A man threatening to sue MIT Tech Review for using his photo to illustrate an article on how hipsters come to look alike has ended up proving the writer’s point better than any study ever could – the photo wasn’t of him at all.

Apparently offended at being called a hipster – as most hipsters are – the reader fired off an angry letter to the magazine, denouncing the use of his image to illustrate the “tired cultural trope” and demanding satisfaction.

“Your lack of basic journalistic ethics in both the manner in which you ‘reported’ this uncredited nonsense, and the slanderous, unnecessary use of my picture without permission demands a response, and I am, of course, pursuing legal action.”

Now, as far as I know, calling someone a hipster isn’t slander, no matter how much they may hate it. Still, we would never use a picture without the proper license or model release. So we checked the license. https://t.co/uFPXXNlEid — Gideon Lichfield (@glichfield) March 6, 2019

The article’s authors dutifully contacted the stock photo agency where they’d found the image – which was sold as a “handsome young man in trendy winter attire against a wooden background,” not even a hipster – only to learn the model in the photo was someone else entirely. “We don’t think this is you,” they told the self-conscious hipster-phobe.

“Wow, I stand corrected, I guess” the reader wrote back, insisting friends and family had agreed the photo was of him.

“No apology, but I’m happy that it’s resolved,” MIT Tech Review editor-in-chief Gideon Lichfield told CBC Radio.

In other words, the guy who'd threatened to sue us for misusing his image wasn't the one in the photo. He'd misidentified himself.All of which just proves the story we ran: Hipsters look so much alike that they can’t even tell themselves apart from each other. /ENDS — Gideon Lichfield (@glichfield) March 6, 2019

The study used a mathematical model to predict the convergence of appearances, hypothesizing that “the hipster population always undergoes a kind of phase transition in which members become synchronized with each other in opposing the mainstream.”

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