Let’s admit it, don’t be coy. Everyone’s egotistical enough to search for themselves on the internet! After all, it’s fun and takes no time at all. What else are you going to do online? Facebook is so mainstream. You’ve already been mashing your f5 button on Pitchfork for hours. And you swore never to return to Look At This Fucking Hipster ever since that one terrible day when you were on the front page.
Dear latfh.com, I think there’s been a mistake. You see, I wore this shirt ironically.
So that’s when I decided it would be fun to wiki the term “hipster.” I got more than I bargained for…
First off, there were five separate pages for me to choose from (in and of itself, that’s ridiculous). I eliminated Low Rise (fashion) since that has to do with clothes, and went for something I hadn’t expected at all: the Hipster PDA.
The Hipster PDA is a bunch of index cards held together with a binder clip. Okay, that’s mildly funny. I can get behind that (only ironically, though). Then I clicked on the real jackpot, Hipster (contemporary subculture). Holy shit.
I’m normally the kind of guy who can browse Wikipedia for hours (am I supposed to actually admit something like this?), but this article was just too real for me. It was drier than a grammar textbook, and repeated itself throughout the entire page. The main point seemed to be “Only hipsters themselves know about/can recognize hipsters, but basically PBR, Williamsburg, Pitchfork, scene.”
I get that people who edit Wikipedia are the types of people who edit real encyclopedias, except they don’t get paid. So why am I so disappointed with this page? I can’t put my finger on it. I think to be honest, I was expecting a pithy joke like “If you have to look up Hipsters on Wiki, we’re 2cool4you” or maybe a redirect to the Chicago board of tourism’s page for Wicker Park. So seeing the stuffiness of faux academia (they use “postmodern” like 3 times) really ruined my expectations. Maybe that was the point, and I was elaborately trolled?
The truly horrifying thing was that the whole article was without irony. Hipsters aren’t really deserving of a wiki page, and the fact that there is a page is kind of wrong. At the very least, it’s unsettling.
About as unsettling as having to look at this guy’s face all over Wikipedia for 3 months
