFA better, since they haven't RTFA sufficiently to evince comprehension of it.

And in general, people who have nothing to contribute (and no desire to contribute) to a discussion of the specific linked article should really exercise a lot more restraint before commenting just in order to sound off on the vague general topic. That's exactly the point of "it's about the links" as opposed to "it's about the discussion."
posted by RogerB at 1:23 PM on May 13, 2013 [6 favorites]

It's apparently one of those topics where people immediately jump onto their competing hobbyhorses and then chase after each other with sharpened knives.

I think it's because the term "hipster" conveys a kind of weird othering that is so diffuse as to be almost contentless, but also contains within it the barbs of inauthenticity, a weird over-obsession with authenticity, and unearned privilege that masquerades as class tourism.

I remember about ten years ago a friend of a friend had read David Brooks' book "Bobos in Paradise" and she was going around calling everybody around her a bobo. I remember at one point arguing with her that the problem with calling somebody a bobo was that once the label has been applied there's practically nothing a person could do to convince you it was incorrect. "I'm not a snob; I also drink PBR." "Of course you do."

I think "hipster" is pretty close to the same thing as "bobo" in that it is freighted with the same weird passive-aggressive judgment. The judgment and othering are like unbottled lightning that could strike anybody, and the safest thing to do is to disclaim one's own hipsterdom by bitching about those other fucking hipsters.

I think everybody is open to the accusation of being inauthentic -- selves are performed, after all -- and also that everybody is looking for some authenticity to shine through all the layers of simulacra. I think that unearned privilege is also a pretty free-flowing and abundant resource. I think it's easy to be clipped by the "hipster" label -- not necessarily to have the wind knocked out, but to feel the blow a bit. So even though it's an argument about a term that is almost contentless, it will still raise hackles.
posted by gauche at 1:24 PM on May 13, 2013 [28 favorites]

Not to derail, but your intro requires this link.
posted by Chrysostom at 1:29 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

You know, I used to wonder why people hate hipsters so much, but I recently started working on a project as a volunteer with a bunch of hipsters (they have an agency, they're getting paid), and you know what? Fuck those guys.

I feel kind of sorry for them. They have focus on shit like wearing the right clothes and listening to the right music and drinking the right coffee and getting the right tattoos, but what a bunch of insufferable pricks.
posted by KokuRyu at 1:31 PM on May 13, 2013 [3 favorites]

I especially feel like it's a shame because the fact that the topic on the one hand seems like such a weird and trivial thing to get worked up about, yet on the other hand provokes such strong and polarized emotional reactions, makes me think there is something worth hashing out below the surface. If that link wasn't enough to get there, though, I'm not sure what would be.
posted by en forme de poire at 1:32 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

I think "hipster" is pretty close to the same thing as "bobo" in that it is freighted with the same weird passive-aggressive judgment.

I think of these as two separate demographics. For example, Mayor Bloomberg is a bobo but he is not a hipster. There is some overlap, though. All hipsters are bobos but not all bobos are hipsters.

I think of "bobo" as being a synonym for SWPL, of which hipster is a subset. I think it is pretty clear that Brooks wanted to coin a new word just like the girl in "Mean Girls" with "fetch". Thus, I prefer SWPL, which is not as silly-sounding as "bobo" (but pretty close).

It has previously been determined that I am a fuddy duddy, so no one is likely to mistake me for a hipster so my use of the term is presumably not "weirdly passive aggressive".
posted by Tanizaki at 1:32 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

Wow. Thank you Greg Nog. That's very kind of you to say.
posted by gauche at 1:32 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

corb: "You know, it's possible to read the articles and completely disagree with them. Reading them does not mean sympathy and it does not mean you need to talk about them in the way people Intended You Talk About Them."

This isn't about demanding agreement. It's about not reading the article, which is a common enough problem that we've actually had at least a couple of MetaTalk posts in the past that begged the mods to impose a "No Comments Allowed Timeout" (of varying time frames) between the time a post goes up and when the first comment is allowed.
posted by zarq at 1:34 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

They have focus on shit like wearing the right clothes and listening to the right music and drinking the right coffee and getting the right tattoos, but what a bunch of insufferable pricks.

I, in turn, find the tendency to hate on people who have a geeky interest in things like what they wear, eat, drink, and listen to highly irritating. I don't obsess over coffee or beer, but I do geek out about music and film, and I find that people who have passions for things tend to be interesting in ways that have nothing to do with their interests. Being curious and enthusiastic is a good thing.

I will side with you, however, in not understand what the fuck the appeal of tattoos is. But that's not a reason for me to hate on people who find some value in sticking inky needles into their bodies, or whatever the hell getting a tattoo is actually like.
posted by Rory Marinich at 1:35 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

I feel kind of sorry for them. They have focus on shit like wearing the right clothes and listening to the right music and drinking the right coffee and getting the right tattoos, but what a bunch of insufferable pricks.

I probably work with and know people and maybe sometimes even am someone that people might describe this way, and yet no one is actually like this.
posted by sweetkid at 1:35 PM on May 13, 2013 [13 favorites]

KokuRyu: "You know, I used to wonder why people hate hipsters so much, but I recently started working on a project as a volunteer with a bunch of hipsters (they have an agency, they're getting paid), and you know what? Fuck those guys.

I feel kind of sorry for them. They have focus on shit like wearing the right clothes and listening to the right music and drinking the right coffee and getting the right tattoos, but what a bunch of insufferable pricks."

What is the Japanese word for hipster?
posted by boo_radley at 1:39 PM on May 13, 2013 [4 favorites]

I, in turn, find the tendency to hate on people who have a geeky interest in things like what they wear, eat, drink, and listen to highly irritating.

I, in turn, am irritated by those who frame their status-preening as "adorkable" geekery.

I am glad that we can agree on tattoos. I only understand on guys who have anchor tattoos from when they were in the navy in WWII.

What is the Japanese word for hipster?

ヒップスター
posted by Tanizaki at 1:41 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

I think "hipster" is pretty close to the same thing as "bobo" in that it is freighted with the same weird passive-aggressive judgment. The judgment and othering are like unbottled lightning that could strike anybody, and the safest thing to do is to disclaim one's own hipsterdom by bitching about those other fucking hipsters.

This was part of the point of the article. That because of the above-described effect, using the word "hipster" is like chucking bread to the mob; immediately the squabbling begins in the ally's and the gutters, leaving one's sedan chair to pass unmolested. Or in this case, leaving the transformation of Bohemia into the new servitude unremarked on.
posted by Diablevert at 1:43 PM on May 13, 2013 [7 favorites]

What is the Japanese word for hipster?

"Otaku". Besides, Japanese folks can take wearing the right clothes to the most ridiculous degree, but it's not about exclusion, it's about... I don't know. Marxy did a better job than I could ever do talking about it.

This is in Canada. Normally I would never bother hating on the beard-wearing set, but the is MetaTalk, my only escape valve in life. Aaaaagh!
posted by KokuRyu at 1:43 PM on May 13, 2013 [4 favorites]

I, in turn, am irritated by those who frame their status-preening as "adorkable" geekery.

Is this what you're doing here?
posted by octobersurprise at 1:44 PM on May 13, 2013 [4 favorites]

What makes you think that the 'right' coffee and 'right' music is anything other than what they like?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 1:45 PM on May 13, 2013 [4 favorites]

I think of "bobo" as being a synonym for SWPL, of which hipster is a subset

I am so lost, I dont know what any of this means.

All I know is last time I followed a "hipster" link on Metafilter (the NYT hipster lexicon post), I was wearing the same hat as the guy at the top of the page. Whatever, I've had mine for 5 years so I was probably into those hats before something something.
posted by Hoopo at 1:46 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

"Stuff White People Like?" Because minorities can never be hipsters.
posted by sweetkid at 1:47 PM on May 13, 2013 [3 favorites]

I, in turn, am irritated by those who frame their status-preening as "adorkable" geekery.

What in life isn't status-preening, pray tell?

I can make comprehensive arguments that discussing the economy, politics, capitalism in general, any stripe of religion, any shade of philosophy, any kind of entertainment down to discussing favorite pop songs and Michael Bay movies, discussing education, discussing civil rights or gender inequality, discussing favorite fast foods, or really discussing anything at all (which is the point) is a form of showing your status. Because your status defines the context through which you filter everything in your life. Hell, that last sentence says something about my status as well.

If it makes you feel any better, I can promise you that many of those "status-preeners" are either close to broke or actively broke. Some of them are even homeless!
posted by Rory Marinich at 1:47 PM on May 13, 2013 [3 favorites]

with too many folks who clearly haven't read the fucking article

Tilda Swinton has not read any of the articles. Nevertheless, Tilda Swinton comprehends.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 1:49 PM on May 13, 2013 [3 favorites]

Rory Marinich: " What in life isn't status-preening, pray tell?"

Quite a bit, if you're not particularly interested in massaging your own ego. The act of discussing a topic does not automatically mean that one is doing so to push a point of view on others.
posted by zarq at 1:51 PM on May 13, 2013 [8 favorites]

> I especially feel like it's a shame because the fact that the topic on the one hand seems like such a weird and trivial thing to get worked up about, yet on the other hand provokes such strong and polarized emotional reactions, makes me think there is something worth hashing out below the surface

The heat around it kind of belies all the protests that the term doesn't matter or doesn't mean anything (it's dilute, yeah, but being dilute increases its social utility). I think there's plenty under the surface, and its got more more to do with social systems and collective assumptions about identity-building than it does 20-30 somethings in Williamsburg. (Which is what OP was talking about, yeah.)
posted by postcommunism at 1:51 PM on May 13, 2013 [3 favorites]

What in life isn't status-preening, pray tell?

You irritate Tanizaki when you preen your status in a way he disapproves of, Rory.
posted by octobersurprise at 1:52 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

Tanizaki, the irony cannot be lost on you that you are setting up a distinction between yourself and other people in which their preferences are motivated by social status and mugging for the camera, while yours are implied to be more authentic and/or intrinsic -- which is pretty much exactly what gauche was talking about upthread.
posted by en forme de poire at 1:52 PM on May 13, 2013 [13 favorites]

Irritating MetaFilter users is my favorite way to show off my status*. I'm like a peacock.

*unemployed
posted by Rory Marinich at 1:53 PM on May 13, 2013 [9 favorites]

bingo en forme de poire.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 1:56 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

"Stuff White People Like?" Because minorities can never be hipsters.

Yeah, somebody should come to my neighborhood and tell all the Black/Asian/Latino/etc. hipsters that they're just being hipsters ironically, and that they therefore can't be "real" hipsters!
posted by rtha at 1:57 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

Some things are better left undiscussed.

Bay is actually a genius of sorts, but his work appeals to the general populace. Hence the regular roasting by those who prefer more high brow entertainment.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 1:57 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

The act of discussing a topic does not automatically mean that one is doing so to push a point of view on others.

Ah, but the act of discussing a topic does mean other people can take you in bad faith and assume you're preening in public.

I know a lot of people who can be real assholes about their favorite X, where X is anything from socioeconomic philosophy to favorite member of the Beatles. I also know a lot of people who are sweet and sincere and generally enthusiastic about a lot of things, love hearing what other people think, also love talking about why they like the things that they like. Funny thing is, to the outsider with a bias, both types of person will come across as insufferable.
posted by Rory Marinich at 1:57 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

This isn't about demanding agreement. It's about not reading the article, which is a common enough problem that we've actually had at least a couple of MetaTalk posts in the past that begged the mods to impose a "No Comments Allowed Timeout" (of varying time frames) between the time a post goes up and when the first comment is allowed.

I really do see your point there - I think my problem is just that, short of someone self-flagging, it's impossible to tell whether or not someone has actually read the article simply by their comments in the thread. So I think this thing gets set up where, whenever someone posts something that someone else thinks is insufficiently thought out by their lights, they make the accusation that "You haven't read the article." I think it's really probably less true on average than it is perceived to be, and I think it's unproductive even on times when it is.
posted by corb at 1:57 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

They have focus on shit like wearing the right clothes and listening to the right music and drinking the right coffee and getting the right tattoos, but what a bunch of insufferable pricks.

Replace "Listening to the right music" with "using the right fly rods" and "tattoos" "guided tours" and you've described some fly-fishing aficionados I know. I could play the same game for classical Saxophonists too.

In other words, they're insufferable because they're insufferable, not because they're hipsters.
posted by Gygesringtone at 1:58 PM on May 13, 2013 [6 favorites]

"They have focus on shit like wearing the right clothes and listening to the right music and drinking the right coffee and getting the right tattoos, but what a bunch of insufferable pricks."

But people who do that, or people we perceive to be doing that, are always insufferable pricks, this decade or fifty years ago, among twentysomethings or high-school students.

"What makes you think that the 'right' coffee and 'right' music is anything other than what they like?"

Well, we usually can't know this, which is the problem. However, sometimes we can and do know this, and that's also the problem. It's not as if such people don't exist, because they do. And they're annoying.

The trouble comes, though, from rather than going from "this group of status conscious people are inauthentic in their tastes for x, y, and z" people do the reverse and say "this group of people who like x, y, and z are status conscious and inauthentic in their tastes". And, also, sometimes someone will assert the first statement and a person who likes x, y, or z will hear the second.

Indeed, I think that a big portion of the conflict about this can be accounted for by people either wrongly asserting the second type of statement, or people wrongly assuming that the first kind of statement is the second and applies to them.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 1:59 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

Bay is actually a genius of sorts, but his work appeals to the general populace.

He's like the Thomas Kinkade of film.
posted by nathancaswell at 2:00 PM on May 13, 2013 [3 favorites]

I do unabashedly love Bad Boys 1 and 2.
posted by nathancaswell at 2:01 PM on May 13, 2013

"Stuff White People Like?" Because minorities can never be hipsters.

Don't let the W fool you. Any ethnicity can be SWPL.
posted by Tanizaki at 2:01 PM on May 13, 2013

And The Rock. And Con-Air.
posted by nathancaswell at 2:01 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

The Donald Trump of film.
posted by octobersurprise at 2:01 PM on May 13, 2013

And Armageddon if I've had too much red wine.
posted by nathancaswell at 2:03 PM on May 13, 2013

Fuck man. I joined Metafilter because I thought it was all hipsters. Now this?
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 2:06 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

Bay is actually a genius of sorts, but his work appeals to the general populace. Hence the regular roasting by those who prefer more high brow entertainment.

All I know is every fight scene I've seen in a Bay movie is illegible on account of it apparently being illegal to have a shot longer than .82 seconds.
posted by PMdixon at 2:07 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

Bay is actually a genius of sorts

We start by making a big CG building and then we have a meteor go CROSSHH! And it, and it's all like CRAAWW and motorcycles burst into flame while they jump over these helicopters, right?
posted by Hoopo at 2:11 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

Nerds on the internet feel threatened by people they think have a better chance at getting laid than they do.

Don't call me nerdy, hipster
Don't call me hipster, nerd
Don't call me nerdy, hipster
Don't call me hipster, nerd
posted by Atom Eyes at 2:11 PM on May 13, 2013 [3 favorites]

corb: "it's impossible to tell whether or not someone has actually read the article simply by their comments in the thread. "

Sure there is. If someone says/implies that something wasn't mentioned in an article and it was in fact mentioned repeatedly, then they didn't read the article. This happens every once in a while, especially on articles which are long and controversial, and it can be damned annoying. Like this.
posted by zarq at 2:11 PM on May 13, 2013 [5 favorites]

Nerds on the internet feel threatened by people they think have a better chance at getting laid than they do.

Eh, I don't know. Quality versus quantity, anyway. Besides, the project manager, who lamely tried to wear the flannel shirt, the jeans with rolled-up cuffs, the reference to Steve Reich ("you've probably never heard of him"), etc etc, persistently and absentmindedly picked his nose during the kickoff meeting.
posted by KokuRyu at 2:12 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

"If it makes you feel any better, I can promise you that many of those 'status-preeners' are either close to broke or actively broke. Some of them are even homeless!"

You really ought to read about Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital to see why not only is this sometimes the case, it's usually the case† for status in the context of culture as opposed to status in the context of wealth.

I don't agree with your categorical claim that all attested tastes and interests are status-seeming, that's just silly. But I think that all such attested tastes and interests — that is, engagement with these things in the public sphere — do involve social identity and therefore necessarily involves to variously greater or lesser degrees some component of display of status. But engaging with that is invariably problematic. As gauche points out, we're all variously "authentic" and "inauthentic" in our tastes and interests and so these sorts of claims strike us both where we are insecure and yet also have cause to believe we're unjustly accused.

† I don't mean that it's usually the case that relative high cultural capital means being broke or homeless; just that theoretically there's an inverse relationship between the motivations to acquire economic capital and cultural capital.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 2:14 PM on May 13, 2013

"I really do see your point there - I think my problem is just that, short of someone self-flagging, it's impossible to tell whether or not someone has actually read the article simply by their comments in the thread."

