The London Lounge

You know how it is. You’ve waxed your moustache, rented a warehouse apartment with artfully bare walls, and bought a lumberjack shirt that demonstrates the right level of indifference about fashion.

Then you find your new neighbour has a waxed moustache, a lumberjack shirt, and walls that shed brick dust into his pumpkin spice latte.

Don’t put it down to your unoriginality and slavish conformity, though — blame the laws of statistical physics. A French mathematician has concluded that, however much hipsters wish to be different, they are all doomed to end up with the same fixed-gear bicycles and ironic waistcoats.

In a paper titled The hipster effect: When anticonformists all look the same, Jonathan Touboul,of the Mathematical Neuroscience Laboratory at the Collège de France, looks at the “non-concerted emergent collective phenomenon of looking alike [while] trying to look different”.

His intention was to model a mathematical system in which a large proportion of the members are motivated by being the opposite of all others.

Dr Touboul said: “In neuroscience, lots of phenomena are collective. Some neurons have the ability to inhibit others — when they are active, others are silent; and when they are silent, others can be active.If you want to do as the others do it’s a stable situation. You detect a trend and do the same thing. If you want to be different, though, if you want not to conform, it’s much more complicated.”

There are obvious applications to stock markets, where people benefit from making trades before others and not following the herd, but Dr Touboul noticed its effects on Paris’s hipsters. “What I found is if it takes some time for hipsters to detect a trend, they will all synchronise,” he said of the work in the journal ArXiv. “They all make the same choice at the same time, and then realise they are aligned.”

In his particular circle of hipster hell, just as someone hits on, say, playing the sousaphone while smoking a pipe, they discover the whole of Shoreditch is strolling around puffing away with esoteric brass instruments. Or, as he puts it, there is a “synchronisation of hipsters”.

The thermodynamic limit of the system can be described as a jump process whose jump statistics depend on a self-consistent quantity. In detail, in the limit n → ∞, individuals behave independently (a property similar to Boltzmann’s molecular chaos, called propagation of chaos property in mathematics [11]), and therefore the jump rate s → −s averages out to φ(ερε(t)s)