Sociological Images links to a video about the differences between nerds and the types of hipsters that co-opt nerdom. The topic has been visited a million times, but I think this is one of the better presentations. The gist of the argument is that hipsters “cherry pick the things they think are neat” whereas nerds are more earnest and effusive in their behaviors and in the ways they choose to spend their leisure time. Nerdom is an end; hipsterdom is a means.
What we have right now, in Brooklyn, the Bay Area, Portland, East Los Angeles – neighborhoods where bourgeois young people work at magazines, movie studios, TV shows, Web sites and advertising, so that cultural trends work like weather at sea, offering the newcomers a chance to prove themselves, upending the complacent – is a similar choice on the part of the privileged to identify with the outsider. The outsider in this case is the nerd, because nerds are people incapable of, or at least averse to, riding cultural trends. When your greatest fear is that you will become a loser because your intuition will fail to keep up with tastes, you embrace the nerd like a harmless teddy bear who’s the one creature in the whole wide world who would never to anything to hurt you.
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For being a fake nerd, like being a white Negro [Nugent was discussing hipsterism in the context of Norman Mailer's "The White Negro"], can be a way of putting even more distance between yourself and the object of your imitation than there was before. In the imagination of the fake nerd, the nerd is attractive because he is unaffected, untrendy to the point of primitivism, a kind of inert noble savage. Going through life making the exertion of affecting noble savagery make you feel even less a noble savage than you did before. Being a fake nerd leaves you less of a nerd.
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You hear fake nerd conversation. It follows a model. You bring up an “obsession” or “total fascination” with a purportedly unfashionable subject…This is a way of whipping out cultural capital, but not in the same way as leaving guests in the living room to retrieve a hollow-body guitar or a first edition of To the Lighthouse…It’s the cultural capital of quirk.
Unlike the Negro of the ghetto, and unlike nerds who were destined to be nerds because their parents were nerds or because they were frail or because they have high IQ and low sociability, hipsters choose to slum it. To affect a persona or an identity that the very same people they are emulating might not actually choose for themselves if given the option.
And that’s why hipsters are derided. They skim the easy stuff of the top of whatever genre or group they want to emulate at the moment without putting in the hard work of being what they are emulating.
Nerds have sex rarely or not at all, or with a single nerd partner. Hipsters have sex like crazy with a panoply of other people (not all of them other hipsters).
This is why it’s more fun to be a hipster than a nerd. Being a hipster means you have high sociability, being a nerd means you don’t. So maybe hipsters are just social nerds.
Geeks are social, can like non-geeks and prefer a couple of subjects.
Nerds are asocial, prefer other nerds and a huge variety of subjects.
Hipsters are mainstream, ironic and are all about style, not substance, about pretending.
So hipsters are not social nerds, that’s geeks. Hipsters are different from both nerds and geeks.
Nerds can get some hipster mojo if they grow up in oases with a critical mass of highly educated people. If they bloom in Fratlandia then they get crushed and quickly develop an inferiority complex which trains them for a life of submission and Dilbertdom.
“And that’s why hipsters are derided. They skim the easy stuff of the top of whatever genre or group they want to emulate at the moment without putting in the hard work of being what they are emulating.”
Exactamundo. This might also fall into the irony bit, where they can claim knowledge and liking it but remain detached from it.
This is another example of hispters and SWPLs trying something on and wearing it for a short while for the status bump. They can sample whatever they choose for the moment, play the ‘expert’ on something and then discard it when it is passe.
I went on a date with a hipster girl in my nieghborhood. We ended up with a bar with a bunch of hipsters. There was a hipster with his earloops stretched way down like to his neck.
Me: Why does he do something like that.
Her: Just because its something to do.
Hipsters are usually boring trust funders and slackers trying to wittle away their lives. Nerds are trying specific things for a reason. They may have different levels of success, but they are trying.
Nerds are generally come from lower-middle class homes and don’t understand the value of following upper middle class norms. They tend to be miserly and worried about things. Hipsters are just assholes who like to make fun of people.
Hipsters are intellectuals, and so are nerds. Hipsters are intellectuals with a strong aesthetic, literary, and artistic streak, whereas nerds are intellectuals with an interest in things that have no aesthetic or cultural dimension, like computers, or mathematics. Hipsters will try to be stylish but will be sure to include elements in their style that convey intellectuality, like glasses, whereas nerds simply don’t care about style as they don’t care about anything aesthetic.
