DieHipster.Wordpress.com, a WordPress-based snark blog that bills itself as “A place for real New Yorkers to vent about the invasion of attention starved, useless adults that we know as hipsters” has recently focused its lazer-like gift of useless verbiage on NERBC and USBC competition barista Mike Jones. Mike fell under the glare of DieHipster.Wordpress.com’s “spotlight” while working at noted Manhattan cafe Third Rail. From their posting, titled “The Barista Olympics” and featuring a photo of Mr. Jones:
“This uniqueย and quirky individual has chosen coffee as his hipster shtick.ย At age 25, his accomplishment and contribution to society is designing latte foam. Also if Iโm not mistaken, he is the first person to wear a fedora, thick frames and tattoo sleeve simultaneously. Wow, a true pioneer. I guarantee you this annoying bastardย somehow manages to pay for an over-priced โโcool nabeโย apartment, a collection of i-Products, a wardrobe of over-priced ironic t-shirts and vintageย hipster accessories all on a baristaโs salary.”
The post also features 175 (and counting!) comments from enlightened and erudite DieHipster.Wordpress.com readers. Highlights include: “you have to treat these people like a roach or rodent infestation“, “Can he just pour me a rilly kewel cup of coffee to go in 30 seconds, so I can get to my JOB on time?“, and “I was a professional Barista too. When I was 16 years old in high school. Then I grew up“. Another poster offered extensive Wikipedia quotations to assert that Mike Jones is a “21st Century Remittance Man”, an embarrassment to his family, and the owner of a purposeless life.
All in all, DieHipster.Wordpress.com and its learned, reasonable cadre of readers are merely actors in an on-going urban culture play with deep roots in the American experience. We’ve been collectively ridiculing others for their physical appearance since the dawn of this very nation. Their comments remind us of “We Hate Irishmen”, an informal news magazine published in New York’s 5 Points neighborhood in the mid-19th century. There, features with headlines like “Sully O’Sullivan, Silly Smithee” or “John John Flaherty, Maker Of Meat Pies” evoked countless vitriolic letters of agreement to the WHI editorial staff. Or let’s not forget the San Francisco-based railroad era monthly publication “Laundry Quandry”, in which staff and readers alike were permitted endless racial epithets, each more pointed than the last, directed at the Bay Area’s sizable Chinese immigrant population.
To the author of DieHipster.Wordpress.com, an editorial note: there is nothing, and we mean nothing, more quintessentially hipstery than owning and operating on a daily basis your very own blogatorial font of snark and bullshit. Trust us. You’re like that girl in high school who tried to crack wise like Daria Morgendorffer, but without a team of writers. Quit ripping off Vice Magazine.
And to Mike Jones…keep turnin’ heads. We love you.
