A hipster complained to a magazine that said all hipsters looked the same and the final twist is just perfect
We’re grateful to a magazine editor called Gideon Lichfield who told the story of a complaint he received about a photo used to illustrate a story headlined: ‘The hipster effect: Why anti-conformists always end up looking the same.’
The piece, in the MIT Technology Review was based around something called the ‘hipster effect’ in which the population of hipsters ‘initially act randomly but then undergo a phase transition into a synchronised state’.
Anyway, a guy got in touch to say they’d used his photo without permission and the article had ‘slandered’ him. This is what happened next.
1.
A few days ago we ran a piece in @techreview about some research purporting to explain the "hipster effect"—the fact that nonconformists often end up nonconforming in the same way. We used a stock Getty photo of a hipster-ish-looking man. https://t.co/8LB6qLSmgS
— Gideon Lichfield (@glichfield) March 6, 2019
2.
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.)
— Gideon Lichfield (@glichfield) March 5, 2019
3.
Now, as far as I know, calling someone a hipster isn’t slander, no matter how much they may hate it. Still, we would never use a picture without the proper license or model release. It was a stock photo from Getty Images. So we checked the license. https://t.co/uFPXXNlEid
— Gideon Lichfield (@glichfield) March 5, 2019
4.
The image does have restrictions—e.g., if you use it “in connection with a subject that would be unflattering or unduly controversial to a reasonable person (for example, sexually transmitted diseases)”, you should say that the person in it is a model. https://t.co/sYNmqJYZ2g
— Gideon Lichfield (@glichfield) March 5, 2019
5.
We weren’t implying that the model had an STD, only that he was a hipster. We didn’t think this met the definition of “unflattering or unduly controversial.” Still, we recognized that others might disagree. So, just to be on the safe side, we contacted Getty.
— Gideon Lichfield (@glichfield) March 5, 2019
6.
Getty checked the model release, and gave us the news: The guy who complained wasn’t even the guy in the picture. 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. /ENDS
— Gideon Lichfield (@glichfield) March 5, 2019
BOOM!
So the guy basically confirmed the theory
Surreal
— Kaio Oliveira (@dongatonis) March 8, 2019
https://twitter.com/The_Hoggy/status/1103988732133326849
Birds of a feather
— Denniswigt (@DWigt165) March 7, 2019
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