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Hipster Whines at Tech Mag for Using His Pic to Imply Hipsters Look the Same; Wasn't His Pic

posted by Fnord666 on Friday March 08 2019, @10:23AM   Printer-friendly
from the do-you-see-what-I-see? dept.

martyb writes:

Hipster Whines at Tech mag for Using his pic to Imply Hipsters Look the Same, Discovers pic was of an Entirely Different Hipster :

At the end of February, MIT Technology Review emitted a pithy rundown of a 34-page research paper from maths-modelling boffins at Brandeis University in the US; the paper essentially posited that in a bid to make that all-important "countercultural statement", hipsters can end up looking alike. For groovy models of how random acts by hipsters "undergo a phase transition into a synchronized state" – along with some knotty network equations – see here [PDF].

Accompanying the article was an edited stock image of a generic millennial chap in plaid shirt and standard-issue beanie, or "trendy winter attire", as Getty put it.

The MIT journal's editor-in-chief, Gideon Lichfield, took to Twitter to tell a "cautionary tale" about what followed the article going live:

"We promptly got a furious email from a man who said he was the guy in the photo that ran with the story. He accused us of slandering him, presumably by implying he was a hipster, and of using the pic without his permission. (He wasn't too complimentary about the story, either.)"

[...] Lichfield pointed out that he didn't think calling someone a hipster was "unflattering or unduly controversial" but contacted Getty to be safe.

The stock photo giant checked the model release and lo! The guy in the image wasn't even the same dude who was complaining. "He'd misidentified himself," Lichfield said.

"All of which just proves the story we ran: hipsters look so much alike that they can't even tell themselves apart from each other."

Maybe he was confused after renting this movie?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 08 2019, @06:22PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 08 2019, @06:22PM (#811640)

    The problem [...] people have is in realizing they were never meant to be universal truths

    Not-so-entirely untrue then.

  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 08 2019, @08:35PM

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Friday March 08 2019, @08:35PM (#811718) Homepage Journal

    That's their error, not an error in the stereotype. Much like you shouldn't have to put a "for external use only" sticker on a tractor, you should not have to explain that a stereotype is neither a fine-grained tool nor an infinitely wide brush to paint people with.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.