No, actually, a reasonable reader can pick those comments out pretty easily. They generally involve something that TFA addressed, and the comment is posted without engaging that point, and rather proceeding like it was omitted.

Or just saying things that are factually wrong. That happens a lot too.

So I think this thing gets set up where, whenever someone posts something that someone else thinks is insufficiently thought out by their lights, they make the accusation that "You haven't read the article." I think it's really probably less true on average than it is perceived to be, and I think it's unproductive even on times when it is.

Respectfully, I think you're wrong, and I don't think you read the article very well, and I think that your comments and many other comments in that thread reflect not reading the article by the very act of demonstrating the premise bemoaned in the fucking article.
posted by klangklangston at 2:14 PM on May 13, 2013 [4 favorites]

that begged the mods to impose a "No Comments Allowed Timeout" (of varying time frames) between the time a post goes up and when the first comment is allowed.

Yes. I move for "indefinite."
posted by the man of twists and turns at 2:15 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

During the brief period I was in grad school (humanities version), my malcontent friends and I always loved making fun of the Q & A's that happened after talks by visiting scholars. There was a particular "question" format beloved by junior faculty that we found particularly hysterical: "It's interesting that you mentioned [one peripheral keyword or concept from talk] -- I've been working on [extended description of completely unrelated issue, using that minor concept as a pivot point, to move into a self-serving monologue totally unrelated to the subject of the talk -- which incidentally isn't actually a question at all]."

I think a similar thing happens a lot here, when people post on topics about which others already have a pre-set schtick ["Let me tell you what I think hipsters are..."].
posted by neroli at 2:17 PM on May 13, 2013 [19 favorites]

lamely tried to wear the flannel shirt

Hold the phone, we live in BC. Flannel shirts are, like, our thing.
posted by Hoopo at 2:17 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

Besides, the project manager, who lamely tried to wear the flannel shirt, the jeans with rolled-up cuffs

I feel like it's not very surprising that your coworkers are thoughtful about what they wear when they work with at least one person who is analysing every part of their outfit as a sign of character flaws.
posted by jess at 2:17 PM on May 13, 2013 [19 favorites]

yea what the hell is wrong with a flannel shirt and jeans with cuffs? This is like that thread where someone said jeans were a way of appropriating the culture of the working class and if you make over x amount you should wear khakis.
posted by sweetkid at 2:19 PM on May 13, 2013 [9 favorites]

the reference to Steve Reich ("you've probably never heard of him")

He would have been right in my case. I had to use Bing. Then, I used YouTube to listen to what I had been missing all my life. The "18 Musicians" song did not impress, although I enjoyed the YouTube commenters fighting over who "got it" the most.
posted by Tanizaki at 2:21 PM on May 13, 2013

"...when they work with at least one person who is analysing every part of their outfit as a sign of character flaws."

But that describes every workplace in the history of ever.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 2:22 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

Yes. I move for "indefinite."

But where will homunculus put his blog?
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 2:23 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

" wear the flannel shirt, the jeans with rolled-up cuffs"

what is this bear flo rida
posted by klangklangston at 2:23 PM on May 13, 2013 [3 favorites]

sweetkid: "This is like that thread where someone said jeans were a way of appropriating the culture of the working class and if you make over x amount you should wear khakis."

Heh. Link please?
posted by zarq at 2:23 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

Well, I wouldn't normally give a shit what people wear to work, but in this case it was a form of exclusion. For whatever reason, someone else on the project said I was "too old" to relate to the material. So that's when it got personal...
posted by KokuRyu at 2:25 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

whatever reason, someone else on the project said I was "too old" to relate to the material.

NO EW
posted by sweetkid at 2:26 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

Bay did not direct Con Air.
posted by dogwalker at 2:28 PM on May 13, 2013

argh those kids with their shirts and their giants of 20th century art music
posted by theodolite at 2:28 PM on May 13, 2013 [4 favorites]

zarq: here.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 2:29 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

oh, it was someone else who suggested khakis later in that thread, haha. But yea that's the comment, thanks twisty turny man.
posted by sweetkid at 2:31 PM on May 13, 2013

if life is fair why do roses have thorns
posted by phaedon at 2:31 PM on May 13, 2013 [3 favorites]

the man of twists and turns: "zarq: here."

And now all I can think of is DeNiro saying, "I have nipples, Greg. Could you milk me?"
posted by zarq at 2:32 PM on May 13, 2013 [5 favorites]

although I enjoyed the YouTube commenters fighting over who "got it" the most.

Hey man, nothing like a little self-congratulation at the expense of YouTube commenters.
posted by octobersurprise at 2:34 PM on May 13, 2013

argh those kids with their shirts and their giants of 20th century art music

Ah, you missed the point. Oh, well. I don't have a problem with "hipsters" per se, just this bunch of dicks who have pretty poor social skills. Besides, I tend to think that some of the anti-hipster sentiment has a distinctly homophobic vibe - who are these young men who wear capri pants and pedal pushers and pay attention to clothes?

And I hate ever hold the majority opinion anyway - just 16% of Americans have a favorable opinion of hipsters
posted by KokuRyu at 2:36 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

THIS THREAD IS NOT ABOUT HIPSTERS, THIS THREAD IS ABOUT ARGUING ABOUT THINGS IN A WAY WHICH ACCIDENTALLY INDICATES YOU AREN'T PAYING ANY ATTENTION TO THE OSTENSIBLE TOPIC OF THE THREAD

SO

HUH
posted by shakespeherian at 2:40 PM on May 13, 2013 [27 favorites]

can we just get a Something Awful style word filter of "hipster" to like, "cowboy" or "cosmonaut"
posted by theodolite at 2:44 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

can we just get a Something Awful style word filter of "hipster" to like, "cowboy" or "cosmonaut"

Jessamyn made a grease monkey script for you. You can replace the word with whatever you'd like.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 2:48 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

Liking Steve Reich does not make you a hipster, it makes you awesome. Music for 18 Musicians is one of the greatest pieces of music I have ever heard. It is the song to play for surly young children that will make them less surly and more wonderful.
posted by Rory Marinich at 2:49 PM on May 13, 2013 [5 favorites]

Like I said earlier, that's not the point.
posted by KokuRyu at 2:52 PM on May 13, 2013

I'd be fine changing the hipster derail into a Steve Reich derail.

Ooo! We could make it into a John Adams derail after that!
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 2:52 PM on May 13, 2013 [3 favorites]

Is Steve Reich something I'd have to be a hipster to understand?
posted by jacalata at 2:53 PM on May 13, 2013

12% of Democrats and 27% of independent voters say they’d be more likely to vote for a hipster, but just 2% of Republicans agreed. 98% of Republicans say they’d be less likely to vote for a hipster.

This is the best poll.
posted by postcommunism at 2:54 PM on May 13, 2013 [4 favorites]

Looking at the front page of the blue, would you settle for an Amtrak derail?
posted by biffa at 2:55 PM on May 13, 2013

NOG CAN YOU NOT MAKE YET ANOTHER THREAD ALL ABOUT NORWEGIAN FOREST CATS

TIA

Finnish woodland kittens are obviously better to anyone paying attention.
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic at 2:57 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

nathancaswell: "And The Rock. And Con-Air."

Con-Air was directed by Simon West doing his Michael Bay impression
posted by brundlefly at 2:58 PM on May 13, 2013

Brandon Blatcher: "Jessamyn made a grease monkey script for you"

rabblenauts, here we come!
posted by boo_radley at 2:58 PM on May 13, 2013

Looking at the front page of the blue, would you settle for an Amtrak derail?

That's great! That'll take us to the Tony Scott derail, where we can either go to Michael Bay directly or through Jerry Bruckheimer.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 3:00 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

Woah, how did I miss this part:

Just 10% of voters say they consider themselves to be hipsters – and almost all of those are younger voters. Half of all voters aged 18-29 consider themselves hipsters; every other age group is 5% or less.

Where are all those 50% self-identifiers hiding?
posted by postcommunism at 3:02 PM on May 13, 2013 [3 favorites]

Anywhere they can from everybody else, clearly.
posted by cortex (staff) at 3:03 PM on May 13, 2013 [4 favorites]

You and your egghead musicians. Why can't you hipsters preen your status with a creepily phallic attachment to guns and cars like everyone else?
posted by octobersurprise at 3:04 PM on May 13, 2013 [3 favorites]

They are certainly pretty openly self identifying in Seattle and Portland.
posted by jacalata at 3:04 PM on May 13, 2013

Speaking of Steve Reich, I recently posted an FPP of the Eastman Saxophone Project doing an arrangement of the Rite of Spring (talk about hipsters, amirite, all those phonies in 1913 bragging about who "got it" the most)...anyway, the YouTube video was taken down due to copyright claims by Stravinsky's publisher, but there's still a video of the ESP doing a gorgeous version of Reich's New York Counterpoint.
posted by neroli at 3:05 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

TFA seems like pretty routine unmasking of false consciousness to me, but I was critiquing cultural categories that serve hegemonic interests before it was cool.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 3:10 PM on May 13, 2013 [3 favorites]

If I hear one more Norwegian Forest Cat go on and on about how Steve Reich is the greatest thing ever, I'm going to scream.

Dude, you just heard "Drumming" for the first time a week ago. It's obvious. You're not fooling anyone.
posted by mcmile at 3:12 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

Rustic Etruscan: Ooo! We could make it into a John Adams derail after that!

I am SO READY for the John Adams v. John Luther Adams mefi megabrawl.

It's only a matter of time.
posted by troika at 3:12 PM on May 13, 2013 [4 favorites]

Yeah, postcommunism, that extent of self-identification was surprising to me too - and even Seattle, Brooklyn, Oakland and Portland together can hardly account for an entire 50% of American young adults.
posted by en forme de poire at 3:16 PM on May 13, 2013

I'm surprised you all know about Steve Reich. You didn't seem like the type.
posted by KokuRyu at 3:16 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

troika: " I am SO READY for the John Adams v. John Luther Adams mefi megabrawl."

I have Grizzly Adams covered, y'all.
posted by zarq at 3:17 PM on May 13, 2013 [4 favorites]

I thought the fault was saying "You've probably never heard of him" when he's wicked famous.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 3:17 PM on May 13, 2013 [5 favorites]

Somebody called Mayor Bloomberg a bobo so I had to google his net worth. 27 billion. I was under the impression that the max cutoff for bobo was somewhere around 15 million in net worth.

On an unrelated tangent I didn't know who Steve Reich was until a comment in the Brian Eno thread yesterday. I was going to post in the Eno thread about the thing in the header about being afraid of Abba which I wanted someone to explain. But then I didn't because I hadn't watched the video to the point where he talked about fear of Abba so I was afraid my comment might make me look stupid. This is about when things got really strange. In the Eurovision thread somebody posted an Abba link. And I was suddenly enlightened like Narujna when Siddhartha lifted up the lotus blossom in front of his eyes because I clicked on the Abba link and within five seconds I acquired perfect understanding of fear of Abba. The lesson I took from this is that sometimes it helps to not comment when your comment might make you look stupid!
posted by bukvich at 3:20 PM on May 13, 2013 [4 favorites]

Jessamyn made a grease monkey script for you

Some suggestions

- hippopotamusters
- vampires
- banana eating skunks
- slow lorises
- the undead
- the New York Public Library
- small burrowing mammals
- hip waders
- jessamyn
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 3:21 PM on May 13, 2013 [10 favorites]

Okay fine, I will google Steve Reich.
posted by postcommunism at 3:21 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

Incidentally, I've been keeping a
list of unexpected things to like about being middle-aged. It's pretty minor stuff, so 'not having any stake in what 20-somethings call each other' actually ranks pretty high, somewhere around 'Hollywood caters to my nostalgia' and 'pop music never seems overplayed anymore, because I hear so little in the first place.'
posted by Monsieur Caution at 3:23 PM on May 13, 2013 [13 favorites]

Okay fine, I will google Steve Reich.

WAKE UP SHEEPLE
posted by en forme de poire at 3:23 PM on May 13, 2013 [10 favorites]

You may also be interested in Frank Reich. It's more likely that you will not, but I've already started typing this comment.
posted by troika at 3:26 PM on May 13, 2013

I thought the fault was saying "You've probably never heard of him" when he's wicked famous.

Well, yeah, that was my point, but I failed to get it across. Need to type on the keyboard harder or something.
posted by KokuRyu at 3:28 PM on May 13, 2013

Ok, that's two Reichs, anyone have a third?
posted by octobersurprise at 3:28 PM on May 13, 2013 [20 favorites]

I just skimmed through the beginning of 18 Musicians and I think Steve Reich would really like the Civ IV endgame music.
posted by postcommunism at 3:29 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

> Ooo! We could make it into a John Adams derail after that!

So I looked up the Civ IV soundtrack and guess who composed the endgame music.
posted by postcommunism at 3:32 PM on May 13, 2013

jessamyn: "banana eating skunks"

A skunk that will eat a banana will also eat an acorn squash.
posted by boo_radley at 3:33 PM on May 13, 2013

it's impossible to tell whether or not someone has actually read the article simply by their comments in the thread.

I've been thinking about this, and I'm stuck on wondering so what?

I guess if you want we could rephrase the complaint as R(uminate on)TFA, but I don't think that makes a substantial difference. The basic idea is still the same, if you want to contribute, you should do so in a way that's relevant to the article.
posted by Gygesringtone at 3:35 PM on May 13, 2013

And by you, I mean general you, not you, corb.
posted by Gygesringtone at 3:43 PM on May 13, 2013

I am going to put 18 Musicians on my mp3 player. I think it will get me really pumped up for my workouts.
posted by Tanizaki at 3:45 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

So, of course the this Meta post about R-ingTFA has turned into a referendum about hipsters, which has turned into a referendum about Steve Reich, which has branched off into the question of John Adams vs. John Luther Adams, which as made me remember the amazing performance of the latter's 99-percussionist piece "Inuksuit" I saw last summer in Morningside Park, which has made look at videos of that performance, in which I saw a few seconds of myself wandering around the park and realized, Holy crap, I've gained so much weight in the last few years, which means that the whole point of this Meta is, obviously: what's the best way for me to drop 15 pounds in the next three - four months? I should just stop eating bread, right?
posted by neroli at 3:46 PM on May 13, 2013

Join MyFitnessPal, there's a ton of MeFites there. 15 lbs in four months is a totally attainable goal.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 3:54 PM on May 13, 2013 [7 favorites]

So I looked up the Civ IV soundtrack and guess who composed the endgame music.

I liked how Civ IV's take on modernity was MODERNITY IS TERRIFYING
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 3:57 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

Decide to engage or not before you start typing.

This should be at the top of the New Post page.
posted by Ice Cream Socialist at 3:59 PM on May 13, 2013

Tanizaki: "I am going to put 18 Musicians on my mp3 player. I think it will get me really pumped up for my workouts."

"A workout routine for 18 reps.pls"
posted by boo_radley at 4:00 PM on May 13, 2013 [3 favorites]

Or at the top of every page, I guess on the New Post page would make less sense, since it's a guideline for comments.

In short, forget I said anything.

I will return to contemplating Frankreich.
posted by Ice Cream Socialist at 4:00 PM on May 13, 2013

A banana that will eat a skunk is nightmare fuel.
posted by Lyn Never at 4:00 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

I can't believe Tanizaki tried to make "fetch" happen.

That was unexpected.
posted by running order squabble fest at 4:09 PM on May 13, 2013 [5 favorites]

Well, they are streets ahead.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 4:10 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

An equally good point, that's a bit more than tangentially related to this MeTa, is why the fuck do we have to have a new "Hipsters, discuss" or "Hipsters, don't you hate them?/isn't there a legitimate reason to hate them?" article twice a week?

There's been like, 1.5 FPPs on this per week for the past month, if not longer. Why does a new circlejerk about this have to bridge off the old one continuously every time the thread is about to die down?
posted by emptythought at 4:10 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

I tried to make "fetch" happen ironically.
posted by Tanizaki at 4:14 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

There's been like, 1.5 FPPs on this per week for the past month, if not longer. Why does a new circlejerk about this have to bridge off the old one continuously every time the thread is about to die down?

Perhaps the mods should be applying the Israel/Palestine Standard to hipster posts.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 4:16 PM on May 13, 2013 [4 favorites]

Is this thread drunk? Because I'm not but reading the last couple hours or so of comments suddenly made me feel like I was.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 4:20 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

"I thought the fault was saying "You've probably never heard of him" when he's wicked famous."

…within a certain realm of cultural capitol, sure. But compared with someone like Kanye, well, I'll just stop there because I'm parlously close to engaging in hipstermorphic taxonomies.
posted by klangklangston at 4:36 PM on May 13, 2013

why the fuck do we have to have a new "Hipsters, discuss" or "Hipsters, don't you hate them?/isn't there a legitimate reason to hate them?" article twice a week?