High class culture anywhere will always seek to convey intellectuality, and thus some elements of what may seem to be nerd fashion will show up, but it has nothing to do with trying to imitate or distance oneself or anything from nerds – it has to do with a respect for intelligence and a desire to convey this through one’s physical appearance while still remaining stylish.
It is amusing to see all sorts of convoluted status based explanations people who are not part of the intellectual class and who just can’t grasp that intellectuals generally look down on the stupid and wish to have a style that actually emphasizes their smarts, not hide it. For the unintellectual, no one could possibly want to emphasize or show respect for intelligence, so it’s gotta be about some kind of social status thing like distancing oneself from nerds in an ironic way or whatever.
Closeted nerds certainly have a fascination/envy regarding hipsters – how can they act/dress the way they do yet feel so safe and self-assured? Such close cousins, such subtle differences, such different outcomes. And yes, a lot of it springs from class background.
Game generally counsels nerds to not attempt hipsterdom and launch a completely different path, a more “Ed Hardy” type route which is probably for the best…a clean break, improvement in T levels, and less whiny questions about subtle nerd/hipster differences.
Except when you talk to people that are really good at design (that do it professionally) they aren’t hipster and aren’t into hipster fashion. So its not so much aesthetics as the lazy mans aesthetic. Hipsters don’t make anything new. They just throw togethor the old.
To me it’s fairly simple: hipsters are all about image. Piercings, tattoos, clothes, certain types of music, books, foods…there’s a whole range there. So the hipster will listen to music and read books and do other things that signal hipster, but they have a self-awareness about this, so they will throw in something geeky or prole to throw you off the scent. “Yeah I listen to Band of Horses and Arcade Fire but I love to watch Sesame Street and drink PBR out of a can!” Nerds or true geeks don’t care about image- they like what they like and that’s that. Hipsters are trying to play the game of being cool without trying to be cool, so they throw in a few nerd or blue collar things to make it appear like their image is their own and not contrived. That’s why they are so unlikeable: everything is contrived but when you listen to them talk they are trying to con you into believing that they are different, that they don’t care what other people think. Hence the rage towards them.
The nerd sub-culture has become more accessible to non-nerds over time. Back in the 70s, it based itself far more around boring old books (in sf – stuff like Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein) which take time to read and try most non-nerds patience. Sf movies were all ghastly 50s/60s and early 70s trash no normal person could take seriously or sit through. Then came Star Wars and the re-invention of Star Trek as a special effects laden movie series (followed by its Patrick Stewart television incarnation which gained a mass audience unlike its 60s predecessor). Anime also came along during the 80s. All this new material was easier to pick up than the old nerd sources. It is far more visual and packaged in a more easily digested form (just turn on the tv, slot the video tape or dvd or download and watch it). To some extent the nerds also sold out to Star Wars – a popular movie series aimed at non-nerds which they none the less championed probably because it earned them social credit (finally they could be appreciated by non-nerds for knowing a ton of useless trivia about a film with ray guns in it because for once the non-nerds loved it too). Hipsters find this pop cultural trash lying around in vast quantities and re-purpose it like Dadaists with found objects or ghetto artists reworking land fill rubbish into religious icons. Underground cartoonists of the 70s would take Disney characters and do nasty stuff with them in a subversive way too. Sf and fantasy films, tv shows, comics & video games tend to be highly iconic and visually stylized and therefore recognizable. One can appropriate the imagery and people will pick up on it readily and understand what you are ironically quoting. This has happened at the same time as the broader culture & economy has embraced corporate logos & branding on just about everything. So hipsters can take these kinds of symbols and wear them and create an instant style.
@asdf, people into design are not intellectual. Hipster = intellectual+interest in aesethetics. Nothing to do with being lazy – if anything hipsters are overly fashion conscious – it’s about being stylish in an intellectual way, and often with an intellectualism that reflects peculiarly modern trends like irony, etc. Non-intellectuals don’t get this.
The funniest thing to me is how everyone becomes enraged at hipsters in America. A big part of that is the anti-intellectualism of American life that is outraged that anyone can actually want – want! – to emphasize that they are intelligent and artistic, and the other part of that is that hipsters are elitist and strive to distinguish themselves, even if in an often misguided, even silly, way, and America is militantly egalitarian.
