How to Be a Hipster, According to Math
Hipsters’ love of handlebar mustaches, flannel shirts, and elfin shoes, it seems, can be explained by math.
A new paper uses mathematical theory to answer a befuddling question about all of those folks obsessed with the small batch and obscure: Why does a group known for wanting to be original all dress alike?
Jonathan Touboul, a mathematical neuroscientist at the Collège de France in Paris, makes sense of those chain wallets and super-tight jeans in his paper, The Hipster Effect: When Anticonformists All Look the Same, using formulas like these:
Right now, you’re probably thinking, “It was my understanding that there would be no math on Yahoo Style.” (Or, if you’re a hipster, maybe you’re reaching for a cocktail with an unreasonably large ice cube.)
But the point behind the numbers—what Touboul’s uses mathematical theory to prove—is that it’s impossible to be non-conformist forever—or even for anything other than a very short period. People jump on trends too quickly. He calls this a “generic phase transition in the system,” and what it means is the second you decide that white sunglasses are the jam, 20 other people will too. To keep authenticity, you have to keep changing—which is tough when we’re talking about hipster identifiers like sleeve tattoos.
This theory could be applied to more than hipsters, too, says Touboul, who doesn’t exclusively study the vinyl-and-fixe fans. His other papers include “Pinwheel-Dipole Configuration in Cat Visual Cortex” and “Canard Explosion in Delayed Equations with Multiple Timescales.”
“If you take large sets of interacting individuals—whether hipsters, stock traders or any group that decides to go against the majority—by trying to be different, they will ultimately all do the same thing at the same time,” Touboul told Vocativ. “The reason for that is the time it takes for an individual to register the decisions of others. You cannot be aware of what other people decide in real time, it takes a little while.”
Touboul also used math to figure out that it’s easier to set yourself apart from others if you’re closer in proximity to them. For example, you may be able to dress differently than the co-workers you see everyday, but at a big party for your entire industry, you may find there are a bunch of people who look just like you.
Or, to bring it back to hipsters, you may stand out among the three guys you run your slate cheeseboard business with, but when you’re walking the streets of Williamsburg in Brooklyn or the Mission in San Francisco, you may see yourself reflected in nearly every person you pass.
Still, Touboul said that his findings are just drawn from numbers; he doesn’t claim to have figured out the mystifying ways of hipsters everywhere.
“Scientifically, I cannot claim that this represents all hipsters,” Touboul told Vocativ. “I just thought the metaphor was kind of enlightening.”