People really like to talk about hipsters. Not just on mefi, either. The hipster myth seems to hit a lot of contemporary anxieties (or can flex to reflect different anxieties for different people), and the maintenance of that myth in the face of the fact that no one wants to claim the hipster as an identity (that PPP poll not withstanding) would seem to indicate that we find something valuable in keeping it around. It's doing some kind of cultural work, probably several different kinds of work, for all the protests that hipsters and just these people who are jerks and who ruin all our favorite things/brands and are also hypocrites.

Then, despite the more analytic tone set in the article, the discussions go along the lines of hipsters: fetch or unfetch? Are you a hipster? Tell us about the hipsters in your life. And we get a MeTa about reading TFA.

I think the nature of the beast under discussion sort of encourages that, though, and the ways in which it encourages that is part of what's interesting to discuss.
posted by postcommunism at 4:37 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

I'm pretty sure the Hipster posts and the Late Stage Capitalism posts are basically about different facets of the same thing. So it makes sense that it's discussed a lot.

Now if only someone could actually tell me what a Late Capitalism is. I've come to understand that people know it when they see it, but...
posted by tychotesla at 4:40 PM on May 13, 2013

I enjoy lazy, casual quippage if it's done with wit and venom. It's certainly a damned sight more entertaining than yet another post or comment about Doctor fucking Who or Star fucking Trek.

Also, is it just me or did klangklangston's post read like really mad English of a sort that might be produced by a gentleman writing dispatches from the outer reaches of a fever/ opium frenzy?
posted by Decani at 4:41 PM on May 13, 2013

Doctor fucking Who

The slash thread is over thataway.
posted by shakespeherian at 4:46 PM on May 13, 2013 [3 favorites]

Now if only someone could actually tell me what a Late Capitalism is. I've come to understand that people know it when they see it, but...

I think it's "late" as in "the late DentArthurDent"...
posted by running order squabble fest at 4:48 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

If people are going to call me out, I'd appreciate it if they'd tell me so I can defend myself. And I read the fucking article, and I popped into the thread and people were claiming that hipsters didn't exist, like they do on all these threads.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 5:05 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

I remember about ten years ago a friend of a friend had read David Brooks' book "Bobos in Paradise" and she was going around calling everybody around her a bobo. I remember at one point arguing with her that the problem with calling somebody a bobo was that once the label has been applied there's practically nothing a person could do to convince you it was incorrect. "I'm not a snob; I also drink PBR." "Of course you do."

Again, there's that defensiveness. I read that book while living in Westport, Connecticut. What David Brooks was describing was 100% accurate to that town (and again, people on MeFi).
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 5:06 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

"Stuff White People Like?" Because minorities can never be hipsters.

Yeah, somebody should come to my neighborhood and tell all the Black/Asian/Latino/etc. hipsters that they're just being hipsters ironically, and that they therefore can't be "real" hipsters!

Ah SWPL, which was ostenbibly deleted for being 'racist' but really deleted for summing up this site too accuratly.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 5:08 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

I guess my major complaint about Bay is that I couldn't understand the nuance and complexity of Transformers: Dark of the Moon without first having seen Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

There's an amazing SA thread that i'll link when it gets archived that makes this claim in great, great, great detail (basically the thesis is that Sam was replaced by the Allspark at the end of ROTF, so in DOTM he's not even human anymore).
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 5:10 PM on May 13, 2013

I am going to put 18 Musicians on my mp3 player. I think it will get me really pumped up for my workouts.

Dude, you need 4′33″. It'll get you mad pumped.
posted by octobersurprise at 5:11 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

Ah SWPL, which was ostenbibly deleted for being 'racist' but really deleted for summing up this site too accuratly.

You are making ridiculous generalisations. And projecting. Again. Cut it out.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 5:12 PM on May 13, 2013 [5 favorites]

Jessamyn made a grease monkey script for you

Then, despite the more analytic tone set in the article, the discussions go along the lines of tiny puppys: fetch or unfetch? Are you a tiny puppy? Tell us about the tiny puppys in your life. And we get a MeTa about reading TFA.

yes good
posted by capricorn at 5:13 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

although maybe only because wine
posted by capricorn at 5:14 PM on May 13, 2013

Ah SWPL, which was ostenbibly deleted for being 'racist' but really deleted for summing up this site too accuratly.

What.
posted by sweetkid at 5:18 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

Ah SWPL, which was ostenbibly deleted for being 'racist' but really deleted for summing up this site too accuratly.

Seriously ease off or open your own MeTa at this point. No one is making you participate here. If you'd like to have a good faith discussion about how the site works or how it is moderated, open your own thread or even just open a discussion about a specific topics, don't just be the guy perpetually pissing in the punchbowl and then wondering why people are looking at you funny.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 5:18 PM on May 13, 2013 [10 favorites]

no tiny puppies are good with or without wine
posted by elizardbits at 5:21 PM on May 13, 2013

ostenbibly cracks me up though.
posted by sweetkid at 5:21 PM on May 13, 2013

that came out more carnivorous than i intended

puppyvorous?
posted by elizardbits at 5:21 PM on May 13, 2013

I popped into the thread and people were claiming that hipsters didn't exist, like they do on all these threads.

"I do believe in hipsters. I do. I do."
posted by octobersurprise at 5:22 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

I think it's exactly as puppyvorous as you intended.
posted by sweetkid at 5:24 PM on May 13, 2013

ostenbibly cracks me up though.

NEW: OSTENBUBBLY.

It appears to be champagne. Is it? No, it's actually pinot noir!

It goes well with tiny puppies.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 5:24 PM on May 13, 2013

yes let's crack some ostenbubbly and enjoy with or without puppies
posted by sweetkid at 5:25 PM on May 13, 2013

Roasted, or raw like ceviche?
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 5:26 PM on May 13, 2013

...don't just be the guy perpetually pissing in the punchbowl and then wondering why people are looking at you funny.

The possible origins of this metaphor are simultaneously facsinating and appalling.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 5:28 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

Wait, but what if that guy pissed in the wine too?
posted by capricorn at 5:28 PM on May 13, 2013

No, the wine was sealed; it's all good.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 5:29 PM on May 13, 2013

ostenbibulously
posted by octobersurprise at 5:34 PM on May 13, 2013

Ostenbiliously? Where you appear hungover, but you're not.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 5:37 PM on May 13, 2013

I swear on this Ostenbible I did not piss perpetually in the punchbowl
posted by sweetkid at 5:44 PM on May 13, 2013

Ostenbile: Angry linkbait.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 5:45 PM on May 13, 2013

rtha: "If you (general you) don't RTFA and then say something in the FPP that TFA actually totally refutes or undercuts, you look like a jerk."

I'd actually disagree slightly with this, and say that you look like someone who has just painted themselves with barbecue sauce and is screaming "WHY ARE YOU BITING ME" while autoflagellating with live weasels.

There is nothing that takes a MetaFilter thread into full-on Shark Week faster than someone who proudly proclaims their ignorance, then openly displays it, paints a target on their ass, then doubles down.
posted by scrump at 5:48 PM on May 13, 2013 [3 favorites]

"At that hipster party last night, I ostenbibulously drank so much micro-batch rye that I pissed my skinny jeans."
posted by octobersurprise at 5:54 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

...and I was standing over the punchbowl at the time, so...
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 5:55 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

...there were some ostendribbles?
posted by en forme de poire at 6:09 PM on May 13, 2013

Man, y'all don't how guilty I feel for the times I've posted w.o RTFA. Although I do watch the animal videos...okay, gonna slink away here
posted by angrycat at 6:19 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

Again, there's that defensiveness. I read that book while living in Westport, Connecticut. What David Brooks was describing was 100% accurate to that town (and again, people on MeFi).

I don't wish to add gas to the fire but since the above was directed at something I wrote I'll say this as briefly as I may:

I don't perceive myself as feeling defensive about whether hipsters exist, in part because I'm not entirely clear what the definition of a hipster might be. As I described at some length above, I'm not sure that there is a non-problematic definition. As far as I can tell a hipster is someone who is perhaps annoyingly enthusiastic about something or some set of things, although it is not clear to me whether their enthusiasm is annoying because it is inauthentic or because it is not inauthentic. I hear it used both ways. So the best I can understand the term, a hipster is someone who likes something in a way that annoys the speaker. This definition seems problematic to me, both as a signifier and in terms of its notional referent, in a way that I think explains in part why "hipsters" is a topic MetaFilter might not be doing especially well, and I was writing in what I thought a diagnostic or descriptive mode to tease that out a little.

I'm happy to talk about this over memail if you like.
posted by gauche at 6:26 PM on May 13, 2013 [7 favorites]

And in general, people who have nothing to contribute (and no desire to contribute) to a discussion of the specific linked article should really exercise a lot more restraint before commenting just in order to sound off on the vague general topic. That's exactly the point of "it's about the links" as opposed to "it's about the discussion."

I agree with this completely. Also, I think emphasizing this would reduce the amount of animus that happens on MetaFilter. It's a lot easier to spiral into combative tropes in a conversation about "gun control" or "unions" than if we focus on the specific articles and facts raised by the FPP.
posted by cribcage at 6:27 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

"If people are going to call me out, I'd appreciate it if they'd tell me so I can defend myself. And I read the fucking article, and I popped into the thread and people were claiming that hipsters didn't exist, like they do on all these threads."

I linked to it in the thread; apparently your bespoke letterpress invitation has yet to arrive by pedicab.

But if you want to claim that you read the fucking article before commenting, why did you drop this apropos nothing, which is more about slagging some phantom MeFi hipster contingent than has anything to do with the fucking article? People weren't claiming that "hipsters don't exist," and the only Clairol hipster moment was whether the author of the article was also a hipster for some fucking reason. So if you think that was about whether or not hipsters exist, you did a remarkably shit job of reading the fucking article and a remarkably shit job of reading the fucking thread, leading to some sort of shit moire pattern of shit interference. YOU MADE MY BRAIN HURT WITH STUPID!

"Again, there's that defensiveness. I read that book while living in Westport, Connecticut. What David Brooks was describing was 100% accurate to that town (and again, people on MeFi)."

Wait, are MeFites bobos or are they hipsters or are you just easily taken by bullshit faux-sociology that makes it easy to live with shallow stereotypes? And it's not defensiveness to point out that it's a description so broad that it's incoherent and only has strong utility in being tautologically indefensible from sneering.

Lots of people have dumb, indefensible worldviews, but you raise them to a fucking religion.
posted by klangklangston at 6:33 PM on May 13, 2013 [6 favorites]

I dunno but CiS hates on the most random things. It's like a Mitch Hedberg skit but 98.9% less adorable.
posted by sweetkid at 6:35 PM on May 13, 2013 [3 favorites]

klang, dial it back.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 6:38 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

"Man, y'all don't how guilty I feel for the times I've posted w.o RTFA."

That's actually caused me to get scooped a couple times, but my rule here is that I don't post anything that I haven't read/watched/looked at to the end. Why? Because if it's not good enough for me to make it all the way through and then still want to post, it's not worth posting to MeFi.
posted by klangklangston at 6:38 PM on May 13, 2013 [3 favorites]

The only interesting part about that Brooks book was reading about the historical shift in the location of kitchens in contemporaneous homes.
posted by shakespeherian at 6:40 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

I dunno but CiS hates on the most random things. It's like a Mitch Hedberg skit but 98.9% less adorable.

It's all self-hatred. I fit half the SWPL/Look at that Fucking Hipster stereotypes, but I know it and I can laugh at them.

Wait, are MeFites bobos or are they hipsters or are you just easily taken by bullshit faux-sociology that makes it easy to live with shallow stereotypes? And it's not defensiveness to point out that it's a description so broad that it's incoherent and only has strong utility in being tautologically indefensible from sneering.

Except neither is that broad. 'Bobos' - bourgouis bohemians - are middle class to well off people who adapt the trappings of bohemian society. They shop at anthropologie and Pottery Barn and Pier 1 imports, and decorate their homes with tasteful folk art. Hipsters are a bit broader, but there's a definite 'know them when you see them' quality to them.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 6:40 PM on May 13, 2013

Sorry. Something that I should take time to say: I find this especially frustrating because I like a lot of you contributions here, CiS, despite my griping. It's just, man, some of the stuff you put out here, it's like having a bandmate who becomes a Scientologist or a Moonie or some shit.
posted by klangklangston at 6:41 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

"Except neither is that broad. 'Bobos' - bourgouis bohemians - are middle class to well off people who adapt the trappings of bohemian society. They shop at anthropologie and Pottery Barn and Pier 1 imports, and decorate their homes with tasteful folk art. Hipsters are a bit broader, but there's a definite 'know them when you see them' quality to them."

Neither of those are useful descriptions of consistent cohorts of people, and there's an implicit imputation of value. I get the self-mockery stuff, but none of it says anything more than THERE ARE THESE PEOPEL THAT DO THIS I KNOW BAD AMIRITE
posted by klangklangston at 6:44 PM on May 13, 2013

Neither of those are useful descriptions of consistent cohorts of people, and there's an implicit imputation of value. I get the self-mockery stuff, but none of it says anything more than THERE ARE THESE PEOPEL THAT DO THIS I KNOW BAD AMIRITE

But its not saying anything bad! The worst thing I've attributed to hipsters and bohos is a bit of inauthenticity, which isn't too evil in the grand scheme of things. But it seems like saying 'all these people have a thing in common and do this stereotypes, let's have a bit of fun at their/our expense' is bad. And before you bring up mocking less priveleged groups, bohos and hipsters are some of the most privileged groups on the planet. Which is why this is even more okay.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 6:46 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

"But it seems like saying 'all these people have a thing in common and do this stereotypes, let's have a bit of fun at their/our expense' is bad."

Read the fucking article again.
posted by klangklangston at 6:50 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

I just read it, for the 3rd time, and it didn't make any more sense than the first two times I read it. And I usually enjoy Jacobin and N+1.

We should retire “hipster” as a term without referent or political salience. Its zombie-like persistence in anti-hipster discourse must be recognized for what it is: an urbane, and socially acceptable, form of ideologically inflected shaming on the part of American elites who must delegitimize those segments of a largely white, college educated population who didn’t do the “acceptable thing.”

This is a totally bullshit statement. 'White, college educated' people are a protected, downtrodden class now?
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 6:54 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

middle class to well off people who adapt the trappings of bohemian society. They shop at anthropologie and Pottery Barn and Pier 1

They say Augustus John just fucking loved Pottery Barn.
posted by octobersurprise at 6:54 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

the term "hipster" conveys a kind of weird othering that is so diffuse as to be almost contentless

are you just easily taken by bullshit faux-sociology

It strikes me that a lot of the weirdness in this discussion is basically an expression of the Forer effect. There's a certain kind of pop-sociology that impassions its adherents because of the very vagueness that bothers the more analytical reader: people pick up the vocabulary (terms like "bobo" or "hipster" or "black swan" or whatever else) because it feels so meaningful when it's initially deployed anecdotally — and it's hard for them, afterward, to let go of that feeling, even in the face of a serious discussion of the actual uselessness or deceptiveness of the term.
posted by RogerB at 6:55 PM on May 13, 2013 [6 favorites]

But its not saying anything bad! The worst thing I've attributed to hipsters and bohos is a bit of inauthenticity, which isn't too evil in the grand scheme of things.

Are you having memory problems? From your comments in the thread the subject of this MeTa:

Honestly, most of the hipsters I know have politics that SHOULD be marginalized. They push for a pseudo-scientific reliance on organic food and oppose GM crops that could save lives.

posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 6:55 PM on May 13, 2013

THIS THREAD IS NOT ABOUT HIPSTERS
posted by shakespeherian at 6:56 PM on May 13, 2013 [5 favorites]

READ AND UNDERSTAND TFA TIA
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 6:58 PM on May 13, 2013

In all these kinds of threads I like to imagine people in the early 80s earnestly talking about today's hippies and somehow thinking it's both 1968 and the Regan era.

I imagine the conversations go on about those polyester wearing long hairs with their coke habits spending all their time discoing to Joan Baez music or something like that.
posted by aspo at 7:00 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

"But why bother with “dry” and “structural” when you can tune-in to the “fucking hipster” show?"
posted by klangklangston at 7:16 PM on May 13, 2013

Ye gods, this has truly come full circle now. The snake has eaten its own tail.

But at least it was ethical meat and locally sourced.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 7:21 PM on May 13, 2013 [6 favorites]

I don't know if it's the NyQuil or what but this is the funniest thread.

Im still giggling at the vision of Augustus John in Pottery Barn.
posted by winna at 7:21 PM on May 13, 2013

One can participate in discussions of the American class system much more informedly after having read Paul Fussell's excellent and hilarious Class. Although some of the references are date, such as the references to Ronald Reagan's brown suits, I highly recommend it to those who would comment on American class dynamics.

I believe that Fussell would place most hipster types in the elusive Class X. Also, upon reading Class, one generally finds out that one is at least one class level below what thought.

