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 even find somebody who
self-identifies as a hipster.
However, with nerds it's a much different story.
And I want to pause here 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!
W 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 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 and 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 sort
of 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 1920s 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 $500 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 which 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 socioeconomic 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.
[SINGING]
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.
What's wrong with that?
I mean, you don't get mad at your mom
when she shops at LL 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 our interconnected internet what's-it, 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 hipsterondi.
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 capitals from entirely
disparate some cultures.
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 re-appropriation of things like Levi's, chain
wallets, or 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.
I think we approached the creation of a total perspective
vortex in the comments.
Let's see what you guys had to say about space travel.
yaragorm and MightyMoose64 said that space travel might
actually lose its luster and that after it's here
we'll just be bored of it, which, yeah, I mean, we'll see.
Rob Witbeck says that it's not space travel which
will unite us, but rather some sort of external alien threat,
which is probably true.
I guess we'll see which one happens.
Rai Galicia makes a really interesting point,
that the overview effect isn't necessarily related
to space travel and that it can happen based
upon the many communication technologies we have right
here, right now on planet Earth, which, you know,
I think they're easy to take for granted.
Etaukan says that it's not the destination,
but the journey that will unite us, which I think we found
was true on a national level.
On an international level, especially when
it's funded by a private company, could go either way.
Mat Cayton points out that the fastest way to world peace
is to just get everybody off the world, which technically I
guess is true.
These are the voyages of the Starship Idea Channel.
Clones, actually, just like slightly--
there was a-- I came out wrong.
To timetuner, I think the inherently political future
of augmented reality is terrifying and probably totally
spot-on.
And to Conner Ward, let me check.
It's the Schoeps CMIT5U.