Egalitarianism + anti-intellectualism is the American religion, and hipsters egregiously violate both – how dare they! How dare anyone not dress in sweat pants and flip flops and try to actually be stylish! How dare anyone care about art and intellectual things and style – don’t they know they are pretentious fags? And they seem to not mind being pretentious fags! The ultimate insult!
Lots of things I don’t like about hipsters, but at least they represent an elitist ideal, which means they are a hopeful sign in the American cultural darkness. No wonder why so many are enraged by them.
eightyeight, people aren’t mad at hipsters because they try to be stylish. Nothing wrong with wanting to dress nice, look sharp, read intellectual books or appreciate art, etc. Hipsters are phony and pretentious, that’s why people hate them. Same with anyone who does something for attention, but then acts like they aren’t looking for attention and are annoyed for getting stared at.
There is a whole set of arguments that hipsters are a class of young, ambitious whites of limited resources, adapted to survive in an urban environment under the pressure of a white-suppression state. They are a close cousin to SWPL; in fact hipsters become SWPLs when they age a bit, marry and start having children, but their primarily objective of urban camouflage remains the same.
Hipsters overlap with the arts scene, which overlaps with gays, who are advance scouts of gentrification, ie urban reclamation campaigns.
Sorry but today’s nerds are not nerds. Just cause someone likes star wars and comic book hero movies does not constitute a nerd. I say it makes them more of a loser(to varying degrees), but not nerds.
Hipsters overlap with the arts scene, which overlaps with gays, who are advance scouts of gentrification, ie urban reclamation campaigns.
Indeed! For which I love, love, love hipsters and SWPLs. They have made vast swaths of New York not only inhabitable again (gentrification = de-ghettofication), but fun and interesting. Yes, it’s easy to mock artisanal chocolate shops or what have you, but hey, that chocolate is damn good. And a year ago it was either an empty storefront or a check cashing store.
The one thing you know for sure about hipsters/SWPLs is that they aren’t going to mug you, assault you or steal your car. The people they are displacing happily do all those things.
I always assumed that hipster guys wear tight pants because they have small organs and don’t experience the discomfort the rest of us would feel. Me, the only thing I have ever been able to wear comfortably is a kilt.
personally i hate hipsters because they represent a reaction against jewish liberal multicultural america, all of their interests and asthetics are a yearning for America as it used to be, yet they are fanatically liberal and in favor of multiculturalism.
“Lots of things I don’t like about hipsters, but at least they represent an elitist ideal, which means they are a hopeful sign in the American cultural darkness. No wonder why so many are enraged by them.”
Elitist? High culture? Bwaaahaaahaaa! You mean like how the characters in Downton Abbey wore mismatched, random clothes? Oh, wait…
eightyeight, you have some awfully demotic notions about what constitutes “high culture”. Even J. D. Salinger and Miles Daves aren’t exactly Jean Racine and Gustav Mahler, but tell us more about how Lena Dunham is the next Kieslowski, or how scene hair is a semiotic gloss on the Age of Sensibility.
One can be a geek or nerd anywhere in the U.S. The internet makes it easy. However, one can only be a hipster in just a few geographic locations. Does anyone really believe that there are any hipsters in Omaha Nebraska. No one around them would get the joke and there would be no status in it. Being a hipsters has a geographic component that being a baseball geek or computer nerd does not.
“Does anyone really believe that there are any hipsters in Omaha, Nebraska.”
I bet, within Omaha, there IS a hipster enclave. You just have to be a local to notice the distinction —— a distinction that is probably quite ridiculous to outsiders.
- “tell us more about how Lena Dunham is the next Kieslowski”
Plus-one for alt-Right’s first ever reference to K. Kieslowski. When I finally start my blog I will do a post about his work.
- “Does anyone really believe that there are any hipsters in Omaha, Nebraska.”
A couple of years ago I visited Bristol, TN, a town on the western edge of the Appalachians, known as the birthplace of Country music and home to a racing speedway. In the historic downtown amidst ancient Art Deco buildings and boarded-up storefronts, there was a coffeeshop with orange couches and quirky artwork on walks. My lady and I stopped in there and enjoyed some outstanding lattes. There were hipsters at various chairs reading and a small group was talking about their band.