Despite all the hand-wringing in this thread about who or what is or is not "hipster", I think there would be much unity regarding who or what is "prole".
posted by Tanizaki at 7:22 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

Say hipster again. Say hipster again. I dare ya I double dare you motherfucker say hipster one more goddamn time.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 7:32 PM on May 13, 2013 [3 favorites]

It is worth knowing the relationship steric hindrance has with the SN2 reaction (runs)
posted by en forme de poire at 7:51 PM on May 13, 2013

Say hipster again. Say hipster again. I dare ya I double dare you motherfucker say hipster one more goddamn time.

Will Weird Beard come out of my bathroom mirror?
posted by Tanizaki at 7:52 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

The linked article was good and the discussion was really superb, but I hadn't looked at either one until I saw this MeTa-- so thank you very much for that, Klang.

And from reading the article and the thread (along with this thread) I think I finally grasp who hipsters are and what makes them so upsetting to people.

One of corb's comments began the process of crystallization for me:

A hipster is a single or partnered white person with disposable income who came from a lower middle class or greater familial circumstance, who is not in immediate survival mode and has no belief or fear of ever having to be in survival mode. They do not generally have children and do not have them above elementary age. The bulk of their disposable income is either inherited or acquired with little effort, which allows them to have great moments of spare time. They may choose to spend this spare time working, but if so, it will be an activity they find mentally satisfying rather than financially so.

They primarily pose themselves in opposition to their perceived former class status. While many people self-describe class status poorly, instead of self-describing up, hipsters generally describe themselves at least one class status down from where they actually fall socioeconomically. They attempt to dress and behave in opposition to the social norms and ideals of their youth - they define themselves primarily by what they are not rather than what they are. This also manifests in attitude towards child-rearing and ownership - they tend not to have children, and if they do have children, will have no more than two, and generally, no more than one. They spend their disposable income primarily towards immediate sensations or trinkets rather than large-scale planning for the future.

If involved in political ideals or movements, they will generally engage at low risk to themselves and primarily engage through minor gestures or through providing funding or social media support. The bulk, however, of their engagement in political ideals will either be about preserving the character of a local area that they are transplants to, or about issues that do not directly impact their daily lives.

To condense this and give it my own spin, hipsters are people who've opted out of pursuit of the traditional American Dream, and stand on the sidelines shouting to the people who are still in full cry, such as I would say corb is, to wake up from their Dream and notice that the planet itself can no longer sustain their obsession with "work" and "large scale planning for the future" and cannot possibly support all the children they might wish to have except in conditions of dire poverty and with life spans drastically shortened by environmental degradation and perpetual wars to secure steadily diminishing resources-- and even in those miserable circumstances will be able to support those children only for a moment before the by then inevitable plunge over the brink into global demographic catastrophe.

And almost worse, hipsters have the gall to demonstrate by their own example that it's possible to lead a satisfying life rich with achievement while at the same time consuming fewer resources than their parents did.

And worst of all, they have the temerity to attempt to fence our few remaining resources away from the depredations of the Dreamers, and to seek to curb their planet-killing avarice.
posted by jamjam at 8:03 PM on May 13, 2013 [5 favorites]

Say hipster again. Say hipster again. I dare ya I double dare you motherfucker say hipster one more goddamn time.

Will Weird Beard come out of my bathroom mirror?

No the reference is 1990s, not 1890s.
posted by sweetkid at 8:04 PM on May 13, 2013

To condense this and give it my own spin, hipsters are people who've opted out of pursuit of the traditional American Dream, and stand on the sidelines shouting to the people who are still in full cry, such as I would say corb is, to wake up from their Dream and notice that the planet itself can no longer sustain their obsession with "work" and "large scale planning for the future" and cannot possibly support all the children they might wish to have except in conditions of dire poverty and with life spans drastically shortened by environmental degradation and perpetual wars to secure steadily diminishing resources-- and even in those miserable circumstances will be able to support those children only for a moment before the by then inevitable plunge over the brink into global demographic catastrophe

That's hippies. Hipsters pursue their own American dreams of owning small bars and making it big in a band. Though what you're suggesting is much worse than hipsters.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 8:09 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

American dreams of owning small bars

"small bars" is a Sydney AU term so wouldn't be used for an American Dream.

I know this cuz I was in Aus in March.

Yea that's bragging.
posted by sweetkid at 8:18 PM on May 13, 2013

Are we talking about hipsters? I’m agin ‘em.
posted by bongo_x at 8:25 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

"Okay. I got a question for ya, how do you feel about frilly toothpicks?"

/Mitch Hedberg
posted by sweetkid at 8:32 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

Sorry about my last comment - it was just (puts hands on hips) terrible.
posted by en forme de poire at 8:38 PM on May 13, 2013

"If you (general you) don't RTFA and then say something in the FPP that TFA actually totally refutes or undercuts, you look like a jerk."

There's no jerk like a kneejerk, and kneejerk is pretty much what we're talking about here. "Oh, the FPP says X and I have a fully autonomic reaction to X and here it is."
posted by George_Spiggott at 8:48 PM on May 13, 2013

Is this the part of the thread where we recommend the best marinade for braised free-range hipster loin or is that later.
posted by elizardbits at 8:49 PM on May 13, 2013

But the loin of a Norwegian forest cat is so stringy, even when free-range.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 8:54 PM on May 13, 2013 [3 favorites]

Hating "hipsters" is like hating Paris Hilton. No one actually does, because those people aren't hurting anyone, and with all the war and genocide and starvation in the world how big of a fucking idiot would you have to be to waste your hate on someone for liking Daft Punk or being a socialite?

No, it's a pose.

Which makes people who hate hipsters...

posers.

You can all carry on with your lives now.
posted by drjimmy11 at 8:57 PM on May 13, 2013 [5 favorites]

The loin is pretty lean meat, so you'd definitely need to brine the hipster first. Of course, only an artisinal pernod, with locally source juniper berries and Andean sea salt.
posted by Ghidorah at 9:00 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

No, it's a pose.

Which makes people who hate hipsters...

posers.

You can all carry on with your lives now.

srs'ly close this we're done.
posted by sweetkid at 9:04 PM on May 13, 2013

Which makes people who hate hipsters... (puts sunglasses on) ...

Aiiiiiiiiiiiihhhhhhhhhh

... posers.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 9:06 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

I choose to hate Teddy Boys. That's right: transatlantic retro-hate. I'm in before the crowd with that one.
posted by George_Spiggott at 9:09 PM on May 13, 2013 [7 favorites]

I'm in before the crowd with that one.

The West Indian residents of Bramley Road are waaaaaay ahead of you on that one. In fact, the Notting Hill Carnival is, in its way, a response to Teddy Boys.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 9:15 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

Fatal Error: Cannot parse MetaTalk thread
posted by double block and bleed at 9:16 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

Nonsense, Bunny Ultramod, their Teddy Boy hate was contemporaneous and sincere. It does not compare with my volitional and capricious choice of hate-fashion.

(P.S. interesting info, though. thank you)
posted by George_Spiggott at 9:20 PM on May 13, 2013

That's true. You have the arbitrary retro down.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 9:21 PM on May 13, 2013

HEre's a whole list of subcultures to hate on. Actually, it's a pretty paltry list. This doesn't even scratch the surface. Me, I'm gonna go with the Wide-Awakes. Those bastards, with their oilskin capes and red sashes, marching around with torches and creepy banners. So fucking smug.
posted by Miko at 9:23 PM on May 13, 2013 [4 favorites]

Actually, it's a pretty paltry list. This doesn't even scratch the surface.

Boy, I'll say. Subcultures have a lot of catching up to do with with, say, house music subgenres. In fact, until it's possible to have a subculture based largely on the ability to name-drop more subcultures than someone else, this whole subculture thing is completely in the weeds.
posted by George_Spiggott at 9:29 PM on May 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

Which makes people who hate hipsters...

posers.

I believe it's "poseurs", after the French.
posted by gingerest at 9:31 PM on May 13, 2013 [10 favorites]

Stilyaga

Looked it up. They look like John Waters vomitedon screen.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 10:17 PM on May 13, 2013

Mod note: One comment deleted. CiS, please don't post huge textdumps, and please don't get into listing other subcultures you dislike.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 10:21 PM on May 13, 2013

...
I didn't even get to save that! I spend a few minutes on it!
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 10:21 PM on May 13, 2013

I will MeMail it to you.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 10:22 PM on May 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

Just when I thought this conversation couldn't get any worse, local news made a 'Are you a hipster?' test.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 11:44 PM on May 13, 2013

I got 10 out of 20
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 11:45 PM on May 13, 2013

Nerds on the internet feel threatened by people they think have a better chance at getting laid than they do.

Riiiiight. Couldn't be because they gentrify my neighborhood, then pretend it's theirs. Or make live music boring by standing around en masse not giving a shit and trying to look cool with their drinks. Or form a million identical "Americana" bands. Or suicidally barrel around on bikes with no brakes because someone decided that's cool. Or or or or.
posted by DecemberBoy at 12:02 AM on May 14, 2013 [3 favorites]

"Riiiiight. Couldn't be because they gentrify my neighborhood, then pretend it's theirs."

READ THE ARTICLE
posted by klangklangston at 12:35 AM on May 14, 2013 [11 favorites]

klangklangston: "READ THE ARTICLE"

This thread is oddly reminiscent of mid-90s Time Life Books commercials, and I like that.
posted by barnacles at 2:09 AM on May 14, 2013 [5 favorites]

I'm really taken aback by the amount of negativity in this thread.

I mean... if the worst that this (if it exists) subgroup of people do is move en masse to a neighbourhood and sort of claim it (this happens all the time, in every city, with all sorts of cultures), "make live music boring" (I'd say that's at least partly in the ear of the... um... behearer?) and "try to look cool" (pretty sure all of us have done that at some point in our lives)... then... how is that so terrible?

Can everyone getting wound up by this thread think about why for a moment, and then direct that anger/frustration at something worthwhile. If you're worried about your neighbourhood then organise a street party. If you're concerned about live music then help keep live music going. And if the thing most on your mind right now is how annoying it is when people try too hard to look cool then consider recalibrating your parameters.
posted by greenish at 3:33 AM on May 14, 2013 [2 favorites]

Respectfully, I think you're wrong, and I don't think you read the article very well, and I think that your comments and many other comments in that thread reflect not reading the article by the very act of demonstrating the premise bemoaned in the fucking article.

Klangklangston, I'd like to start out by saying that I appreciate your attempt to be more civil here. I wish it were something that were on display more often, but I do really appreciate the attempt.

I can't speak for anyone else: I can only speak for me, but I think it's possible that other people may have similar processes, so here's how the process of commenting for me works. I read the article and have a thought. I don't even remember what that thought originally was - it probably was, in fact, a comment on the actual analyses in the article. Then I went to read the discussion, because I think it's a bad idea to comment before you read. In reading that discussion, I saw something that seemed like I could address well - the idea that it's really, really hard to define What A Hipster Is. So I gave it my shot, and then resolved to pause a bit, because no one likes someone who double posts or posts a massive text dump and I try really hard not to do those things. And then commentary questioned the original comment, and I tried to respond to that. And then MeTa.

I think it is entirely possible (and would certainly be a more charitable interpretation, at least) that other people follow this process of sidetracking - they may mean to discuss the article itself, but by the time they get to the bottom, the article is just one chunk of text in a host of other chunks of text that also need to be addressed - and one of those may be more compelling or the person may have more to contribute on one of those.
posted by corb at 3:42 AM on May 14, 2013

What David Brooks was describing was 100% accurate

That's impossible, it's David Brooks, the man who never met a lazy cliche he didn't like. And actually his Bobo book was something that the original post in the original thread sort of was about, wasn't it, as it regurgitated lazy socialogical "observations" in service to a distinc political ideology, to distract attention from said ideology.
posted by MartinWisse at 3:43 AM on May 14, 2013 [1 favorite]

"I'm really taken aback by the amount of negativity in this thread."

I'm not.

There's a fair-sized contingent on Mefi - and especially in MeTa - who, despite decrying "Othering", are quite happy to indulge in some fairly nasty but subtle othering when doing so indulges their preconceptions and prejudices. You've only got to look in this thread and others (especially the recent deletion threads) to see that.

And here we have one of MeFi's 'love to hate' subjects being deconstructed and revealed as mostly a simple case of Othering. It's a perfect opportunity for people who love to decry Othering whilst indulging in it themselves, to pick a side and start Othering away…
posted by Pinback at 3:58 AM on May 14, 2013 [1 favorite]

READ THE ARTICLE

This hipster... he vibrates?
posted by zarq at 4:16 AM on May 14, 2013 [3 favorites]

Riiiiight. Couldn't be because they gentrify my neighborhood, then pretend it's theirs. Or make live music boring by standing around en masse not giving a shit and trying to look cool with their drinks. Or form a million identical "Americana" bands. Or suicidally barrel around on bikes with no brakes because someone decided that's cool. Or or or or.

This is history's dumbest comment. I'd like to have it bronzed and displayed at the post-Internet meatspace museum in 2065.

Hipster is a catch-all for people you don't like. It's used the same way "poser" was used in the 90's. it meaningfully defines nothing other than folks who go to the same cultural events you do or live in your neighborhood that you don't want there.
posted by to sir with millipedes at 4:20 AM on May 14, 2013 [8 favorites]

Couldn't be because they gentrify my neighborhood, then pretend it's theirs. Or make live music boring by standing around en masse not giving a shit and trying to look cool with their drinks. Or form a million identical "Americana" bands.

Look, bruh, I hate to say it, because I feel your pain, but this right here? This isn't called "hipsters". This is called "society", with an appetizer-sized portion of "you're getting old".

Yeah, young people are gonna move into wherever it is you live, and not exactly give a shit about whatever it is you were doing before you got there. You clearly don't give a shit about them, so it's even. Only it's not even, is it. Because they have social capitol you lack, and they're louder and more obnoxious than you are, and you're clearly aware of it.

Young people have an irritating tendency to stand around at concerts. I suspect this has something to do with social uncomfortableness. Concerts are no longer a place for people who love getting wasted and screaming and shouting; now they must accept a certain proportion of quiet, awkward introverts. For some people, it feels safer not to dance than to dance. Yes, you and I both want to drown them in the inflatable swimming pools we carry around for just such revenge fantasies, but they are people just like us, and even if they ruined my Lady Gaga concert (WE WERE TEN FUCKING ROWS FROM THE FRONT AND NOBODY WAS MOVING A MUSCLE) it's not entirely fair to claim that they're ruining our lives. They're ruining concerts, because they've discovered concerts. Good for them.

If anything, I'd say that complaining about concert etiquette makes US the hipsters. We're the ones who ought to be searching for the obscure underground shows that the outsiders haven't spoiled yet, amirite?

As for the Americana bands thing, that's odd because around where I live, it's all about electronica bands. Synthpop, chiptune, anything you can play with a keyboard or a gameboy. In Hoboken I gathered it's all heavy metal and funk. And lemme tell you, it doesn't matter what genre of music The Youth are trying to play, because The Youth suck at shit in general. If you had my synthpop bands you'd still hate the sound. If we had to listen to The Youth's heavy metal we'd probably be yearning for Americana plain and simple.

But none of this is hipsters. This is you, being old, realizing that the fantasies and ideals of your youth have been replaced with fresher, newer, younger fantasies, of which you are no longer a part. Because that's what fantasies do: they die. The second something a little bit newer comes along, the old fantasy's chucked and done. I think the line that old people like to tell the youth is just as applicable when the youth say it to the old: Welcome to real life. It's a heap of shit. Here's your shovel.

Whatever led you to your current life, your town, your favorite bands, your concerts, your methods of transportation, your choice of friends, they were all rooted in the hope that you could find something satisfying and lasting in the world, some place you could forever call home. Well, you can't. And you can't because all those choices you made, all those ideas you had when you were young, they pissed people off too, whether you saw it or not. Every action you take is going to bother the rest of the world, because the rest of the world's trying really hard to ignore you and they resent you for getting in their way. The only way to opt out is to lie down and curl up and pretend you're an eggplant, preferably in a dark closet where nobody even has to look at you, and if you picked that path as a child I don't even know what to say.

Strike up a conversation with some of those gentrifiers. The cool thing about so-called hipsters is that it doesn't matter whether you're hip or square, because if you're hip you're hip and if you're square you're "authentic". That's a bullshit reasoning right there; in reality the reason so-called hipsters will like you is that many of them are enthusiastic and young and willing to like anything that likes them back. Young people are okay! They are a part of your world, see. It's up to you whether to go on blindly hating them or accept that you live in the World Of The Hipster now, and see what you can get out of that world for yourself.
posted by Rory Marinich at 5:50 AM on May 14, 2013 [26 favorites]

I dunno, corb. The article contains a couple of paragraphs specifically outlining, addressing, and then critiquing the very argument you made in your first comment. It's pretty overt. It's hard to believe you could have read the article and still have made that comment.
posted by Miko at 5:50 AM on May 14, 2013 [2 favorites]

This is called "society"

Gentrification is also called "a skewed and essentially anti-urban economic system that favors total decline and crash and then extended fallow periods before conditions change enough to favor reinvestment as a commodity now marketable in scale to private financing entities," and so it's part of neoliberal economics and governance strategies. So it's hard to blame the little people who like these neighborhoods. They just play the small but necessary role of "market forces" in a bigger game whose parameters are set by urban planners, local/state/federal policymakers, and investment bankers.
posted by Miko at 5:54 AM on May 14, 2013 [9 favorites]

Hipster is a catch-all for people you don't like. It's used the same way "poser" was used in the 90's. it meaningfully defines nothing other than folks who go to the same cultural events you do or live in your neighborhood that you don't want there.

