Kevin Marshall's America
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a very politically-minded person, nor am I what most people would consider patriotic. Although I don’t harbor any resentment towards this country and I appreciate being born here, I don’t make it a point to hang a flag on my porch or sing “Proud to Be an American” at the drop of a hat.
Too cool for the census.
However, there are certain activities that I do feel a sense of civic obligation towards, such as voting or the recent census count.
After all, the census form ain’t no thing. It took me all of two to three minutes to fill out for my entire household. It’s not what I would consider to be intrusive, since government agencies (should) already have all of this information on file. Besides, if it helps them properly allocate funds for things like education and other needed programs, then I’m all for it.
Not so for hipsters.
Firstly, an explanation for readers who might not be familiar with the term. In short, hipsters are the counter-culture. The most identifiable members of the group reside in Brooklyn. They’re in their twenties mostly, post-college, and despite their dress and propensity towards feigning poverty, often come from families with some degree of financial stability. These are the folks you’ll see walking around with ironic mustaches, skinny jeans, and shirts culled from a second-hand store.
It is atypical of a youth sub-culture: rebelling against style, conformity, and identifiable behaviors in the mainstream by creating their own set of style, conformity, and identifiable behaviors. If you’re ever on Lark Street, you may spot a hipster variant. Though not one hundred percent committed to the hipster lifestyle, they do display many of the tendencies. And they’re all moving to New York City in two weeks.
A recent NPR piece (I know; how utterly hypocritical for me to rail against obnoxious hipsters by linking to NPR) focused on the difficulties census-takers are having in obtaining returns from hipsters in the Williamsburgh section of Brooklyn, which is the Bratty Hipster Capital of the World. The return rate there is thirty percent.
The reason they aren’t returning the census forms? Well, probably laziness. But many feel that they aren’t “counted” in the eyes of many, so they don’t bother filling out a census form. Hipsters have thrown themselves up on a sociological cross; counting themselves as the downtrodden even though they pay rent through a trust fund.
This is typical hipster behavior – adopting a holier-than-thou attitude and false stand to obscure and disguise what is really an almost chronic lack of work ethic and sense of civic responsibility. These are the people that care about your plight, so long as your plight is out of their direct line of sight and for all intents and purposes a vague concept they can read about online.
Unfair indictment? Perhaps. I’m a crabby old man at the spry young age of 28. Fill out your damn census forms, you hipsters!
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15 Responses to Hipsters: Too Cool for the Census
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“Stay off my lawn hipsters!” Seriously though; they’re a joke.
Actually, I had to request another form because on the first one that came, I accidentally selected “Hipster” under Race and the whole census form just disintegrated! I refrained from making this mistake on my second form, and it went much more smoothly.
Moral of the story: maybe the hipsters aren’t submitting their census because this disintegration issue is not allowing them to!
[Probably obvious, but this is not a true story)
Love the disclaimer derryX – you can’t be too careful especially on this blog.
They make me grumpy. I can’t wait to see what they’re doing in 15 years…
Just another thing to add to my list of why I hate hipsters…
Skinny jeans look good on know one! And please, don’t try to ‘sag’ them. You walk like an idiot. Oh wait, this wasn’t about skinny jeans? Sorry.
Go fill out you darn census forms and stop being idiots.
Thanks for the laugh! I didn’t realize the “type had a name to them.
White dopes on punk.
One thing I do wonder…why do they ask what ethnicity you are on the forms? If we are all equal, who cares?
As for the Hipsters….if they made the forms from recycled hemp, maybe they’d feel a greater sence of responsibility.
I hate hipsters for co-opting my culture. Stop wearing all those fancy hats, jerkstores! Fancy hats are for balding single men over thirty.
This is a problem easily solved by mathematical formulae, and could help economic recovery by either hiring more unemployed statisticians to work at the Labor Dept., or to outsource said formula modeling. If I may explain:
Te locus of the hipster world tends to shift over time. Discounting such hipster-invasion anomalies as the great migration to San Francisco in the Summer of Love, a fairly consistent number of hipsters can be counted on to establish their hipster beachheads at various census periods. The vanguard of the alt-country army and Richard Linklater’s Slackers, for example, moved to Austin in time for the 1980 census; Seattle was the locus of the grunge census of 1990. It can be argued that San Francisco was once again the locus of hipsters for the 2000 census, because the people who had actually re-created SF as a legitimate technology hotbed of new applications and platforms had cashed in their options and were living in Milan by then (it is key to note hipsters are always 2-5 years behind productive folks in selecting a spot). As you mention, Williamsburg seems to be the locus for the 2010 census.
The best way to calculate the formula is to ask any coffeehouse proprietor in a “hip” neighborhood the size of its core customers’ residential footprint in squaer blocks, how many of those customers are hipsters, and what percentage those hipsters represent of their total regular customer base. The census taker can then extrapolate the likely number of hipsters in that x or y-sized square block area. Subtract 10% based on the fact coffehouse proprietors will likely pad their customer base and send it in.
To measure the relative increase or decrease of hipsters in the US over a given period of time, then, one could look a coffeehouse openings and closings in Austin, Seattle, and San Francisco in the last 30 years and, using the above formula, establish a relatively useful estimate of how many hipsters resided in each hot spot at each census.
This will help plan for wherever the next hipster hot spot will be for the 2020 census. Right now the smart money is on New Orleans, as there will be little to no danger left from the Katrina rebuild, and absinthe is once again legal.
“They pay rent through a trust fund.” Don’t forget about all the cocaine that trust fund buys, too.
I hate hipsters for opening up a skateboard store half a block up from my apartment and proceeding to do so way into the middle of the night.
But if I know anything about hipsters, they can’t commit to an idea for too long and the store should close within a year.
I’m still bitter that we never got a census form. How uncool is that?
Totes uncool.