Man Inadvertently Proves That Hipsters Look Alike By Mistaking Photo As Himself : NPR

This is the unedited version of a contested photo from an MIT Technology Review article on hipsters. Original caption: “Shot of a handsome young man in trendy winter attire against a wooden background.”

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This is the unedited version of a contested photo from an MIT Technology Review article on hipsters. Original caption: “Shot of a handsome young man in trendy winter attire against a wooden background.”

PeopleImages/Getty Images

It’s a running joke that male hipsters all look alike with their flannel shirts, thick beards, and other seemingly off-brand attributes. But a comical incident at MIT Technology Review might just prove that they all really do look alike after all.

The publication recently published an article on a study out of Brandeis University about the “hipster effect,” which studied how nonconformists usually act unconventionally in the same way – to end up being exactly the same.

“What the study found essentially was that when a group of people decide to be different, to do something non-conforming, there comes a point when they all end up adopting the same behavior or the same style,” Gideon Lichfield, editor-in-chief of MIT Technology Review, told NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro for Weekend Edition.

While the study itself proves this theory, so does accidentally thinking the edited photo at the top of the story – which featured a man in a plaid shirt with a beanie hat on – is of yourself, a fellow hipster.

Right after the article was published, MIT Technology Review promptly received an email from someone who claimed he was the man in the photo and hadn’t given his consent. He accused the publication of slandering him and threatened legal action, writing:

“You used a heavily edited Getty image of me for your recent bit of click-bait about why hipsters all look the same. It’s a poorly written and insulting article and somewhat ironically about five years too late to be as desperately relevant as it is attempting to be. By using a tired cultural trope to try to spruce up an otherwise disturbing study. Your lack of basic journalistic ethics and both the manner in which you reported this uncredited nonsense and the slanderous unnecessary use of my picture without permission demands a response and I am of course pursuing legal action.”