This is it exactly. When I go to a meetup, I'm meeting up with my friends, with people I like. When I'm standing around waiting for a table at my local brunch spot, surrounded by people who dress a lot like the friends I go to meetups to see, people who (from what I overhear of the conversations), do the same kinds of jobs and go to the same kinds of shows etc., I'm surrounded by fucking hipsters.
posted by rtha at 5:59 AM on May 14, 2013 [1 favorite]

By why is your reaction "fucking hipsters" rather than "hunh, the people around me appear similar to me"?
posted by postcommunism at 6:05 AM on May 14, 2013

They just play the small but necessary role of "market forces" in a bigger game whose parameters are set by urban planners, local/state/federal policymakers, and investment bankers.

Ugh, yeah. I live in a lovely little neighborhood -- Little Italy in Omaha -- and developers definitely have their eye on it just now. There have been a few neighborhoods locally that have been "revitalized," but to urban planners, that's the polite word for gentrified (thankfully, city planning is so incompetent in Omaha that they are never entirely successful).

I also want changes in my neighborhood, and mine and these planners sometimes dovetail. I'd like to see dog parks and bike trails, but mostly because there are already a ton of dogs in the neighborhood and a growing group of people are already biking up and down 10th, but without the benefit of bike trails (and 10th is a very lightly trafficked street that is, by everybody's estimation, far too wide.)

There are a ton of empty storefronts and is a large amount of inexpensive (and rather nice) rental space. It's walking distance from downtown, and from one of Omaha's premiere music venues. And I am what people think of when they think of hipsters, and my goals for my own neighborhood are similar to those ascribed to hipsters. But I want these changes to occur internally and naturally and both be generated by and support the neighborhood that already exists.

The trouble is, on the ground level, we aren't given the tools or even the choice to participate in any way but one that encourages gentrification. It's very hard to come up with schemes for a neighborhood that get any sort of support from local government or financial support. The practices that often prove to actually be best for a neighborhood are actively discouraged by city ordinances. Decisions are made by planners, often using models of growth that encourage gains for private businesses and jack up property values (and therefore property taxes), but are generally not very good for the existing community.

All those boutique businesses that hipsters supposedly love? Many of them started out as businesses that genuinely catered to their neighborhood, but the ones that have flourished -- in large part because of top-level support -- practice a more predatory sort of capitalism, and they will eventually be swept aside in favor of chain businesses. It's not hipsters who make these decisions -- you'll note none of these NYTimes pieces on bespoke cheeses or whatever actually survey the neighborhood to see how much of the business is supported locally and how much targets a larger audience that indulges in transactional tourism.

Here's the thing -- hipsters don't force out a previous neighborhood. They (and others associated with gentrification -- artists, gays, etc.) often simply take advantage of existing cheap rent and plentiful space, and move to neighborhoods that have an already fairly transient population that constantly displaces itself. It's the next wave, pushed by city planners and businesspeople, that causes real displacement, raising property taxes and rent in such a way that the current non-transient population is genuinely forced out -- often including the hipsters, artists and gays who are then blamed for all of it.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 6:12 AM on May 14, 2013 [12 favorites]

hipsters have the gall to demonstrate by their own example that it's possible to lead a satisfying life rich with achievement while at the same time consuming fewer resources than their parents did.

In other words, they are freeloaders. They enjoy the fruits of the industrious while sneering at them. Do they think that the iPhone they use to share Instagram photos of their lunch is "local"?

When I see hipsters heading off to the Congo to mine the columbite–tantalite in their gadgets, I will believe that they are somehow interested in conserving resources.
posted by Tanizaki at 6:19 AM on May 14, 2013 [1 favorite]

By why is your reaction "fucking hipsters" rather than "hunh, the people around me appear similar to me"?

Oh, that's a sarcastic appellation on my part, made with full recognition that They are Us. That's just it - they are only "fucking hipsters" when they are annoying me (by being in line in front of me, e.g.); elsewise, they're my friends.
posted by rtha at 6:23 AM on May 14, 2013 [3 favorites]

When I see hipsters heading off to the Congo to mine the columbite–tantalite in their gadgets, I will believe that they are somehow interested in conserving resources.

So whatever efforts they make are ineffective and hypocritical because they are not succeeding at an impossible standard that you are imposing on them but, presumably, not yourself?
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 6:31 AM on May 14, 2013 [10 favorites]

So whatever efforts they make are ineffective and hypocritical because they are not succeeding at an impossible standard that you are imposing on them but, presumably, not yourself?

I do not understand this comment. I am not concerned with "consuming fewer resources".
posted by Tanizaki at 6:34 AM on May 14, 2013

Then what do you care about how they go about consuming fewer resources?
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 6:37 AM on May 14, 2013 [2 favorites]

Then what do you care about how they go about consuming fewer resources?

I am indicating hypocrisy on their part, as your comment from just several minutes ago seemed to understand.
posted by Tanizaki at 6:45 AM on May 14, 2013

Oldsters gonna old.
posted by shakespeherian at 7:05 AM on May 14, 2013 [5 favorites]

I am indicating hypocrisy on their part, as your comment from just several minutes ago seemed to understand.

And I am saying you cannot invent your own impossible standards for something you don't care about, apply it to people who do care, and then declare them hypocrites.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 7:08 AM on May 14, 2013 [5 favorites]

Tanazaki, you contrarian, you
posted by angrycat at 7:15 AM on May 14, 2013 [4 favorites]

And I am saying you cannot invent your own impossible standards for something you don't care about, apply it to people who do care, and then declare them hypocrites.


Even if I grant you "impossibility" (which I do not), why do you say that? When deeming someone a hypocrite, what I care about is inconsequential.
posted by Tanizaki at 7:16 AM on May 14, 2013

The problem I have with hipsters is that people keep trying to talk about them in this thread.
posted by shakespeherian at 7:19 AM on May 14, 2013 [5 favorites]

In other words, they are freeloaders.

Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

Dunno, some of these descriptions of hipsters, I think, are mistaking them for rootless cosmopolitans.
posted by octobersurprise at 7:19 AM on May 14, 2013

what I care about is inconsequential.

This is true, Tanisaki. This is true.
posted by octobersurprise at 7:21 AM on May 14, 2013 [7 favorites]

Even if I grant you "impossibility" (which I do not), why do you say that?

Because why am I even having this discussion. I'm just going to go ahead and say that I agree that what you care about is inconsequential.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 7:21 AM on May 14, 2013 [1 favorite]

Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

Yes, it is my opinion. That is why I wrote it. Whose opinion do you write?
posted by Tanizaki at 7:22 AM on May 14, 2013

This is my least favorite Abbott and Costello sketch.
posted by shakespeherian at 7:23 AM on May 14, 2013 [40 favorites]

Did everyone get up on the weird side of the bed this morning or what?
posted by rtha at 7:26 AM on May 14, 2013 [2 favorites]

I sleep in a hammock.
posted by Aizkolari at 7:32 AM on May 14, 2013 [1 favorite]

So, yes.
posted by shakespeherian at 7:34 AM on May 14, 2013 [1 favorite]

Yes, it is my opinion. That is why I wrote it.

Whoooosh.
posted by Miko at 7:35 AM on May 14, 2013 [8 favorites]

Whose opinion do you write?

Skeletor's.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:44 AM on May 14, 2013 [10 favorites]

Where are all those 50% self-identifie[d hipsters] hiding?

I self-identify as a hipster sometimes, in a mocking humblebrag sort of way. The reason is basically captured by:

Don't let the W fool you. Any ethnicity can be SWPL.

If you take out the W, you're left with the pejoratively-capitalized "People who Like Stuff." Which is also what gauche said about "hipster": "a hipster is someone who likes something in a way that annoys the speaker."

So: I'm youngish and live in a city and have disposable time (and income, although I don't think sustainable hipstering depends on much more than a living wage). That lets me spend time ... liking stuff. E.g., finding better ways to make coffee or buy vegetables; playing old-timey songs on the porch; throwing weird parties; going to weird cultural events and interesting restaurants and experimental plays. I have access to a ridiculous range of culture and the time and resources to enjoy it, so I do. It's a lifestyle that I love, and at the same time there's the unsettling sense that I must be pulling one over on someone -- we can't just be allowed to enjoy our lives this way, can we? So "hipster" ends up as useful shorthand at that moment of self-consciousness, to refer to both the joys of how we live and the Peter Singer/Puritan voices whispering in our ears.
posted by jhc at 8:00 AM on May 14, 2013 [6 favorites]

Skeletor's.

As played by Frank Langella.
posted by octobersurprise at 8:02 AM on May 14, 2013 [2 favorites]

What ever happened to that dude that used to hang out on this corner yelling how "THIS THREAD IS NOT ABOUT HIPSTERS"? And back then, it wasn't, but now it's gettin' all gentrified.
posted by cribcage at 8:17 AM on May 14, 2013 [6 favorites]

There are no Hipsters in the Congo. They all went to Rwanda.

...and wait till all your little whurling machines stop working. Buy an axe today and learn to swim.

I'm just going to go ahead and say that I agree that what you care about is inconsequential.
posted by Bunny Ultramod

way to early to pull out now.

They (and others associated with gentrification -- artists, gays, etc.) often simply take advantage of existing cheap rent and plentiful space, and move to neighborhoods that have an already fairly transient population that constantly displaces itself. It's the next wave, pushed by city planners and businesspeople, that causes real displacement, raising property taxes and rent in such a way that the current non-transient population is genuinely forced out -- often including the hipsters, artists and gays who are then blamed for all of it.
posted by Bunny Ultramod

Really, you need to come to Flint were the opposite is happening. And what pray-tell is a "Transient neighbourhood" because that is so opaque. So yeah, you need to talk about this.

And if your hip, it is not the "next wave" in many places it has been happening for years. (neighbourhood reformations)

Frank Langella... that made my day
posted by clavdivs at 8:32 AM on May 14, 2013

And what pray-tell is a "Transient neighbourhood" because that is so opaque

It's a neighborhood where a lot of people move in and out constantly, instead of a neighborhood with a fixed, long-lasting community.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 8:38 AM on May 14, 2013 [1 favorite]

Oldsters gonna old.

Nah, the way you tell an oldster is when they go looking for a substitute for oudated terms for being fashionably clued-in. Y'know; some kind of 'hip' replacement.
posted by George_Spiggott at 9:42 AM on May 14, 2013 [4 favorites]

"There are no Hipsters in the Congo. They all went to Rwanda.

...and wait till all your little whurling machines stop working. Buy an axe today and learn to swim."

clavdivs!
posted by klangklangston at 9:47 AM on May 14, 2013 [1 favorite]

Smile like you've got nothing to prove
No matter what you might do
There's always someone out there cooler than you

I know that's hard to believe
But there are people you meet
They're into something that is to big to be
Expressed through their clothes

And they'll put up
With all the poses you throw
And you won't even know

That they're not sizing you up
They know your ma fucked you up
Or maybe let you watch too much TV

But they'll still look in your eyes
To find the human inside
You know there's always something in there to see

Beneath the veneer
Not everybody made the list this year
Have a beer

Life is wonderful
Life is beautiful
We're all children of
One big universe
So you don't have to be
A chump
posted by lazaruslong at 10:29 AM on May 14, 2013

Tanizaki: “In other words, they are freeloaders. They enjoy the fruits of the industrious while sneering at them.”

octobersurprise: “Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.”

Tanizaki: “Yes, it is my opinion. That is why I wrote it. Whose opinion do you write?”

Tanizaki (and anyone else who might not know this) – octobersurprise was quoting a well-known film called The Big Lebowski, the titular character of which may fairly be described as a "freeloader" – and indeed he is characterized as such by another character in the film who happens to have the same name.
posted by koeselitz at 1:21 PM on May 14, 2013 [5 favorites]

We could have kept that going for weeks if you hadn't given away the joke. :D
posted by zarq at 1:47 PM on May 14, 2013 [2 favorites]

This is Metatalk. Somebody probably will anyway.
posted by koeselitz at 1:51 PM on May 14, 2013 [2 favorites]

Tanizaki didn't get a Pulp Fiction reference either so he may have just missed the 90s. Maybe he was but a scamp in those days. :-/
posted by sweetkid at 1:51 PM on May 14, 2013 [1 favorite]

I was a scamp in those days, and I made the Pulp Fiction reference.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 2:07 PM on May 14, 2013 [2 favorites]

I was joking, I'm sure Tanizaki was far from scamphood in the 90s.
posted by sweetkid at 2:48 PM on May 14, 2013

In the 90s, Tanizaki was in the Matrix.
posted by sweetkid at 3:16 PM on May 14, 2013

As agent smith, maybe.
posted by emptythought at 3:18 PM on May 14, 2013 [1 favorite]

shakespeherian: "The problem I have with hipsters is that people keep trying to talk about them in this thread."

Not just this thread, though - sometimes it seems like everyone everywhere is talking about hipsters. Except hipsters. I'm starting to think that hipsterism is one of those things that only exists because it gets talked about. In other words, it only exists in the minds of those who talk about it. So, if everyone stops talking about them, hipsters will suddenly cease to exist and there'll be one less source of anger and jealousy in the world.
posted by dg at 3:36 PM on May 14, 2013 [2 favorites]

There's a fair-sized contingent on Mefi - and especially in MeTa - who, despite decrying "Othering", are quite happy to indulge in some fairly nasty but subtle othering when doing so indulges their preconceptions and prejudices. You've only got to look in this thread and others (especially the recent deletion threads) to see that.

Its not 'othering' when the group that you 'otherize' is your own group! Its observational in-group humor.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 4:19 PM on May 14, 2013

I'm starting to think that hipsterism is one of those things that only exists because it gets talked about.

last night i did poetry at a zine launch in a tiny hole in the wall bar/artspace where 90% of the men wore vests and pegged jeans and the women were in polka-dots and it was right next to a bar that recently converted its beergarden into a graffitti artspace that has local DJs and markets. but hipsters don't exist!
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 4:22 PM on May 14, 2013

Why are you trying to have this argument here. That is not what this thread is for. You are aware of how this works.
posted by shakespeherian at 4:30 PM on May 14, 2013 [3 favorites]

Ye gods, shakespeherian. You have the patience of saints and tenacity of a terrier.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 4:32 PM on May 14, 2013 [5 favorites]

Your point isn't real clear, Charlie, but it seems to be "I know there are hipsters because my friends and I are all hipsters. And I hate us."
posted by octobersurprise at 4:33 PM on May 14, 2013 [10 favorites]

"I know there are hipsters because my friends and I are all hipsters. And I hate us."

For serious.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 4:34 PM on May 14, 2013 [1 favorite]

Ye gods, shakespeherian. You have the patience of saints and tenacity of a terrier.

I'm a father.
posted by shakespeherian at 4:37 PM on May 14, 2013 [12 favorites]

This thread needs to be mercy-killed. I started reading thinking there maybe some sort of discussion about how to curb thread-shitting, but no, it turned out to be just a testbed for even more thread-shitting. I feel like I need a shower now.
posted by afiler at 4:50 PM on May 14, 2013

Shakespeherian, I think you lost this battle when the thread was tagged "hipstershipstershipsters", although "shutthefuckupabouthipsters" might counter that. Still, please don't let me get between your lance and that windmill.
posted by gingerest at 4:51 PM on May 14, 2013 [1 favorite]

Fun fact, Cervantes started out Quixote aiming to mock the character and the romanticism he represents but by the end of the book clearly likes him better than anyone else.
posted by shakespeherian at 5:03 PM on May 14, 2013 [7 favorites]

see, this is what happens when i don't get my way re: giant wicker mans
posted by elizardbits at 5:15 PM on May 14, 2013

Oh, Christ, no.

Sorry, I said that wrong. I meant:

OH, CHRIST! NOOOOOOOO!
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 5:20 PM on May 14, 2013 [1 favorite]

I didn't even MENTION the bee mask okay.
posted by elizardbits at 5:21 PM on May 14, 2013

OH, CHRIST! NOOOOOOOO!

CHRIIIIIIIIST!

I didn't even MENTION the bee mask okay.

That's just in the remake. But the remake also has BEAR PUNCHING, which I am glad is a thing that exists.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 5:25 PM on May 14, 2013

there's a hipster kids/clothing store on my old route home and it has animal masks that are almost exactly like the animal masks in the original Wicker Man. could do a thing on pagan animal motifs in the subculture in general. its pretty creepy
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 5:33 PM on May 14, 2013

last night i did poetry at a zine launch in a tiny hole in the wall bar/artspace where 90% of the men wore vests and pegged jeans and the women were in polka-dots and it was right next to a bar that recently converted its beergarden into a graffitti artspace that has local DJs and markets. but hipsters don't exist!

