You have undoubtedly seen them, those handful of humans blessed with tousled hair, pale complexions and the perfect facial structure for multi-colored Ray-Ban Wayfarers, standing around like high-school athletes with their noses lifted so high you are sure they may break their necks.
Around campus, or just around town, a phenomenon of plaid shirt-wearing, hobo-bag-toting, high-top-stepping youth has completely changed the average human scenery - but that is not all.
These keffiyah-wearing folk have impacted every consumer industry imaginable, simply by buying in.
It has been said before, and I am not leaping to repeat it, but counterculture is the new popular culture.
Whereas decades ago, counterculture meant hopping trains and spitting in the face of societal norms, today, counterculture can be owned by every clothing company, record label or advertising agency and sold to everyone anxious to fit in - and they do buy in.
Of course, it is not considered "buying in" to the hipster crew, because buying in would mean that the trendiest trendsetters were following a trend. Reality check - they are.
In fact, they are buying in to the largest and trickiest consumer ploy in history. This attitude only leads them to believe they are individuals, and as individuals they are the coolest.
From that mindset we can vaguely derive the hierarchy of hipster, based on how thrift your look is or which cheap non-Anheuser-Busch product you put to your lips before partying like a golden-god rock star in someone's broken down apartment to some type of music, as long as the people you are cooler than have never heard of it.
Emerging from this counterculture takeover is a whole new superiority complex, similar to the "jock" or "cheerleader" complex from cheesy 80s cinema.
These kids are cooler and way more original than any person within an 80-foot radius of them.
This complex is fed by the consumer culture, and those roguish youth scrambling to be an individual among individuals are anxious to eat it up.
This sort of attitude about buying in makes "hipster" a dirty word among hipsters-ask the next person you think may be a hipster if they are a hipster, and you are likely to get your head chopped off.
Well, there is your clue.
Even conforming to a non-conforming title is looked down upon, but I guarantee you that they are secretly proud you noticed.
One of the earliest and most tragic victims of hipsterism is any given music scene.
It is impossible to go to a music show without being crowded by these soldiers of non-conformity and in turn judged endlessly by what you are or are not wearing, and how you are or are not acting.
It is this sort of nauseating buy-in behavior that I blame for the cries of "punk is dead," and it is the reason why I typically refuse to go to concerts anymore.
I have come to realize that there was a time in my life when I would have secretly been proud to have been a hipster, to fit in by not fitting in, and to lift my nose up at normal people as if they were completely unworthy human beings.
That time is not now, because now I am simply disgusted by this buy-in sellout and the horse it came in on.
I want to clear up that I am not by any means judging the people who buy in to this trend; that would be contrapuntal.
I am simply inviting everyone, hipster or not, to take a step down and realize that it is easier to judge someone than it is to know them. In addition, it is endlessly easier to judge people when you are sitting on a cloud of endless cool, but that leaves you distanced, derived, and lets you live in a vivid hallucination of humanity.
It is impossibly cool to judge people, no matter what get-up you don, letterman's jacket or skinny jeans. What is really valuable is not those judgments, but the acceptance of other people on a one-to-one basis, and not by the obscure literature, music, or clothing they may employ to define themselves.
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