Alex, can I get terrible haircuts for $200?
Yesterday, a moment of cultural significance occurred with very little notice or attention: Tom Moosbrugger, a librarian from Columbus, Ohio, was the first hipster contestant on Jeopardy. I know what you're thinking: this guy and his hoodless hoodie are not hipsters. But consider this: he proved that getting a library science degree from a Midwestern state school isn't completely useless. You can just chill out, grow some rad facial hair, and win an average American income by answering questions about water fountains in an episode of Jeopardy. He not only gets to perform minimal amount of work to receive some cash and a free trip to LA, but he also gets to solidify his intellectual superiority over Middle America. The American hipster dream.
On the flip, Jeopardy is a show that's primarily watched in retirement homes and at the Old Country Buffet. That's not to suggest grandpa is about to trade in his fanny pack for a neon green fanny pack and throw on a wolf shirt; rather, Tom is the flash point for the decline of the “hipster” subculture and its widespread acceptance into the mainstream.
Consider Demand Media and the recent proliferation of hipster-related “evergreen” content. For the unfamiliar, Demand Media owns eHow and similar sites that make it their business to monetize popular search trends by producing “content” that is highly catered to sought-after Google search terms. In other words, unlike news, these pages will always generate revenue (“evergreen”), as people will continuously find the information useful and relevant.
Over the past few months, there has been an explosion of eHow articles describing how to act like, dress like, and be a hipster. Most of these guides are so hilariously stereotypical, it's a struggle to imagine what types of newcomer hipsters find this information useful:
In addition to telling readers they'll only need “Pabst Blue Ribbon” and tight jeans to become a hipster, they instruct them to “quit your lame 9-to-5 job,” “move out of the suburbs,” “start collecting vinyl,” and, best of all, “Drink Pabst Blue Ribbon.”
“[PBR] is the preferred choice of beers among hipsters. It's cheap, which is convenient: once you become a hipster, you won't have much money.” - random eHow bro
While the eHow hipster clown car reads less like a how-to article and more like a help guide found in The Onion, Demand Media's writing of articles is an extremely calculated move. The company employs scores of “SEO specialists” that spend their days analyzing search traffic to identify growing trends and market potential. As the general rule of thumb in the “evergreen” industry is that the first search result will be clicked on 30% of the time, with the second result receiving a 5% clickthru rate, Demand Media's team of bean counters can predict how many people will read an article, click the embedded Google Ads on the article, and how much is necessary to pay a freelancer to ensure the company profits on the piece. By definition, Demand Media is the trend-jumping poser of the internet, writing about a topic only after it reaches a commercial critical mass.
Demand Media and similar companies no one respects primarily mine Google Trends for keyword and topic analysis, suggesting that search volume is a barometer for the societal acceptance of a subculture. For example, look at the stats for the query “How to dress like a hipster”:
And “hipster music”:
You can even see the transition from OG Hipsters drinking PBR (blue) and new wave kids drinking Tecate (red):
A classic battle between American, union-made products slowly losing ground to cheap Mexican goods.
Comparing the annual Halloween searches for “hipster costume” (blue) and “guido costume” (red) additionally suggests that the 'normies' of America have identified hipsters as a trending and relevant subculture to parody:
The data suggests that as the years have gone by, cultural outliers have increasingly wanted to be associated with the “hipster” subculture while lacking the knowledge of how to embody the lifestyle directly. People increasingly are looking to be told how to dress, what to listen to, and how to act, rather than finding their own way. Like the hippie lifestyle of the 70s, the hipster mores of individualism have been lost to crowds of people yearning for acceptance.
Looking back to Tom Moosbrugger, you see a man who publicly depicts himself on Facebook as your everyday, wild-haired bro who wears American Apparel hoodies, flannel shirts, and whose interests include the A-Team, Knight Rider, The Big Lebowski, MacGyver, “Indie Stuff”, collecting mold spores, and Ernest Hemingway. But rather than being himself on national television, he fashions himself with a trendy “I'm gunna rape you” haircut, proving once and for all that the hipster subculture has been co-opted by the followers and style-conscious, begging for the attention of the masses.