So? How does applying a label achieve anything? A lot of that sounds like some of my friends and I (the poetry really not so much) but the hipster tag is pretty meaningless to us (and I'm currently sitting at work on a construction site wearing dirty hi-vis -- I'm not feeling very stereotypically hipsterish right this minute). Really it's all just people being people and putting labels on them is going to mean nothing to 50% and piss off the other 50%. That's a thing with all labels ever but particularly with the hipster label because people don't even self identify with it, unlike punk or goth or whatever, it's applied from the outside.
posted by deadwax at 5:34 PM on May 14, 2013

Well, this thread took a few turns, didn't it?

Anyway, regarding the original post, the fact that reliably the first few posts in almost any thread are people who clearly didn't read the article and are merely using the thread to post things which indicate as such is bad. What's even worse is that these comments are usually needlessly aggressive and then sidetrack the thread away from any interesting discussion of the material at hand.

I've done this myself in the past, but have recently made an agreement with myself that if I don't read then I don't post, and if I can't manage that, then I at least caveat whatever I post by saying that I haven't read. Aside from making the community better, it's actually pretty nice. It gives you time to think about the article, think about the discussion, and form your thoughts instead of just rushing in to start a fight based on your preconceived notions. Ever since I've been consciously doing this it's made me enjoy the act of posting on here a lot more.
posted by codacorolla at 5:47 PM on May 14, 2013 [1 favorite]

It's not just that people say "don't hate on hipsters". It's that lots of people on this site say "Hipsters, as a distinct subculture, don't exist" WHILE DISPLAYING MANY OF THE TRAITS OF HIPSTERS AND BEING ABLE TO IDENTIFY THEM. That's what annoys me. They exist, they can be marked, they can be seen. It's like seeing a dude in a mohawk and a leather jacket with badges and a Clash shirt and saying you can't call him a punk, or wearing jeans made of safety pins and saying punk doesn't exist as a subculture.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 6:06 PM on May 14, 2013 [1 favorite]

We get it.
posted by rtha at 6:13 PM on May 14, 2013 [5 favorites]

people identify as punk, but people don't identify as hipsters, or at least they only identify as much as to say, "Yes, I have some of the characteristics or do some of the things that you think of as 'hipster'" But no it's not a distinct subculture the way punk is.

I don't even understand though why this is making you so endlessly shouty. I mean this is a pretty easy distinction to make.
posted by sweetkid at 6:15 PM on May 14, 2013

*holds envelope up to head*

"The least interesting argument in the history of the world"

*opens envelope and the latter half of this thread falls out, unfolding endlessly*
posted by codacorolla at 6:23 PM on May 14, 2013 [7 favorites]

"And may an unclean Yak sit on your dinner."
posted by octobersurprise at 6:32 PM on May 14, 2013 [3 favorites]

people identify as punk, but people don't identify as hipsters, or at least they only identify as much as to say, "Yes, I have some of the characteristics or do some of the things that you think of as 'hipster'"

yeah but it's a standard, obvious joke that the people who don't identify as hipsters - or explicitly don't identify as hipsters - are the ones who are hipsters. that's my point! people act like it's some kind of horrible racist slur, so do everything they can to avoid being associated with it. i just hate the hyprocricy.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 6:55 PM on May 14, 2013

The Hate Map fpp has an awful lot of people in it making comments that are directly addressed in the links.
posted by rtha at 7:00 PM on May 14, 2013 [2 favorites]

I mean, don't you have any hobbies or anything?
posted by shakespeherian at 7:02 PM on May 14, 2013

I do, but you wouldn't have heard of them.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 7:07 PM on May 14, 2013 [4 favorites]

I must applaud you, rtha, for keeping your cool.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:12 PM on May 14, 2013 [2 favorites]

It's not just that people say "don't hate on hipsters". It's that lots of people on this site say "Hipsters, as a distinct subculture, don't exist" WHILE DISPLAYING MANY OF THE TRAITS OF HIPSTERS AND BEING ABLE TO IDENTIFY THEM. That's what annoys me. They exist, they can be marked, they can be seen. It's like seeing a dude in a mohawk and a leather jacket with badges and a Clash shirt and saying you can't call him a punk, or wearing jeans made of safety pins and saying punk doesn't exist as a subculture.

You can split people into categories based on whatever stupid criteria you want, but that doesn't make it an actual subculture.
posted by empath at 8:22 PM on May 14, 2013 [1 favorite]

I can poke holes in any definition of science fiction you care to supply but that doesn't mean science fiction isn't an actual thing.
posted by Justinian at 8:28 PM on May 14, 2013 [4 favorites]

That's a whole other argument: There's no such thing as 'science fiction'
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 8:49 PM on May 14, 2013

Ack, sorry. I though there was a full text link, but there isn't.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 9:12 PM on May 14, 2013

Oh my Christ, that tweetmap thread.
posted by klangklangston at 9:42 PM on May 14, 2013 [4 favorites]

I finally realized why this thread makes no sense to me. I'm finally old enough that not only do I not understand what the younger generation is doing, I don't care, either. Now I know how my Dad felt.

If you guys need me, I'll be out mowing my lawn in tan shorts, black dress socks and white velcro shoes.
posted by double block and bleed at 9:47 PM on May 14, 2013 [4 favorites]

it makes no sense to you because it's not about generational divides or well-matched clothes or funny mustaches or pickled jars but rather the site's tendency to leap for its hobbyhorses without reading

the

goddamned

links
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 9:52 PM on May 14, 2013

Charlemagne, part of the difficulty I think you are having is that what you observe externally and superficially does not go very deep. "Hipsters" are supposed to dress X way and go to X places, as if that stuff defines what would or wouldn't make them a subculture. That kind of thing is basically nothing but fashion, and it's pretty hard to describe an entire generation and a half as a true "subculture" just because they happen to wear what they and their friends think is in to wear and go to places where other people somewhat similar to them hang out, as does just about everybody if you have ever walked into an Applebee's or a salsa dancing place or the donut shop on a weekday morning. Last I checked, "old married guys who need an excuse to get out of the house" really isn't a 'subculture' either.

It's conceivable that at times I might have been called a hipster (probably too old now). But I would not really have "identified" as a hipster, because these few limited, superficial, and generalized qualities that are said to make someone a hipster or not are basically meaningless to me. They don't tell you a single thing about a person's background, interests or talents. I can't tell from the fact that someone has a beard that they do or don't share other interests with me. I can't tell from a certain kind of pants or a hair accessory.

Within this broad swath of people you think you can "see" as unified are people who think of themselves as different from one another and/or as members of other subcultures. Like food people. Literature people. Bicycle people. Political activist people. Animal people. Poetry people. Fashion people. Movie people. Letterpress people. Art people. Woodworker people. Musician people. Birdwatcher people. Theater people. DIY craft people. Home improvement people. Whatever people. All kinds of people. They don't sit on the bus and look for someone else vaguely resembling their aesthetic and think "Yay! Another hipster! Let's go have a nanobrewery beer!" They gravitate toward people who share interests with them. Those shared interests define a truer subculture.
posted by Miko at 10:02 PM on May 14, 2013 [12 favorites]

I think you can use the word "hipster" in a positive way, and so it shouldn't be on the map, especially since you could totally have misspelled the word Hapsburg or heparin and be tweeting about that instead. But I'm too busy to read the previous comments.
posted by gingerest at 10:23 PM on May 14, 2013 [1 favorite]

Oh my Christ, that tweetmap thread.

Yeah, I give up. I think I'm going to take it out of recent activity - that'll give me a hat trick today, since I've already taken the HIV and MOOC fpps out.

And, to bed.
posted by rtha at 10:23 PM on May 14, 2013 [1 favorite]

Within this broad swath of people you think you can "see" as unified are people who think of themselves as different from one another and/or as members of other subcultures.

I think this is a really key insight into the whole hipster thing. In a sense, hipsters are among the first social scenes to arise purely out of the way the Internet works; I'd say that nerds are too, but strictly speaking they existed before the Internet and merely adapted to onlineness very well.

"Hipster" culture can only exist in a world where a smartphone and an idle hour can turn you into an enthusiastic practitioner of whatever obscure activity you want to get into. It allows enthusiasm without obsession, which I suspect is why my nerd friends are particularly finger-twitchy about hipsters – the sorts of things that used to take years and years to absorb can now be "cheat coded" and analyzed in a matter of minutes. The AV Club has a series called Gateways to Geekery which exemplifies this: it's a series of articles that summarize complex cultural icons and provide an introduction to understanding their body of work.

The reason no hipster calls him-or-herself a hipster is because to any one person, all they're doing is pursuing a series of interests. They have access to a fairly deep repository of knowledge about all these interests, even if they don't store all that knowledge locally. And within a "hipster" social scene it's impossible to follow every person's interests at all times, because every person is picking up five new things a day. This doesn't preclude focus or obsession or specialization; it happens at tangents to a person's real passion, and often enriches their understanding of their central thing. (I can connect Taylor Swift to Fullmetal Alchemist to obscure Russian video games to Heidegger to Homestuck without much effort, because I've found ways that all these things revolve around one thing I seriously give shits about.) But when you only have brief contact with a person, this hyperbreadth can come off as irritating or ironic or apathetic or cynical or whatever-the-fuck.

To borrow an irritating linguistic thing that hipsters do, I'd argue that hipster isn't a scene, it's a post-scene. It's what happens when scenes are colliding so frequently and rapidly that there stops being a central ethos to any one of them, a shared collection of tastes or fashion senses or morals or worldviews. Everything smashes together; everything is equally valid, in the sense that everything is somehow connected to everything else. It's the remix or mash-up of social orders. In a lot of ways it's the personification of the world wide web.
posted by Rory Marinich at 10:32 PM on May 14, 2013 [10 favorites]

"Hipster" culture can only exist in a world where a smartphone and an idle hour can turn you into an enthusiastic practitioner of whatever obscure activity you want to get into. \

I really disagree with this. Most of the things I do that are "hipster"ish are things I have done and been interested in since I was sixteen. We invented hypertext connections/connectivity because our brains already think that way, not the other way around. I don't find the aesthetic confluences that are about the total depth of "hipster" an internet-enabled thing at all really. Being interested in things and able to look things up is not a new invention.

The difference now, to me, is just that because of the economic shift away from industrialism and also the failure of business institutions basically, we are moving into a cultural epoch in which creativity and ideas are valued and celebrated. If there is anything that could be said to unite hipsters, it's that they place a greater emphasis on creativity and ideas (maybe) than the general mass-media/pop culture does.
posted by Miko at 10:36 PM on May 14, 2013 [1 favorite]

Interesting. Would you classify, say, your old-school record-store enthusiast as a hipster? As in, can you be a hipster and only be super passionate about one range of things? Or is a part of being a hipster transcending that and really getting your hands into a bunch of jars at once?

(I don't mean this to debate you; I am only about three months older than the Internet and have no conception of life before online interaction.)
posted by Rory Marinich at 10:40 PM on May 14, 2013

Within this broad swath of people you think you can "see" as unified are people who think of themselves as different from one another and/or as members of other subcultures.

That's what makes it even funnier.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 11:14 PM on May 14, 2013

Interesting. Would you classify, say, your old-school record-store enthusiast as a hipster? As in, can you be a hipster and only be super passionate about one range of things? Or is a part of being a hipster transcending that and really getting your hands into a bunch of jars at once?

Part of what's proto-hipsterish about record collecting culture is the exclusivity - the whole, widely steretyped, "i was into it before it was cool" mindset.

"Hipster" culture can only exist in a world where a smartphone and an idle hour can turn you into an enthusiastic practitioner of whatever obscure activity you want to get into. It allows enthusiasm without obsession, which I suspect is why my nerd friends are particularly finger-twitchy about hipsters – the sorts of things that used to take years and years to absorb can now be "cheat coded" and analyzed in a matter of minutes.

That's another issue. The whole magpie sensability, where everything is fodder for somebody's aesthetic as opposed to being approached or appreciated on its own terms.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 11:16 PM on May 14, 2013

I actually identify as a hipster. Always have, ever since I first stumbled on The Catalog of Cool and discovered there was an aesthetic I share, and proceeded on to books like The Hip: Hipsters, Jazz and the Beat Generation, and others. Here's what I wrote about the first book some time ago -- it's protracted, but explains why this particular definition seemed to suit me:

NOW I MUST CONFESS to something that embarrasses me somewhat. The Catalog of Cool, published in 1985 and edited by former Creem contributor Gene Sculatti, is the single most influential book in my life. I stumbled upon it in the downtown Minneapolis library sometime back in high school and read it from cover to cover in one sitting. A few weeks later, I went back to the library, checked the book out, and, at home, began making lists of the book's recommendations for music, literature, comic books, cocktails, old television shows, and whatever else the various writers of the book had deemed cool enough to include. Eventually I purchased the book, and its sequel, Too Cool, published in 1993. I obsessively hunted down the items on my lists, haunting used book and record stores. On trips out to New York, I would swing by the Museum of Television and Radio on 52nd street and request a booth and several videotapes of old television shows, unavailable anywhere, but recommended by the books. In the early days of cable, which my family did not have, I would sometimes show up at friends' houses, if they had cable. I would do this late at night, without warning, because I had noticed that a film recommended by The Catalog of Cool was playing.

I expect my embarrassment about this stems from the book's title, in part. "Cool" is a devalued term. It's just something people blurt out now to describe anything they feel okay about. It no longer has a sense of describing something subterranean, neither does it describe a knowing aesthetic. It has become, in this generation, what "keen" was to a previous generation: a bland, empty adjective. And, honestly, while the Catalog of Cool does have something of a beatniky quality to it, I'm not sure "cool" is the right adjective to describe the items that show up in the book's many lists.

The Catalog's "Sounds" section, as an example, mentions Sam Cooke and Ella Ftzgerald, and, yes, these are two performers who fit a traditional description of "cool." But the books also recommend zydeco accordionist Iry LeJuene, the obscuro Garage Band The Beachnuts, and redneck maniac Johnny Buckett, who sang a song called "Hippie in a Blender." The Catalog's taste in film tends toward cult and trash, tossing out Paul Bartel's cannibalism comedy Eating Raoul as one of the 50 coolest movies ever made. Also on the list: Ed Wood's transvestite travesty Glen or Glenda, the gossip column noir The Sweet Smell of Success, and the haywire western Winchester '73. This isn't some cliched compilation of the sort of things Fonzie might enjoy; these lists contain obscure and forgotten treasures.

The Catalog's list of books is even more expansive. Alongside The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men, an early compilation that could legitimately be defined as having a "cool" outlook, there is Reyner Banham's book of essays about the landscape of LA, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Also recommended: Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen's satire of Gothic horror; The Stars my Destination, a mind-warping science fiction novel by Alfred Bester in which humanity has learned to spontaneously teleport wherever they want to go; and old issues of the ultra-sleazy Confidential Magazine, which made modern tabloids seem timid.

I'm not sure why I responded to this book in the way that I did. I suspect it's because I was bored and had as great a desire for novelty then as I do now. I also suspect it's because it showed me something that, as a teenager, I had just started to discover on my own: That underneath the monolith of corporate radio, hidden in the stacks of bookstores, and tucked away into the early hours of UHF television, there was real weirdness lurking about. I had a blast tracking down the Catalog's hundreds of recommendations, and, while searching, found quite a lot of my own that I'm not sure I would ever have stumbled across. The books showed me the wild edges of culture -- stuff that had tried for popular success but missed the mark, and stuff that had never cared about popular success at all. I discovered that people were making things just for the simple pleasure of making them, and indulging in their own idiosyncratic tastes. I also discovered that these creations hung around long after they were made. Even if you had to really dig to find them, such as the book Mister Justice by Doris Piserchia, which I started looking for in 1983 and just found and purchased last year, they're out there, waiting to be discovered.

And as someone who has moved on to making my own idiosyncratic things, and just shoved them out into the blogosphere for people to stumble across at some time or another, the Catalog of Cool is still one of the most influential books in my life, for exactly this reason. Not everything ever made is meant to be a blockbuster. Some things may simply be too personal, or out of fashion, or just plain weird, ever to find a large audience. But that doesn't mean it isn't worth doing. I've never had a better time than when I was tracking down the cultural artifacts recommended by the Catalog, and everything it recommended was a blast to watch, or read, or listen to, or eat, or however it was meant to be consumed. These pleasures are real and long-lasting, even if they are only shared by a few people. And that's all right.

* * *

I don't know if I am what people mean nowadays when they mean hipster. I have chunky glasses and weird tastes in music. I am arty and lefty and am a cocktail snob and celebrate the obscure. I have recently started dressing very preppy, but it is a preppy of bright red pants and glowing pink polo shirts. I write plays with titles like Fucked Up Rock Stars Trash a Hotel Room, and my band, The Ultramods, released the first album recorded entirely using GarageBand on the iPad, which made us kind of a big deal in Italy, for some reason. I suspect I would be seen as a hipster by many, and certainly see myself this way.

