Subtitles section Play video
-
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
-
Pollock 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.