I’ve been laughing at people who insist they are expressing their individuality, by looking exactly like every other hipster doofus on the block, for decades.

The first dope who gaged his earlobes, grew a wooly beard, wore horn rimmed glasses and a wool cap was, at least, an individualist. The hundreds of thousands that followed were unoriginal, unimaginative sheeple who are walking monuments to banality. They make it easier to understand why at this moment socialism is “a thing.” Socialism is the skinny jeans of politics.

The guy in the following clip, from Impractical Jokers, really cracked me up. I give him points for being painfully self-aware of his pathetic conformity.

The following is a hilarious story about conformists believing they are individualists.

The Register-

Normally a headline like “The hipster effect: Why anti-conformists always end up looking the same” would elicit much rolling of eyes here at Vulture Towers.

However, it becomes more intriguing when one learns that the hypothesis described in the article was tested by a series of hilarious post-publication events that then further bolstered the paper’s findings.

At the end of February, MIT Technology Review emitted a pithy rundown of a 34-page research paper from maths-modelling boffins at Brandeis University in the US; the paper essentially posited that in a bid to make that all-important “countercultural statement”, hipsters can end up looking alike. For groovy models of how random acts by hipsters “undergo a phase transition into a synchronized state” – along with some knotty network equations – see here [PDF].

Accompanying the article was an edited stock image of a generic millennial chap in plaid shirt and standard-issue beanie, or “trendy winter attire”, as Getty put it.

The MIT journal’s editor-in-chief, Gideon Lichfield, took to Twitter to tell a “cautionary tale” about what followed the article going live:

“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.)”

more

What’s the money shot of this story?

It turns out the guy who was furious that his picture was used wasn’t the guy in the picture.

It was a look-alike “individualist” hipster doofus !

lol

ht/ Uncle Al