But I think the thing about hipsterism, as opposed to nerd culture, is that they are almost identical. I am fanatical about Star Trek and can tell you Spock's serial number. I endlessly reference The Wicker Man (and am always disappointed when people think I am referring to the Nicolas Cage movie). I played Dungeons and Dragons for years as a boy. I was a fan of MST3K from its first year, and count Bill Corbett as a friend, to an extent -- we have known each other since 2000 and communicate regularly. I watch anime and read manga and am conversant in basic comic bookese, with particular affection for the English comics of my youth, when I lived in England. I read science fiction and fantasy. Etc etc etc.

So what makes me different from a nerd? We both gravitate toward fringe popular culture, and both adore it in equal measure. I suppose I have some jazzbo qualities and a taste for some of the things typically associated with hipster culture that isn't really seen as being nerdy -- I dunno what to say, except that both Matt and Dan Wilson of Trip Shakespeare and later Semisonic babysat me when I was a boy, and that sort of early alt-rock influence sticks with you.

I dunno. Maybe it's my red pants. Maybe it's that nerd culture celebrates a sort of perennial outsider status, while hipsterism celebrates a sort of perennial insider status, but they just seem like two versions of the same worldview. We're both exclusionary in our own way, with our own codes of authenticity, but I think we're also both democratic in our own way, in that we recognize that the things we love are available for anybody to love, but they won't be loved by everybody, and that's okay.

I wonder if nerds see us hipsters as the sorts of people who would have mocked and bullied them when younger. I certainly didn't. I was mocked and bullied, and most of my friends have been and remain self-identified nerds. But I am definitely closer to Harvey Pekar than Toby Radloff. I think we can get through this world with mutual respect, but instead I find myself and people like me denigrated at every turn by people who I am similar to in almost every way.

Is it the red pants? Because I'm not going to stop wearing them. I like them.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 11:44 PM on May 14, 2013 [15 favorites]

Part of what's proto-hipsterish about record collecting culture is the exclusivity - the whole, widely steretyped, "i was into it before it was cool" mindset.

You realize that every 20 year old who has ever lived has been like that, yes?
posted by empath at 12:21 AM on May 15, 2013 [2 favorites]

I don't know if I am what people mean nowadays when they mean hipster. I have chunky glasses and weird tastes in music.

If you picked up everything you know from one book, you're probably what people call a poseur.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 12:22 AM on May 15, 2013

If you picked up everything you know from one book, you're probably what people call a poseur.

See, the problem with you on this site is not hipsterism or douchiness or anything. It's your complete inability to read a short piece of text and respond in a way that doesn't make it clear that you skipped entire paragraphs, and in fact probably skipped everything except the opening sentence of the first, middle and final paragraphs, just to be able to make some pathetic wannabe snappy one liner reply.
posted by jacalata at 12:47 AM on May 15, 2013 [18 favorites]

and if you did read the whole thing, then it's your reading comprehension and/or short term memory.
posted by jacalata at 12:47 AM on May 15, 2013

Also, seriously, should you sleep at some point?
posted by ominous_paws at 12:59 AM on May 15, 2013

CiS why are you such an asshole in every single EDM-related thread? If you don't like the genre, don't know anything about it and don't care about it WHY DO YOU POST SO FUCKING MUCH ABOUT IT?
posted by empath at 1:27 AM on May 15, 2013 [2 favorites]

I'm a rock and roll soldier in the war against the jive
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 2:05 AM on May 15, 2013

Or you're a pompous windbag that hates fun. Take your pick.
posted by empath at 2:21 AM on May 15, 2013 [4 favorites]

Ye gods, mods, put a bullet in the head of this thread already. The horse has not merely been beaten, it has been pulverised beyond recognition.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 3:05 AM on May 15, 2013

If you picked up everything you know from one book, you're probably what people call a poseur.

Now you are just being a straight-out dick.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 3:06 AM on May 15, 2013 [3 favorites]

Yes, ye gods, seriously? This is not even remotely cool.
posted by Wolof at 3:13 AM on May 15, 2013

Yeah… God knows, it's no secret that CiS annoys the everlivin' shit out of me, but his dicking you around is what you're choosing to get upset about?

Meanwhile a few threads back we had people literally straight-up calling out specific members for being "fucking assholes" - and clinically dissecting and enumerating the reasons why every right-thinking person knew they were fucking arseholes - with not much more than a peep…
posted by Pinback at 3:26 AM on May 15, 2013 [2 favorites]

I'm a rock and roll soldier in the war against the jive

That's no excuse for taking hot shits right at the beginning of every electronic-music thread posted after 9:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 3:59 AM on May 15, 2013 [1 favorite]

Ye gods, mods, put a bullet in the head of this thread already. The horse has not merely been beaten, it has been pulverised beyond recognition.

Thread tartare?
posted by running order squabble fest at 4:01 AM on May 15, 2013

You guys in North America know that 9 pm EST is 11am CiS's time, right?
posted by gingerest at 4:05 AM on May 15, 2013 [2 favorites]

I know that, but his behavior would be obnoxious at any time.

Anyway, the thread is not about hipsters or CiS or whatever the hell else but about people refusing to RTFA before commenting.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 4:24 AM on May 15, 2013

Bunny Ultramod, that's an interesting take on what a hipster is and not at all the picture I have in my mind of what most would consider to be a hipster. It almost sounds like you're saying that hipsters are really socially adept nerds with fashion sense. That's a real simplification, I know, but that was the impression I got from what you wrote. I've always thought that people use the word hipster to describe someone much much shallower and more artificial where the description you gave was of someone with a great deal of intellectual depth.
posted by dg at 4:39 AM on May 15, 2013 [2 favorites]

The thread is about kneejerk hobbyhorsing. CiS is displaying exactly what the problem is, so thanks for that, CiS.
posted by shakespeherian at 4:41 AM on May 15, 2013 [2 favorites]

If you picked up everything you know from one book, you're probably what people call a poseur.

Fortunately, as it happens, I did not.

It almost sounds like you're saying that hipsters are really socially adept nerds with fashion sense.

I have met many hipsters who this would describe exactly.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 5:33 AM on May 15, 2013 [2 favorites]

Interesting. Would you classify, say, your old-school record-store enthusiast as a hipster?

Well....again, people collected old-school records before the internet existed. I'd be happy to show you my ridiculous vinyl rarities in their precious plastic sleeves, all bought at used record stores before 1987 after passionate searches involving expeditions requiring the conquering of multiple trains, the deciphering of scribbled addresses, and the negotiation of odd hours and idiosyncratic clerks. My father, similarly, has a collection of oddities he picked up when he was young.

As in, can you be a hipster and only be super passionate about one range of things? Or is a part of being a hipster transcending that and really getting your hands into a bunch of jars at once?

I don't know how to answer this because you seem to want to get a set of rules, and there is no one to make such rules. People are interested in things.

Bunny Ultramod, that's an interesting take on what a hipster is and not at all the picture I have in my mind of what most would consider to be a hipster.

It may be generational in that both Bunny Ultramod and I can remember that there was an earlier revival-incarnation of "hipster," and it's one I recognize and entirely agree with. In short, it was an interesting alternative to mainstream pop culture. In fact it has been strange to see the word so generalized as to essentially describe mainstream pop culture for youth today - but I see that as kind of a success story. If it's not a success story, then it's really just testament to the sheer, enormous, massive size of the milennial generation. where maybe 5% of people tagged generation X could be thought of as some sort of a hipster, that's still only 2.5 million people, or 5% of 16% of the total US population. It was somewhat hard to be seen in large enough numbers to cohere as any kind of 'scene' or have much cultural impact on the mainstream. The milennial generation is nearly double that size, so even if there had not been the kinds of cultural shifts that I think make hipsterish interests more acceptable, that would mean more like nearly 5 million people you could call hipsters, representing a larger cohort in any institution or city. Add that to the fact that information and creativity is now more valued and celebrated and less likely to be sneered at and suppressed, and this sort of interest-driven behavior is much more likely to gain cultural traction and attract even more participants.
posted by Miko at 5:44 AM on May 15, 2013 [5 favorites]

This is why we can't have nice callouts.
posted by zarq at 5:54 AM on May 15, 2013

If you picked up everything you know from one book, you're probably what people call a poseur.

So, I want to preface this by saying, I generally like you. I'd probably even want to hang out with you in a party. Just not a party where the topic of hipsters came up. At this point it seems like somewhere your little internal sensor that detects the difference between "fun banter between friends" and "following someone around and poking them with a verbal stick" is broken.

You've got to read the room a little. If the topic's the crappy way X is being blame for all social ills and X is a largely amorphous group, it's probably best not to come in with "I know, all X are Y. Right?" especially if you have to defend your mean spirited stereotypes with "it's o.k., I'm part of X." If we can't tell the difference between self deprecation and just deprecation that's a good sign there's a hitch between how you intend your humor and how it comes across.

There was this English admiral, who fell out of favor and so got stuck guarding what he considered a backwater colony over the winter. He was pissed about it, and so on the Royal Navy's dime, threw a giant party. This party was so over the top that it featured a bowl of punch big enough that it was served by a kid in a boat, floating IN THE PUNCH. You've now done enough pissing in the punch to have made sure nobody would drink that punch, and we're talking people who put ambergris in punch.
posted by Gygesringtone at 6:09 AM on May 15, 2013 [4 favorites]

It's a neighborhood where a lot of people move in and out constantly, instead of a neighborhood with a fixed, long-lasting community.
posted by Bunny Ultramod

Ok, the hipsters and what-nots come and fix up said "hood" all of a sudden property values go up as does rent etc. I see what you mean but if rents are kept the same what incentive is there to fix it up. How will the owners recoup the investment in a place that no one invested in before? (for the most)

I know this, if you wear any sort of long chain attached to a wallet or watch, not hip.
posted by clavdivs at 6:34 AM on May 15, 2013

"Beatniks, beatniks. Beatniks. Beatniksbeatniksbeatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniksbeatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks. Beatniks beatniksbeatniksbeatniksbeatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniksbeatniks beatniks. Beatniks, beatniks. Beatniks: beatniks. Beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniksm beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks. Beatniks (beatniks) beatniks."

--Some idiot in 1967
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:53 AM on May 15, 2013

Soundtrack to this thread.
posted by Aizkolari at 7:22 AM on May 15, 2013

BU, thanks for explaining that. I know that you don't speak for all of hipsterdom but that was the clearest explanation that I've ever read. It was free of the onion-layering of irony and sarcasm that have confused the hell out of me whenever I've tried to understand this.

I don't live in Portland or Brooklyn or wherever these people are supposedly endemic. When I look out my window, I don't see cool kids trying to be cool or hip kids trying to be hip. I see little kids playing on their bikes. I see guys about my age fussing over their yards trying to have the best lawn in all of suburbia. One of the many things that I love about Metafilter is that it puts me in contact with people who have diverse interests and ideas. I like my neighbors, but I can only spend so much time standing outside with them drinking beer and talking about basketball, football and whether grass should be cut at 2 1/2 or 2 3/4 inches. I try to spend as little time as possible doing that.

So I come here and I see hipster this and hipster that. But when I try to figure it out, I see explanations wrapped in x layers of irony. So I have no idea what is going on. I think the whole point might be to exclude people my age and older, as each generation has done to the preceding generation for time out of mind. That's fine and normal. That's what we did when it was our turn.

One day, I woke up to find that 40 had come and gone and any chance that I ever had to be young and hip and cool had gone away forever. I can try to be that cool older guy that understands most of what the youngsters are about or I can try to be that kinda sad older guy that tries to take part but I'll never be that young insider again. It's a sobering revelation.

Maybe I'll read that article now.
posted by double block and bleed at 7:28 AM on May 15, 2013 [1 favorite]

I don't know how to answer this because you seem to want to get a set of rules, and there is no one to make such rules. People are interested in things.

I was asking because I was curious about your perspective, not because I was looking for a concrete, definitive answer. For what it's worth, I don't think that your prototypical record store enthusiast would ping as a hipster, nowadays. Not unless they had something else going on. I've got a friend who's big into music, absorbs everything by everybody, and to top it off he's a graphic designer which strikes me as a kind of "hipster" job. Yet he's pretty much not a hipster.

The reason I asked that question is because while you're taking the word "hipster" and seeing that it was associated with something somewhat different years ago, I'm trying to look at how it's applied nowadays and wondering whether the sort of person I think of as "hipster" existed before the Internet enabled it. There's a quality of enthusiastic dabbling wherein somebody learns about something, spends two days learning EVERYTHING ABOUT IT, and then display outward cultural signs of loving that thing before picking up something new and repeating the cycle, and I'm wondering if that was a possible thing when the modes of learning about a new thing were books and magazines (which respectively require too much effort and yield too little depth).

For me hipsters are defined, in part, by the wildness or the breadth of their enthusiasms. A guy who's crazy about both Queen and The Mars Volta isn't, on his own, a hipster, no matter who crazy about both of them he is. Somebody who is wildly enthusiastic about both Zelda and Proust comes a bit closer. Somebody who loves obscure Brazilian rock bands from the 70s, writes a blog about proper beekeeping social etiquette (and knows enough about beekeeping to feel that such a blog might be necessary), has a thing for Beyblades hentai, and is an enthusiastic amateur water polo player... that kind of spread is more in keeping with contemporary "hipsterism" to my mind. If their fashion is equally eclectic then bam, you've got yourself a hipster.

And the reason I was wondering whether or not that particular cultural entity existed pre-Internet is that a key aspect to that kind of person is how essentially random their interests are. They can't be interests you find in a single magazine or culture, which is why liking both Jonathan Coulton and Portal is not super hipster-y. They have to be things you find through random-but-deep jabs into various cultures, where you figure out what you like by essentially probing the ether until something, anything sticks. And I think the age of the person also comes into play here, because I can see a 40- or even 30-year-old having picked up that water polo/beekeeping/Beyblades/Brazil rock combination organically, whereas if the person in question is 14 then it's pretty obvious they've been doing some culture-hopping (for lack of a better word).

This behavior is amplified, by the way, not just by access to huge information clusters, but by Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr, whose newsfeeds make it incredibly easy to see what five hundred people are finding interesting at any given moment until something clicks and you decide to make it part of your life. Especially when you consider that on Tumblr particularly, all five hundred of those people are posting or reblogging 50 different things a day from a wide variety of cultures. If you've never seen an overloaded Tumblr dashboard, you might be missing out on the single most potent representation of contemporary youth culture there is.
posted by Rory Marinich at 7:39 AM on May 15, 2013 [3 favorites]

> Somebody who is wildly enthusiastic about both Zelda and Proust comes a bit closer. Somebody who loves obscure Brazilian rock bands from the 70s, writes a blog about proper beekeeping social etiquette (and knows enough about beekeeping to feel that such a blog might be necessary)

That pastiche strikes me as straight up Internet more than anything else, and limited by age only in that a younger person with more free time will be able to explore more widely. I think you're right about tumblr, though, and I wonder if an ease with switching between the vernacular and shared references of sub-cultural genres without having to commit your identity to any of them (even sequentially - goth phase, metal phase, etc.) isn't much more of a youth-culture marker than anything under the "hipster" umbrella.
posted by postcommunism at 8:09 AM on May 15, 2013 [2 favorites]

Also: beyblades hentai?
posted by postcommunism at 8:13 AM on May 15, 2013

There's also higher levels of college and high school attendance, presumably accompanied by higher levels of non-professional college graduates and people influenced by graduates.
posted by tychotesla at 8:17 AM on May 15, 2013 [1 favorite]

I'm sure the ship has sailed on this, but there really is a perfectly good place to discuss hipsters in all their hipsterish glory in the existing, open post on the Blue that initiated this thread.

Anyway, wtf is up with the Hate Map thread?
posted by zarq at 8:17 AM on May 15, 2013

> yeah but it's a standard, obvious joke that the people who don't identify as hipsters - or explicitly don't identify as hipsters - are the ones who are hipsters. that's my point!

Your point is a standard, obvious joke? Perhaps you'd like a Henny Youngman collection to help you refine your philosophy of life.
posted by languagehat at 8:21 AM on May 15, 2013 [1 favorite]

"I'm sure the ship has sailed on this, but there really is a perfectly good place to discuss hipsters in all their hipsterish glory in the existing, open post on the Blue that initiated this thread. "

Except that talking about hipsters is a derail there too!

Anyway, wtf is up with the Hate Map thread?"

If I was the God King of MeFi, I'd be handing out temp bans left and right for people who clearly have read neither the fucking article there, nor the fucking comments preceding them.
posted by klangklangston at 8:24 AM on May 15, 2013 [3 favorites]

Anyway, wtf is up with the Hate Map thread?