- “i hate hipsters because they represent a reaction against jewish liberal multicultural america, all of their interests and asthetics are a yearning for America as it used to be, yet they are fanatically liberal and in favor of multiculturalism.”
My larger theory of SWPLs and the like as a complicated white survival subculture is a work in progress but it’s hitting on some truths. About hipsters liking multiculturalism: there is also this element, which springs from all European men: a drive for discovery of new lands and the immersion and overcoming of the wild and the mysterious. We are forever a searching and striving race.
To the hipster, the black ghetto is the wild habitat and the black man is the dangerous but exciting his undisciplined masculine energy (aka ‘vibrant’) wildlife. The hunter and the explorer struggles again the environment he’s exploring and colonizing — he certainly doesn’t hate it. Just like for an explorer it makes no sense to hate the bush or the charging rhino. Rather, you respect its dangers, and you can’t get enough of it.
The are now hipsters making beacheads in Detroit. In Baltimore, I have acquaintances who overlap with my social circle, and are tight-knit group of SWPL networkers who concentrate on beautifyng their reclaimed streets and home/charter-schooling their young children. They’re NPR-addled, liberal pod people when it comes to politics, at least when sober, LOL (intelligent otherwise though with hints of racism when drunk) whose only diversity — besides raving about some Latin Festival that just happened — is a gay black artist on the periphery of their social circle, and a couple of non-white wives. I grudgingly respect the hipsters and his older cousin the SWPL.
The place in Bristol that you mentioned is out of business. I guess there were not enough Hipsters who keep the place going. However, at least you can get non-ironic donuts in Bristol. Something that is probably a lot harder to do in Brooklyn.
It’s important to keep in mind that many annoying but implicitly white things such as hipsters are made of the better elements of our nature. Hipsters are smart, have good taste, and a resilience to hostile culture. Hipsters chicks are slim and cute.
Certainly anything can be taken too far or go off-balance with other important values. Too much love for the exotic make you grotesque, for example.
“Plus-one for alt-Right’s first ever reference to K. Kieslowski”
Hey, I recall writing about the ‘color trilogy’ when it came out for some unknown weekly; can’t see I knew what the hell my adolescent brain was watching —— but that didn’t stop me from pretending and writing something pretentious! Lol!
WQow… I thought those trilogy films were earlier; i was in college then —– I do recall writing about “Double Life of Veronique” a few years earlier; I’m sure I didn’t know what I was talking about. (Kieslowski’s rep among middle-brow, mid-American college kids was: “I don’t know WTF he’s getting at, but he hires gorgeous babes for his flicks!”)
“About hipsters liking multiculturalism: there is also this element, which springs from all European men: a drive for discovery of new lands and the immersion and overcoming of the wild and the mysterious. We are forever a searching and striving race.
To the hipster, the black ghetto is the wild habitat and the black man is the dangerous but exciting his undisciplined masculine energy (aka ‘vibrant’) wildlife. The hunter and the explorer struggles again the environment he’s exploring and colonizing — he certainly doesn’t hate it. Just like for an explorer it makes no sense to hate the bush or the charging rhino. Rather, you respect its dangers, and you can’t get enough of i”
Ding, ding, ding, ding ding!
You just expalined the miscgenated roots of America —– the pioneering spirit personified; the fruits of which now manifest in everything from SWPL-ism to Wiggerism.
When white sees black, he sees his past; the past produces conflict: he wants to run from it and progress from it —— but the past is also comfort. The past is also home.
It’s the sentimental and comforting end of the crucible featuring technology, progress and scientific rationality on the other end.
That reality has been documented, reified and elaborated upon by writers from D.H. Lawrence to Norman Mailer.
Without looking it up, the Double Life of Veronique came out in the very early 90s, and Three Colors right after that. Kieslowski, in partnership with writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz and composer Zbigniew Preisner also did the Decalogue in 88.
I have more to say about them but for now I’ll just day that they represent the communist-era Eastern European intellectual’s hope that a humanism-tempered Christian spirituality will replace Communism in their countries and spread to Western Europe. This movies reflect that hope.
Instead, Eastern Europe’s post-89 descent into Western materialism and immorality came as a shock to many such men, most notably to Pope JPII.
