Corrosion of Conformity
By 
Let’s say you come across a photograph in a magazine of a bearded man walking down a sidewalk in a flannel shirt and a beanie.
You’re looking really closely at this photo, because somehow it looks familiar. So you ask yourself, who is this guy? Is he:
A. A total stranger, probably a model.
B. A caricature or a stock image of a hipster, because no one really uses that word non-ironically anymore.
C. You.
And because the answer is C. the only thing to do is threaten to sue the publication because the picture that you describe as heavily edited is an actionable besmirching of your character.
Oh, God, you think. It is you. So after your friends and family agree, you promptly decide to write to the editors of the magazine, MIT Technology Review, where the photograph appeared above an article from last month headlined, “The hipster effect: Why anti-conformists always end up looking the same,” to complain and threaten to sue them.
You begin your Feb. 28 email: “You used a heavily edited Getty image of me for your recent bit of clickbait about why hipsters all look the same. It’s a poorly written and insulting article, and — somewhat ironically — about 5 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.”
And because the answer is C., the punchline is obvious.
Getty Images completed its review Tuesday. Its response was decisive: Definitely just a model — a different bearded, beanie-wearing guy.
“Wow, I stand corrected,” the litigious bearded man wrote back to the Technology Review after learning his mistake this week.
“In other words,” Lichfield wrote in a widely shared Twitter thread Wednesday, “the guy who’d threatened to sue us for misusing his image wasn’t the one in the photo. He’d misidentified himself. 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.”
So that was silly, but it did call attention to an interesting article on an attempt to map human behavior and the spread of ideas.