Just a note that if you have a specific concern about this that you'd like a mod response from, dropping a note to the Contact Form is a better way to bring it to our attention than to drop it 370 comments in to a MeTa about another thread. Wasn't sure if that's what you were doing, but just a heads up to you or others.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:31 AM on May 15, 2013 [1 favorite]

ever since I first stumbled on The Catalog of Cool

Man, The Catalog of Cool, the RE\Search books, Neurotica, a volume called The List of Books, and High Weirdness By Mail were the Harvard Classics of my collegiate and post-collegiate years.
posted by octobersurprise at 8:34 AM on May 15, 2013 [4 favorites]

If you picked up everything you know from one book, you're probably what people call a poseur.


O la futilité de la vie moderne!
Je déteste les gens que la mode gouverne!

- from Delalande's juvenalia
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 8:40 AM on May 15, 2013 [1 favorite]

jessamyn: " Just a note that if you have a specific concern about this that you'd like a mod response from, dropping a note to the Contact Form is a better way to bring it to our attention than to drop it 370 comments in to a MeTa about another thread. Wasn't sure if that's what you were doing, but just a heads up to you or others."

I appreciate the heads up. It wasn't my intention to bring it to your attention, but thanks. As far as I can tell, there's nothing Team Mod can do there? The problematic comments don't really fit a flag category. And topically at least, this is actually the right metatalk thread to discuss the issue. Even though it seems to have been overtaken by a proxy discussion about hipsters.

In the Hate Map thread, people aren't reading source link or the thread before commenting. That's glaringly obvious. They're then asking the same question over and over. rtha (and now others) keep reposting the same paragraph from the posted link in response, which explains the methodology used to collect and analyze the map's data.

It feels trivial to have to ask y'all to keep an eye on the thread and delete annoying nuisance comments, because (let's face it,) they're so easily addressed by the rest of us. And it's not like a mod note in the thread will matter, because it's super-apparent that people aren't reading the thread before commenting.
posted by zarq at 8:49 AM on May 15, 2013 [1 favorite]

all of a sudden property values go up as does rent etc.

Only if banks are willing to lend in that neighborhood at competitive rates.

if rents are kept the same what incentive is there to fix it up.

You want to live there.

The reason I asked that question is because while you're taking the word "hipster" and seeing that it was associated with something somewhat different years ago, I'm trying to look at how it's applied nowadays and wondering whether the sort of person I think of as "hipster" existed before the Internet enabled it.

No, I'm not actually saying it was associated with something different years ago. I'm saying it's basically the same thing as years ago, only more of it. I'm pointing to the fact that very same phenomenona that's "pinging" you now as hipster are not new. I am dealing with how it's applied nowadays, just marveling at how widespread it's become.

somebody learns about something, spends two days learning EVERYTHING ABOUT IT, and then display outward cultural signs of loving that thing before picking up something new and repeating the cycle, and I'm wondering if that was a possible thing when the modes of learning about a new thing were books and magazines

Yes. Yes it was. People who love information will find information. Believe me, I'm thrilled that internet makes it so much easier to run down my little fascinations. But before there was an internet, people of course still did this. I had a journal in my backpack, and in my journal I listed things I was curious about and looked them up when I was at the library. I read all my parents' magazines and all their books from the 60s and 70s. I listened to late-night radio and subscribed to oddball newsletters and picked up zines. I went to conferences and workshops and events. I learned from other people a lot - subject matter experts, like the blues guy at the record store for instance. The internet just makes this easier. It didn't generate it. And we didn't really find books or magazines "too hard" or to have "too little depth," and people still don't. Frankly, if you want depth, books and long-form are what you want, not the kind of shallow pre-processed one-pager that the internet offers you. You can get breadth on the internet, and sometimes a topic you love will have been covered in depth by someone. At some point, though, that someone probably was using some books to learn what they learned about it. We used whatever resources we could.

that kind of spread is more in keeping with contemporary "hipsterism" to my mind.

Yeah, no, that's not new. As you say, a breadth of familiarity may be easier to develop because information today is easier to consume. But that ease is a difference of degree, not of kind. People who love information love information and will find it. You can't keep them from it. Curiousity powers that. Back in the Day, I got breadth from the Sunday Times, from Utne Reader, from Harper's and the New Yorker, and depth from subject-specific books and people. But having a wide wide range of interests and knowledge is something people have always had access to.

If you've never seen an overloaded Tumblr dashboard, you might be missing out on the single most potent representation of contemporary youth culture there is.

The fact that I'm doing my best to interpret the Old Days to you does not mean I am that out of touch with communications today. Please, give me some credit. I see how the handling of information is changing, I work in the cultural field, I write, I Tweet, I blog, I have Tumblrs, yadda yadda. All my perspective as an early digital immigrant at the dawn of the internet gives me is the understanding that most of what we designed the internet to do are things human beings were already doing, just better/faster/easier/with more pictures.
posted by Miko at 9:03 AM on May 15, 2013 [4 favorites]

I have an internet and I've still taken a bus across Chicago to get to the one branch of the public library that had the book I wanted on Esoteric Subject X.
posted by shakespeherian at 9:08 AM on May 15, 2013 [2 favorites]

That point about increasing levels of education is also a really good one for why it's spread.

Also, as far as the term - this was 1993. And it was a widely known term, or it wouldn't have been a laugh line.
posted by Miko at 9:09 AM on May 15, 2013

Crud. Juvenilia, not Delalande's youthful attempts at satire in the manner of the late 18th century.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 10:20 AM on May 15, 2013

It's like seeing a dude in a mohawk and a leather jacket with badges and a Clash shirt and saying you can't call him a punk, or wearing jeans made of safety pins and saying punk doesn't exist as a subculture.

Except, mohawks and jeans made of safety pins aren't what make punk a subculture. They're generally taken as signifiers of being part of a subculture, one with a certain language and shared ideologies, one that's engaged in a dialogue with broader society and across its sub-sub-cultures, but if the mohawked guy wearing the safety-pin-jeans doesn't have any strong opinions about consumerism or individuals and authority*, you probably wouldn't think he was all that engaged with punk culture. For him, it's just an outfit.

The problem people are having with your argument is that you're calling out a bunch of signifiers as being proof that a subculture exists, without actually talking about what the subculture is. Just because you can identify a certain fashion style or a few activities that are generally popular among the same people doesn't mean that it's a subculture.

*I know I'm being reductive here, and I apologize, but I'm really supposed to be in lab and not writing this shhhhhhhh.
posted by kagredon at 10:22 AM on May 15, 2013 [4 favorites]

People who love information love information and will find it.

This has been my experience, too. The converse is also true. People who don't love information will not find it, no matter how easily accessible it is. My sources of information were even more limited than the ones Miko mentions. The Encyclopedia Britannica of 1968, the books and magazines that we had at home in Pakistan, the limited selections available at the British Council and American Center libraries, and the books we could afford to buy. Or the ones we could borrow from friends. But we still had enthusiasms, that varied from month to month, or year to year. Perhaps the cycle is somewhat shortened now? Going down the rabbit hole was fun then and still is, now. I think there are more people doing it, though.
posted by bardophile at 10:39 AM on May 15, 2013 [1 favorite]

I hereby nominate klangklangston to be God King of MeFi.
posted by homunculus at 10:56 AM on May 15, 2013 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure he's profane enough. ;)
posted by zarq at 11:33 AM on May 15, 2013 [1 favorite]

Or you're a pompous windbag that hates fun. Take your pick

I don't know if i hate fun, but i do hate fun.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 4:35 PM on May 15, 2013

"Beatniks, beatniks. Beatniks. Beatniksbeatniksbeatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniksbeatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks. Beatniks beatniksbeatniksbeatniksbeatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniksbeatniks beatniks. Beatniks, beatniks. Beatniks: beatniks. Beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniksm beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks beatniks. Beatniks (beatniks) beatniks."

--Some idiot in 1967

Not just 1967. I hate that word, since 'beatnik' is how the reductionist pop culture media turned the real Beat movement, with its ground breaking poetry, into a Doby Gilles caricture.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 4:37 PM on May 15, 2013

its ok because all my friends are beatniks
posted by klangklangston at 5:38 PM on May 15, 2013 [4 favorites]

I hate that word

You hate everything.
posted by empath at 5:41 PM on May 15, 2013 [4 favorites]

your favorite lazy stereotype sucks
posted by kagredon at 5:42 PM on May 15, 2013

No knocking on Dobie Gillis while I'm around!
posted by Miko at 8:48 PM on May 15, 2013 [2 favorites]

What does a hipster say when he gets into a restaurant?

"Look at all these fucking hipsters."
posted by palbo at 9:38 PM on May 15, 2013 [2 favorites]

I'm not sure he's profane enough. ;)

We could appoint an advisor. Decani, maybe.
posted by homunculus at 9:40 PM on May 15, 2013 [2 favorites]

There's a tumbleblog called Look at this Hipster Fucking. I won't link to it, but a search will find it rather quickly, and you can guess at its contents.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 10:38 PM on May 15, 2013 [2 favorites]

Dig this cats and kitties, Maynard gets a transistor radio and it is crazy.
posted by octobersurprise at 6:13 AM on May 16, 2013 [1 favorite]

I say thunderdome for Klang and miko for mefi god of the month.

First subject:
Gregory Corso: Love and Methadrine-poet of bawdy heights.
posted by clavdivs at 8:12 AM on May 16, 2013 [1 favorite]

clavdivs: "I say thunderdome for Klang and miko for mefi god of the month."

Klang can be god, miko can be goddess. It all works out.

They're not gonna be able to actually smite anyone though, right? Because....
posted by zarq at 8:16 AM on May 16, 2013 [1 favorite]

I, ah, er, ah
apolgies to miko.

zarq, they both can dish a verbal smite quite well and without ban hammers.
BEATNIKS!
posted by clavdivs at 8:29 AM on May 16, 2013 [1 favorite]

In any battle, my money's on Miko.

She'd probably win by explaining why her opponent is being unreasonable in light of the specific history of his geopolitical upbringing
posted by shakespeherian at 8:49 AM on May 16, 2013 [2 favorites]

I actually try to curb my battle-istic tendencies but am not always successful. I really like digging into to substantive arguments on some topics, but there is a point at which an intellectual debate becomes personal that I just really dislike. I am mainly here for the fun of the interchange with good interchangers.
posted by Miko at 9:38 AM on May 16, 2013 [3 favorites]

Is that what you kids call it?
posted by shakespeherian at 11:03 AM on May 16, 2013

Is there any other kind?
posted by sweetkid at 11:03 AM on May 16, 2013

I don't really get the disdain towards "hipsters", particularly amongst nerds, who comprise most of my friends. I'm passionate about a number of topics that would be considered "nerdy" (computer architecture, the Japanese language, collectable toys) and probably an equal number that would be called "hipster" (obscure indie pop, fashion, vegan cooking). To me, these are all just things I like - it shouldn't matter whether it's a "nerd" thing or a "hipster" thing. I spend a lot of time in Portland and love the quirky and enthusiastic culture, which I don't find to be snobbish at all. My feeling is that (at least among the nerd crowd) it's the old feeling that nerds have got to be outsiders and disdain the "cool kids", regardless of whether said cool kids were ever mean to them. I remember my nerd friends in high school talking crap about some acquaintances from class, calling them "stupid preppies" because of how they dressed. Never mind that these girls were always very friendly and in the honors program, they were "preps" and the enemies of us nerds. Nowadays I think my friends would probably be bashing "hipsters" instead. I love the enthusiasm of nerd culture but the high school-esque social insecurity / "We're better than the cool kids because we don't care about shallow things like clothing" attitude is really off-putting.
posted by lirien at 11:11 AM on May 16, 2013 [3 favorites]

If you just have a random opinion about the word 'hipster', I think you were actually looking for the front page post linked from this one.
posted by jacalata at 12:15 PM on May 16, 2013 [1 favorite]

"Klang can be god, miko can be goddess. It all works out. "

I AM A JEALOUS GOD

ALSO BEYOND GENDER BINARIES

"I don't really get the disdain towards "hipsters", particularly amongst nerds, who comprise most of my friends."

does anyone read the posts down here?
posted by klangklangston at 2:22 PM on May 16, 2013 [1 favorite]

ZIPPITY BOP!
posted by homunculus at 2:53 PM on May 16, 2013 [2 favorites]

...yeah I guess this thread is pretty much dead, isn't it.

*sneaks away sheepishly*
posted by lirien at 2:59 PM on May 16, 2013

More that, again, the point of the first article was that talking about "hipsters" is a canard that is detrimental to discussion of the structural issues that cause the problems nominally associated with "hipsters," e.g. gentrification. And then this MeTa was about people not reading the fucking article/comments and leaping in with anecdotes about hipsters — the very thing decried in the article.

I'm sure you're a lovely person, it's just, like, man, another bit about the fucking hipster show?
posted by klangklangston at 4:04 PM on May 16, 2013 [2 favorites]

MY POST IS ABOUT GODDAMN BASEBALL NOT HITLER YOU CUT-RATE WAGS! READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE GRAAAAAAAAAAAAR!
posted by klangklangston at 7:13 PM on May 22, 2013 [3 favorites]

I flagged your comment as a derail.

EDIT: And also the other comments.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:19 PM on May 22, 2013

My favorite is super-nerdy grognards getting annoyed at Torchbearer, a new D&D style RPG by the guy behind Burning Wheel and Mouse Guard. Apparently it's going to appeal to 'hipsters'.

Nerdrage at hipsters is pretty funny, since it usually means "somebody who shares my interests, but is attractive and dresses well". I admit I've joined into it.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 7:19 PM on May 22, 2013

It's an epidemic.

Clearly, people refusing to RTFA and making comments based on an imagined FA, or reacting to other people's interpretations of TFA without R-ing TFA themselves, is an honored tradition in MetaFilter.

And who are we to oppose tradtion?
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:36 AM on May 23, 2013

Oh hey look there's a common denominator here
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 7:38 AM on May 23, 2013 [1 favorite]

Rustic Etruscan: "Oh hey look there's a common denominator here"

Yes, and it's annoying as fuck.
posted by zarq at 7:55 AM on May 23, 2013 [2 favorites]

He did it quite diplomatically, too.
posted by zarq at 8:11 AM on May 23, 2013

Apropos of... something... I'm glad this thread eventually got over arguing whether you are ever allowed to think about art.
posted by shakespeherian at 8:12 AM on May 23, 2013 [1 favorite]

He did it quite diplomatically, too.

I'd figure from his name that he'd be pretty patient.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 8:44 AM on May 23, 2013 [1 favorite]

Apropos of... something... I'm glad this thread eventually got over arguing whether you are ever allowed to think about art.

Funny how it calmed down around the time Australians get to sleep.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 8:54 AM on May 23, 2013 [2 favorites]

shakespeherian: "Apropos of... something... I'm glad this thread eventually got over arguing whether you are ever allowed to think about art."

I feel bad for tmotat. He creates these awesome FPPs yet CiS seems intent on repeatedly derailing them.
posted by zarq at 10:36 AM on May 23, 2013

I'm just in it for the favorites.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:42 AM on May 23, 2013 [5 favorites]

I think it's more that CiS happens to be awake at the same time as when tmotat makes posts. If CiS lived in New York, he'd be derailing the morning's (EST) posts instead.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 10:48 AM on May 23, 2013

The important thing is that we all continue to follow CiS's derails instead of ignoring them.

Right?
posted by shakespeherian at 10:57 AM on May 23, 2013

Rustic Etruscan: "I think it's more that CiS happens to be awake at the same time as when tmotat makes posts."

Maybe? I often post around the same time as tmotat and don't have the same problem. Could be the superior quality of his posts compared to mine though.
posted by zarq at 11:03 AM on May 23, 2013

Could be the superior quality of his posts compared to mine though.

I mean, possibly, but it's not like CiS is reading them either way
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 11:04 AM on May 23, 2013 [3 favorites]

True.
posted by zarq at 11:11 AM on May 23, 2013

zarq: hardly. Also, check your MeMail.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:12 AM on May 23, 2013

Funny how it calmed down around the time Australians get to sleep.

This initially made me want to spring vociferously to the defence of my country.

But then I read all the comments and put it in context, and I cannot really argue the point (and, in fact, have no desire to since I agree with it).

Strange, how that works.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 10:04 PM on May 23, 2013 [1 favorite]

Now I have an image of a dude bent over his desk, shaking his fist at the lower-right corner of the map hanging on his wall: AUSTRALIANS - PHILISTINES TO THE LAST ONE OF EM
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 5:34 AM on May 24, 2013

I will look into importing a jawbone of an ass to beat us with. Although, looking at our political scene, perhaps it can be locally sourced.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 8:42 PM on May 24, 2013

This discussion needs this.
posted by HuronBob at 3:00 AM on June 3, 2013 [1 favorite]

Did Australia run out of columbite–tantalite to mine?
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 8:55 AM on June 4, 2013

Australians are dwarves. They like mining and drinking.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 4:49 PM on June 4, 2013