I actually know the guy in the video below reasonably well, and I can say without a doubt, that he is not an intellectual of any sort. He is, as one commenter above stated, a dilettante. He’s one of the most vapid people I’ve ever met; there’s just no substance there whatsoever.
Nerds have sex rarely or not at all, or with a single nerd partner. Hipsters have sex like crazy with a panoply of other people (not all of them other hipsters).
This is why it’s more fun to be a hipster than a nerd. Being a hipster means you have high sociability, being a nerd means you don’t. So maybe hipsters are just social nerds.
Geeks vs. Nerds vs. Hipsters
Geeks are social, can like non-geeks and prefer a couple of subjects.
Nerds are asocial, prefer other nerds and a huge variety of subjects.
Hipsters are mainstream, ironic and are all about style, not substance, about pretending.
So hipsters are not social nerds, that’s geeks. Hipsters are different from both nerds and geeks.
Jocks and hipsters are more interconnected to each other, whereas nerds and geeks are more interconnected to one another.
Goths are more like a sad version of hipsters.
Nerds can get some hipster mojo if they grow up in oases with a critical mass of highly educated people. If they bloom in Fratlandia then they get crushed and quickly develop an inferiority complex which trains them for a life of submission and Dilbertdom.
“And that’s why hipsters are derided. They skim the easy stuff of the top of whatever genre or group they want to emulate at the moment without putting in the hard work of being what they are emulating.”
Exactamundo. This might also fall into the irony bit, where they can claim knowledge and liking it but remain detached from it.
This is another example of hispters and SWPLs trying something on and wearing it for a short while for the status bump. They can sample whatever they choose for the moment, play the ‘expert’ on something and then discard it when it is passe.
I went on a date with a hipster girl in my nieghborhood. We ended up with a bar with a bunch of hipsters. There was a hipster with his earloops stretched way down like to his neck.
Me: Why does he do something like that.
Her: Just because its something to do.
Hipsters are usually boring trust funders and slackers trying to wittle away their lives. Nerds are trying specific things for a reason. They may have different levels of success, but they are trying.
Nerds are generally come from lower-middle class homes and don’t understand the value of following upper middle class norms. They tend to be miserly and worried about things. Hipsters are just assholes who like to make fun of people.
I don’t see it this way at all.
Hipsters are intellectuals, and so are nerds. Hipsters are intellectuals with a strong aesthetic, literary, and artistic streak, whereas nerds are intellectuals with an interest in things that have no aesthetic or cultural dimension, like computers, or mathematics. Hipsters will try to be stylish but will be sure to include elements in their style that convey intellectuality, like glasses, whereas nerds simply don’t care about style as they don’t care about anything aesthetic.
High class culture anywhere will always seek to convey intellectuality, and thus some elements of what may seem to be nerd fashion will show up, but it has nothing to do with trying to imitate or distance oneself or anything from nerds – it has to do with a respect for intelligence and a desire to convey this through one’s physical appearance while still remaining stylish.
It is amusing to see all sorts of convoluted status based explanations people who are not part of the intellectual class and who just can’t grasp that intellectuals generally look down on the stupid and wish to have a style that actually emphasizes their smarts, not hide it. For the unintellectual, no one could possibly want to emphasize or show respect for intelligence, so it’s gotta be about some kind of social status thing like distancing oneself from nerds in an ironic way or whatever.
LOL.
Here are a couple of O& A clips on hipsters. The little pervert Jim Norton hits the mark.
Opie & Anthony: Hipsters
Opie & Anthony – Ant’s Hipster Rant
Closeted nerds certainly have a fascination/envy regarding hipsters – how can they act/dress the way they do yet feel so safe and self-assured? Such close cousins, such subtle differences, such different outcomes. And yes, a lot of it springs from class background.
Game generally counsels nerds to not attempt hipsterdom and launch a completely different path, a more “Ed Hardy” type route which is probably for the best…a clean break, improvement in T levels, and less whiny questions about subtle nerd/hipster differences.
eightyeight,
Except when you talk to people that are really good at design (that do it professionally) they aren’t hipster and aren’t into hipster fashion. So its not so much aesthetics as the lazy mans aesthetic. Hipsters don’t make anything new. They just throw togethor the old.
