Hipsters all look alike? Snap, snap.

A Brandeis mathematician recently completed some dense, equation-filled analysis that led to the conclusion that:

…in a bid to make that all-important "countercultural statement", hipsters can end up looking alike. (Source: The Register, by way of my brother-in-law Rick. So a doff of the beanie to Rick.)

As someone who lives in a hipster-rich area – I mean, we’re no Brooklyn, but Boston/Cambridge/Somerville does have its share of hipsters – I am here to tell you that those Brandeis researchers could have saved themselves the time and trouble of doing all that work (and writing it up in a 34 page paper, yet) and just shown a few denizens of hipster-ville a couple of lineups and ask if they could distinguish one hipster from the other.

A summary of the research was published in The MIT Review, along with an image of, well, a generic hipster.

Shortly after their article appeared, The Review heard from an aggrieved reader:

"We promptly got a furious email from a man who said he was the guy in the photo that ran with the story. He accused us of slandering him, presumably by implying he was a hipster, and of using the pic without his permission. (He wasn't too complimentary about the story, either.)"

I don’t know if calling someone a hipster counts as slander, exactly. It’s not like calling some guy an incel or a Bernie bro. But still, the young man felt that he and his image – a stock photo from Getty of a good looking guy in a flannel shirt and knit cap (the sort of knit cap that is of late known as a beanie) had been used and abused.

By the way, back in the day, a knit cap was called a watch cap. A knit cap with a pom-pom was called a pom-pom hat. And a beanie was something worn by a college freshman who might have been a classmate of Dobie Gillis, or by Catholic school girls.

But now watch caps, knit caps, and pom-pom hats all seem to be called beanie. As a grammar school parochial school beanie wearer, I’m not buying it.

(I’m still having a picture issue with my blog, but in the post below, I’ve included a couple of beanie beanies, along with the generic hipster pic that appeared in The Review.)

But. I. Digress.

After The Review received the complaint from the don’t-call-me-a-hipster guy, editor Giden Lichfield wanted to make sure that they’d used the image properly. So his folks reviewed the image license, and then contacted Getty to make sure that the model had officially released use of his image:

The stock photo giant checked the model release and lo! The guy in the image wasn't even the same dude who was complaining. "He'd misidentified himself," Lichfield said.

Sure, sometimes in a crowd scene, or fuzzy snapshot, or photo from ancient history, you may think that you’re looking at a picture of yourself. Or not. But seriously. How often have you looked at what is a really clear current picture and not recognized yourself. Talk about face blind.

"All of which just proves the story we ran: hipsters look so much alike that they can’t even tell themselves apart from each other."

Hah! I say, hah, hah! (That, or I’m snapping my fingers, Beatnik hipster style. Snap, snap.)

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Hiawatha Bray of The Boston Globe had an interesting article on this subject in which he gets into the neural network underpinnings of the research. If you’re interested in more than just making fun of hipsters, it’s worth a read.