Sam Kriss has a post on nerds and hipsters. I think he gets the hipsters right, but bungles the nerds.
Hipsters, he says, are an information sorting algorithm. They discover things, then place them on the altar of Fame so everyone else can enjoy them. Before the Beatles were so canonical that they were impossible to miss, someone had to go to some dingy bar in Liverpool, think “Hey, these guys are really good”, and report that fact somewhere everyone else could see it.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-kriss-on-nerds-and-hipsters
