Hipster Upset His Picture is Used in Article About Hipsters Looking Alike, But It's Not Him
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Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash
MIT's, "The hipster effect: Why anti-conformists always end up looking the same," article went over really well with the hipster crowd. Rather, it went over just as you would imagine it would, horrifically.
The photo MIT used, which the authors took off of Getty Images, fit the "hipster aesthetic" so well that it immediately made a hipster incredibly furious his likeness was used on the article. However, it wasn't his picture.
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
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
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
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
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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.
— Gideon Lichfield (@glichfield) March 5, 2019
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
Now, the hilarity of this story set aside, the article wasn't even that derogatory.
It basically summed up a research paper that found people who try to make "counter-cultural statements" usually look like each other.
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