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Culture

Metacontrarians & Intellectual Hipsterism

While many agree that hipsterism isn’t really much of a thing anymore, and has simply been absorbed into our culture. I feel like this was something that wasn’t talked about very often. Metacontrarians and intellectual hipsters. We all know what regular hipsters are but these are like hipsters with totally supreme intelligence and they will all “pwn” you with their knowledge skills.

By the way, I literally stole my title from this article. I think I might have read this article before, but I don’t know. I’m just going to write this article based on feeling because evidence isn’t important.

To understand metacontrarianism we must first take a look at intellectual hipsters. Heretofore referred to as “these guys.”

These guys tend to be very smart. They are a strange mixture of street smart and academic smart. They read lots of books. They run Linux, but they don’t run Ubuntu because it’s too mainstream. Their entire music library is in OggVorbis (I only ran into this once.)

The bottom line is, they aren’t just smart with a high IQ, they do the obscure smart people things. That should be pretty obvious. They read the facts and are well informed (but only on topics they care about, they aren’t as well rounded as some.) I’m not trying to say they are just tech nerds.

For instance. I prefer social situations and thought processes that aren’t so readily apparent to the mainstream eye. Not because I want to be edgy, but because the people that “get it” are passing my arbitrary litmus test of intelligence. A good example of an intellectual hipster would be the main character from Psych. He wasn’t just shouting off hundreds of pop culture references, he was using them in very intelligent ways that helped him with his investigations.

Anyone can make a joke. We’ve all seen America’s Funniest Videos. Intellectual hipsters make smart jokes. Jokes you have to think about. Their whole clique revolves around using your brain to figure out problems, and if you can’t get them you’re just another “normie.”

Intellectual hipsters work through life setting up elaborate traps and mental roadblocks to confuse and obfuscate the truth, so that the more intelligent person will see through the ruse but the other person will not. This is where we start to delve into metacontrarianism.

Being meta isn’t that hard. All it is is self-referential work. This is the art of being meta, but on the contrary.

Let’s say someone makes a huge argument about how violence against women is wrong. The metacontrarian comes in and just says “No it isn’t.

Now, I suppose you could confuse this for trolling. However, the difference between an intellectual hipster/metacontrarian and a troll is that a troll doesn’t want to get caught. The other prays and hopes that someone ‘gets it.’ Usually this is done by subtle hits in tone an inflection. There are little clues left all over the place to let the reader know they are only being contrary just because.

I make a lot of self-deprecating jokes, but I don’t really believe the things I say. I say it for effect, and I say it for aesthetic. In fact, almost everything I say is a misdirection and I have very hard time being serious. I make jokes about jokes, and I make bad jokes to be bad so that its poor quality becomes the joke. That’s a metacontrarian, and for some reason I feel smarter for doing it. So that makes me an intellectual hipster as well.

Sorry not sorry. Bye.

metacontrarians-intellectual-hipsterism

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