Warren: hipster antitrust nerd

Hey Hipster:

What the heck is hipster antitrust and why does it keep showing up in my news feed? I’m not even exactly sure what regular antitrust is (except I think it has something to do with Theodore Roosevelt and John D. Rockefeller), and I definitely had no idea there was a hipster version floating around now. Do actual hipsters have anything to do with it, or is this just a thing?

— T.S.

Well, this is the week I have to sing for my supper. I guess it can’t always be “lol hipsters” and jokes about moustaches.

You could go Google “hipster” right now, but I’ll save you the time and breakdown the results. The search will return 60 percent worthless listicles about “39 Times Hipsters Went Too Far!” and 39 percent ads for women’s underwear. The remainder will consist of a link to this column (if I’m lucky that week), something to do with Vice news, at least one link to the story that won’t die about the guy who mistook a stock photo of a hipster for himself, and at least one hit for something to do with hipster antitrust. It’s out there, waiting to perplex your newsfeed.

Pop quiz. Hipster antitrust is:

(A) The new Diplo collab with Gustavo Dudamel;

(B) A theory of anticompetitive business practices focused on the economic structure of a given industry rather than the effects of monopoly power on consumer prices; or

(C) Antitrust... but with a moustache (always room for a moustache joke).

I’ll give you an example. Mainstream antitrust has no problem with Amazon, because you can get your Sloth hoodies and knockoff selfie sticks at borderline wholesale prices. Hipster antitrust doesn’t care about how it’s cheaper to get Oreos delivered by Prime than it is to go buy them yourself. Instead, it regards with deep suspicion the probable future where there is only one store that sells everything to everyone; because what could possibly go wrong with that?

You’re probably hearing about it these days because Presidential hopeful and huge nerd Elizabeth Warren (who for sure has no idea who Diplo is or what he does) is all about some hipster antitrust.

To answer your final question, real hipsters had absolutely no part in coming up with this idea. They are too busy being hungover and complaining about Boomers. As near as I can tell, critics created the “hipster antitrust” moniker as an immediate way to signal their displeasure, and as a means of signalling to like-minded people that hipster antitrust should be immediately mistrusted, as if it were a guy trying to sell you an ASMR recording of artisanal keyboard sounds.

However, I think there’s delightful irony in all this. Hipster antitrust proponents would surely prefer an economy built on small, locally owned businesses dealing in a wide array of quirky trades and products that would go unprovided in a market dominated by businesses appealing to the lowest common denominator of competition. In that way, hipster antitrust is actually kind of hipster, even if the people who named it couldn’t tell a real hipster from a hole in the ground. Even the proverbial blind squirrel finds a single-origin heirloom acorn every now and again.