Self-righteous anger is all the rage these days.
The target of the outrage and angst rarely matters, but what does is the self-righteous feeling of indignation that comes from slights, real or perceived, which can range from anything like people not agreeing with your politics to movies not meeting a fan’s exacting and idiosyncratic standards.
Imagine you’re a hardworking male hipster model trying to make a name for himself in the world of stock photography. Of course, you can’t pick who uses your photography, but you can put certain usage limitations on it, such as making sure that you are described as a model if the photo is used for an article that could in any way be perceived as disparaging or negative.
And when someone like MIT’s Technology Review uses your picture for an article titled, “The hipster effect: Why anti-conformists always end up looking the same,” you might have a case for misuse of your picture.
But you don’t have a case for slander.
That didn’t stop one man from furiously writing to the MIT Technology Review to let them know that his picture was misused and that he considered the article and associated image slanderous.
Except for it wasn’t him in the photo.
It was a different male hipster model.
Rarely does life provide such clean QED moments, but the moment when a hipster male model is outraged by an article saying all hipsters basically look the same only to discover that he is not the model in question in the photo is too precious to pass up.
Editor-in-chief Gideon Lichfield tweeted: “We promptly got a furious email from a man who said he was the guy in the photo that ran with the story. He accused us of slandering him, presumably by implying he was a hipster, and of using the pic without his permission. (He wasn't too complimentary about the story, either.) …He’d misidentified himself. All of which just proves the story we ran: Hipsters look so much alike that they can’t even tell themselves apart from each other.”
1 Comment
LOL! 🙂