Are You A Hipster? | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios

Here's an idea: You're probably a hipster. Hipsters catch a really bad rap. The word hipster conjures some smug guy or gal; Ray-Bans; scarves; a bike that's hard to ride; waistcoats; and pickled, local, small-batch everything. [We can pickle that.] And, the cultural backlash to hipsterdom is huge, so huge in fact it's hard to somebody who self-identifies as a hipster; however, with nerds, it's a much different story. (And I want to pause her to say that for simplicity's sake, I'm conflating "geek" and "nerd," and I realize there's a difference, but for now I'm going to use them interchangeably, so don't get mad.) Unlike hipsters, there are tons of people who self-identify as nerds: math nerds, music nerds, video game nerds, philosophy nerds, nerds, nerds, nerds, nerds, nerds. [Get those nerds! Nerds! NERDS!] We talk about nerd cred and nerding out. Many of us are nerd fighters, and there's even nerdcore music, and sure, there's still a bad nerd rap, but generally the cultural tide seems to favor nerds over hipsters, which is a little bit of a false dichotomy, right? Because if there's anything people like Richard Ayoade, Kari Byron, Chris Hardwick, and Felicia Day have taught us, it's that you can be hip and nerdy, but this doesn't stop us [from] drawing a cultural line between a group of people who might wear this t-shirt and a group of people who might wear this t-shirt, meaning while in theory they might be super-different, in practice it's a little bit more complicated, which it usually is. (Stupid practice! Thinks it's so complicated!) Both groups are defined not only by what they enjoy—like anime and Mumford & Sons—but also how they enjoy it. Simon Pegg says that, "Being a geek is all about being honest about what you enjoy, and not being afraid to demonstrate that affection. It means never having to play it cool about how much you like something." And we all probably agree that hipsters exude some smugness or arrogance. They enjoy things ironically and not effusively. In other words, hipsters look or behave in ways that they shouldn't. You are not a 1920's oil baron. Why the handlebar mustache? You wear red flannel and have a large beard, yet you've never touched an axe. Also, your shoes cost five hundred dollars, and you have a back tattoo of a Jackson *** painting. Hipsters adopt the styles and affects of many cultures. Cultures which aren't "theirs," cultures they don't actually belong to, mostly because it would be hard to be an Appalachian coal miner from 1860. Other subcultures enjoy what they enjoy and that is the end of the story. But is it? Our tastes are complicated. They are earnest, aspirational, include guilty pleasures, things we should like but don't and are largely an effect of our socio-economic geopolitical supercalifragitive backgrounds. So, when someone's tastes express something that they "can't" or "shouldn't" enjoy, the hipsterness alarm sounds. (The hipsterness alarm sounds like this, by the way.) A lumberjack looking guy who mixes drinks and listens to country music and rap but also plays D&D is such an extreme pastiche that he causes people to hulk out! But, what's wrong with that? I mean, you don't get mad at your mom when she shops at L.L.Bean, goes to Starbucks, and listens to the Grateful Dead. We see mom's choices as natural, and we see hipster choices as performative; they are pretending or worse yet mocking. What's happened though is that because of our global-media-whatever or are internet-interconnected-whatsit, people have started to realize that every cultural artifact from Carhartt pants and trucker hats to fedoras has cultural capital. Cultural capital, coined by French anthropologist and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu describes the social worth of a particular object, style of dress, or manner of speech, you-name-it, to a particular class or subculture of people. Bourdieu theorized cultural capital as a way to gain status. One could study, inherit, or purchase their way to having huge amounts of cultural capital and, therefore, status. Status, though, is just really complicated. For instance, for punks, high status might be indicated by the number of studs on their leather jacket, but for other subcultures, that indicates extremely low status. The process of recognizing cultural capital in objects and affects and then sticking with them until they are assimilated, that is the modus hipsterandi. This is why people draw that angry, spiteful line between hipsters and other subcultures. Subcultures like nerds have to work for their cred to attain cultural capital within that group. Hipsters just cherry pick the stuff they think is neat. People see hipsters as devaluing cultural fashions by cashing in on their capital without embodying their meaning and by combining cultural capital from entirely different subcultures. They're sort of like the subcultural version of Girl Talk. And maybe the purity of those cultural expressions is diluted a little bit when mish-mashed into hipsterdom, but is it really that different from the cultural reappropriation of things like Levis, chain wallets, or, uh, kilts? What do you guys think? Nerd? Punk? Mom? Is there a little hipster inside all of us? Let us know in the comments and please subscribe, ironically or earnestly, doesn't matter to me.