To me it’s fairly simple: hipsters are all about image. Piercings, tattoos, clothes, certain types of music, books, foods…there’s a whole range there. So the hipster will listen to music and read books and do other things that signal hipster, but they have a self-awareness about this, so they will throw in something geeky or prole to throw you off the scent. “Yeah I listen to Band of Horses and Arcade Fire but I love to watch Sesame Street and drink PBR out of a can!” Nerds or true geeks don’t care about image- they like what they like and that’s that. Hipsters are trying to play the game of being cool without trying to be cool, so they throw in a few nerd or blue collar things to make it appear like their image is their own and not contrived. That’s why they are so unlikeable: everything is contrived but when you listen to them talk they are trying to con you into believing that they are different, that they don’t care what other people think. Hence the rage towards them.
The nerd sub-culture has become more accessible to non-nerds over time. Back in the 70s, it based itself far more around boring old books (in sf – stuff like Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein) which take time to read and try most non-nerds patience. Sf movies were all ghastly 50s/60s and early 70s trash no normal person could take seriously or sit through. Then came Star Wars and the re-invention of Star Trek as a special effects laden movie series (followed by its Patrick Stewart television incarnation which gained a mass audience unlike its 60s predecessor). Anime also came along during the 80s. All this new material was easier to pick up than the old nerd sources. It is far more visual and packaged in a more easily digested form (just turn on the tv, slot the video tape or dvd or download and watch it). To some extent the nerds also sold out to Star Wars – a popular movie series aimed at non-nerds which they none the less championed probably because it earned them social credit (finally they could be appreciated by non-nerds for knowing a ton of useless trivia about a film with ray guns in it because for once the non-nerds loved it too). Hipsters find this pop cultural trash lying around in vast quantities and re-purpose it like Dadaists with found objects or ghetto artists reworking land fill rubbish into religious icons. Underground cartoonists of the 70s would take Disney characters and do nasty stuff with them in a subversive way too. Sf and fantasy films, tv shows, comics & video games tend to be highly iconic and visually stylized and therefore recognizable. One can appropriate the imagery and people will pick up on it readily and understand what you are ironically quoting. This has happened at the same time as the broader culture & economy has embraced corporate logos & branding on just about everything. So hipsters can take these kinds of symbols and wear them and create an instant style.
Hipsters aren’t masculine enough to be jocks, smart enough to be nerds, or talented enough to be real artists.
They are a useless, mongrel bastardization of useful skill sets.
@asdf, people into design are not intellectual. Hipster = intellectual+interest in aesethetics. Nothing to do with being lazy – if anything hipsters are overly fashion conscious – it’s about being stylish in an intellectual way, and often with an intellectualism that reflects peculiarly modern trends like irony, etc. Non-intellectuals don’t get this.
Why do you keep calling hipsters “intellectuals”? They don’t have to know anything and they aren’t required to have any analytical skills.
The funniest thing to me is how everyone becomes enraged at hipsters in America. A big part of that is the anti-intellectualism of American life that is outraged that anyone can actually want – want! – to emphasize that they are intelligent and artistic, and the other part of that is that hipsters are elitist and strive to distinguish themselves, even if in an often misguided, even silly, way, and America is militantly egalitarian.
Egalitarianism + anti-intellectualism is the American religion, and hipsters egregiously violate both – how dare they! How dare anyone not dress in sweat pants and flip flops and try to actually be stylish! How dare anyone care about art and intellectual things and style – don’t they know they are pretentious fags? And they seem to not mind being pretentious fags! The ultimate insult!
Lots of things I don’t like about hipsters, but at least they represent an elitist ideal, which means they are a hopeful sign in the American cultural darkness. No wonder why so many are enraged by them.
eightyeight, people aren’t mad at hipsters because they try to be stylish. Nothing wrong with wanting to dress nice, look sharp, read intellectual books or appreciate art, etc. Hipsters are phony and pretentious, that’s why people hate them. Same with anyone who does something for attention, but then acts like they aren’t looking for attention and are annoyed for getting stared at.
There is a whole set of arguments that hipsters are a class of young, ambitious whites of limited resources, adapted to survive in an urban environment under the pressure of a white-suppression state. They are a close cousin to SWPL; in fact hipsters become SWPLs when they age a bit, marry and start having children, but their primarily objective of urban camouflage remains the same.
