All hipsters look alike? Man claims article's 'hipster' photo is him, only to be mistaken

Do all hipsters look the same? A new article in the MIT Technology Review suggests yes, and a man's angry response to his purported photo with the story all but proves it.

The "hipster effect," as explained by Brandeis University researchers, goes like this: Those in an anti-conformist population still conform to themselves. Eventually, as the review's editor, Gideon Lichfield, told NPR, so-called hipsters "all end up adopting the same behavior or the same style."

Case in point, as Lichfield detailed on Twitter last week: Almost as soon as the "hipster effect" article was published, a man furiously emailed the magazine claiming a photo of him was slanderously used alongside it without his permission. He was, it turned out, mistaken.

According to NPR, the reader decried the article as "poorly written and insulting."

"Your lack of basic journalistic ethics and both the manner in which you reported this uncredited nonsense and the slanderous unnecessary use of my picture without permission demands a response and I am of course pursuing legal action," he reportedly said.

Calling someone "hipster" isn't exactly slander, Lichfield noted on Twitter, but it prompted him to dig into the photo itself, a Getty Images stock photo described as a "shot of a handsome young man in trendy winter attire against a wooden background."

The photo did have restrictions for using it around stories on an "unflattering or unduly controversial" subject like, say, sexually transmitted diseases, Lichfield noted, which did not seem to apply to hipsters.

But what's more, as the magazine's creative director later found after contacting Getty: The name of the model in the photo did not match that of the angry reader who wrote in to complain, Lichfield said. The two only looked alike.

"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," Lichfield said on Twitter.

Read the MIT Technology Review's full article, if you'd like.

Follow Josh Hafner on Twitter: @joshhafner