Hipsters overlap with the arts scene, which overlaps with gays, who are advance scouts of gentrification, ie urban reclamation campaigns.
Hipsters are not intellectuals. Hipsters are dilettantes.
dil·et·tante — A person who claims an area of interest, such as the arts, without real commitment or knowledge.
When I was in school, I was made fun of for being nerdy. Now it’s cool to be a nerd? Fuck.
Sorry but today’s nerds are not nerds. Just cause someone likes star wars and comic book hero movies does not constitute a nerd. I say it makes them more of a loser(to varying degrees), but not nerds.
These are nerds;
Hipsters overlap with the arts scene, which overlaps with gays, who are advance scouts of gentrification, ie urban reclamation campaigns.
Indeed! For which I love, love, love hipsters and SWPLs. They have made vast swaths of New York not only inhabitable again (gentrification = de-ghettofication), but fun and interesting. Yes, it’s easy to mock artisanal chocolate shops or what have you, but hey, that chocolate is damn good. And a year ago it was either an empty storefront or a check cashing store.
The one thing you know for sure about hipsters/SWPLs is that they aren’t going to mug you, assault you or steal your car. The people they are displacing happily do all those things.
I always assumed that hipster guys wear tight pants because they have small organs and don’t experience the discomfort the rest of us would feel. Me, the only thing I have ever been able to wear comfortably is a kilt.
personally i hate hipsters because they represent a reaction against jewish liberal multicultural america, all of their interests and asthetics are a yearning for America as it used to be, yet they are fanatically liberal and in favor of multiculturalism.
“Lots of things I don’t like about hipsters, but at least they represent an elitist ideal, which means they are a hopeful sign in the American cultural darkness. No wonder why so many are enraged by them.”
Elitist? High culture? Bwaaahaaahaaa! You mean like how the characters in Downton Abbey wore mismatched, random clothes? Oh, wait…
eightyeight, you have some awfully demotic notions about what constitutes “high culture”. Even J. D. Salinger and Miles Daves aren’t exactly Jean Racine and Gustav Mahler, but tell us more about how Lena Dunham is the next Kieslowski, or how scene hair is a semiotic gloss on the Age of Sensibility.
If the point is to wear different clothes in order to get noticed, then once again the Japanese have us beat.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=harajuku&tbm=isch
One can be a geek or nerd anywhere in the U.S. The internet makes it easy. However, one can only be a hipster in just a few geographic locations. Does anyone really believe that there are any hipsters in Omaha Nebraska. No one around them would get the joke and there would be no status in it. Being a hipsters has a geographic component that being a baseball geek or computer nerd does not.
“Does anyone really believe that there are any hipsters in Omaha, Nebraska.”
I bet, within Omaha, there IS a hipster enclave. You just have to be a local to notice the distinction —— a distinction that is probably quite ridiculous to outsiders.
- “tell us more about how Lena Dunham is the next Kieslowski”
Plus-one for alt-Right’s first ever reference to K. Kieslowski. When I finally start my blog I will do a post about his work.
- “Does anyone really believe that there are any hipsters in Omaha, Nebraska.”
A couple of years ago I visited Bristol, TN, a town on the western edge of the Appalachians, known as the birthplace of Country music and home to a racing speedway. In the historic downtown amidst ancient Art Deco buildings and boarded-up storefronts, there was a coffeeshop with orange couches and quirky artwork on walks. My lady and I stopped in there and enjoyed some outstanding lattes. There were hipsters at various chairs reading and a small group was talking about their band.
- “i hate hipsters because they represent a reaction against jewish liberal multicultural america, all of their interests and asthetics are a yearning for America as it used to be, yet they are fanatically liberal and in favor of multiculturalism.”
My larger theory of SWPLs and the like as a complicated white survival subculture is a work in progress but it’s hitting on some truths. About hipsters liking multiculturalism: there is also this element, which springs from all European men: a drive for discovery of new lands and the immersion and overcoming of the wild and the mysterious. We are forever a searching and striving race.
To the hipster, the black ghetto is the wild habitat and the black man is the dangerous but exciting his undisciplined masculine energy (aka ‘vibrant’) wildlife. The hunter and the explorer struggles again the environment he’s exploring and colonizing — he certainly doesn’t hate it. Just like for an explorer it makes no sense to hate the bush or the charging rhino. Rather, you respect its dangers, and you can’t get enough of it.
The are now hipsters making beacheads in Detroit. In Baltimore, I have acquaintances who overlap with my social circle, and are tight-knit group of SWPL networkers who concentrate on beautifyng their reclaimed streets and home/charter-schooling their young children. They’re NPR-addled, liberal pod people when it comes to politics, at least when sober, LOL (intelligent otherwise though with hints of racism when drunk) whose only diversity — besides raving about some Latin Festival that just happened — is a gay black artist on the periphery of their social circle, and a couple of non-white wives. I grudgingly respect the hipsters and his older cousin the SWPL.
PA,
The place in Bristol that you mentioned is out of business. I guess there were not enough Hipsters who keep the place going. However, at least you can get non-ironic donuts in Bristol. Something that is probably a lot harder to do in Brooklyn.
That sucks. I liked that place.
However, at least you can get non-ironic donuts in Bristol. Something that is probably a lot harder to do in Brooklyn.
Donuts in Brooklyn are deciseivly non-ironic. What they are is amazing.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dough/147336885329768
http://dunwelldoughnuts.com/products.html
It’s important to keep in mind that many annoying but implicitly white things such as hipsters are made of the better elements of our nature. Hipsters are smart, have good taste, and a resilience to hostile culture. Hipsters chicks are slim and cute.
Certainly anything can be taken too far or go off-balance with other important values. Too much love for the exotic make you grotesque, for example.
“Plus-one for alt-Right’s first ever reference to K. Kieslowski”
Hey, I recall writing about the ‘color trilogy’ when it came out for some unknown weekly; can’t see I knew what the hell my adolescent brain was watching —— but that didn’t stop me from pretending and writing something pretentious! Lol!
WQow… I thought those trilogy films were earlier; i was in college then —– I do recall writing about “Double Life of Veronique” a few years earlier; I’m sure I didn’t know what I was talking about. (Kieslowski’s rep among middle-brow, mid-American college kids was: “I don’t know WTF he’s getting at, but he hires gorgeous babes for his flicks!”)
“About hipsters liking multiculturalism: there is also this element, which springs from all European men: a drive for discovery of new lands and the immersion and overcoming of the wild and the mysterious. We are forever a searching and striving race.
To the hipster, the black ghetto is the wild habitat and the black man is the dangerous but exciting his undisciplined masculine energy (aka ‘vibrant’) wildlife. The hunter and the explorer struggles again the environment he’s exploring and colonizing — he certainly doesn’t hate it. Just like for an explorer it makes no sense to hate the bush or the charging rhino. Rather, you respect its dangers, and you can’t get enough of i”
Ding, ding, ding, ding ding!
You just expalined the miscgenated roots of America —– the pioneering spirit personified; the fruits of which now manifest in everything from SWPL-ism to Wiggerism.
When white sees black, he sees his past; the past produces conflict: he wants to run from it and progress from it —— but the past is also comfort. The past is also home.
It’s the sentimental and comforting end of the crucible featuring technology, progress and scientific rationality on the other end.
That reality has been documented, reified and elaborated upon by writers from D.H. Lawrence to Norman Mailer.
Without looking it up, the Double Life of Veronique came out in the very early 90s, and Three Colors right after that. Kieslowski, in partnership with writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz and composer Zbigniew Preisner also did the Decalogue in 88.
I have more to say about them but for now I’ll just day that they represent the communist-era Eastern European intellectual’s hope that a humanism-tempered Christian spirituality will replace Communism in their countries and spread to Western Europe. This movies reflect that hope.
Instead, Eastern Europe’s post-89 descent into Western materialism and immorality came as a shock to many such men, most notably to Pope JPII.
Openness to and curiousity about other cultures is a good quality. You just don’t want to be so open, you forget about being something yourself.
Is any of that nerd stuff actually good? It all seems pretty crappy to me. Dungeons and Dragons? Superhero Comics? Video Games?
I actually know the guy in the video below reasonably well, and I can say without a doubt, that he is not an intellectual of any sort. He is, as one commenter above stated, a dilettante. He’s one of the most vapid people I’ve ever met; there’s just no substance there whatsoever.