Then, one day, the bubble burst. The economy went into the toilet, reality set in, and many had a rude awakening.  It turns out that every hipster-wannabe was part of one of ten categories in a Hipster Handbook by Robert Lanham.  Originality Schmoriginality.

  While Lanham's book was just a gentle poke at hipsters, a stronger anti-hipster sentiment was beginning to develop, spearheaded by an ostensibly innocent blog by the name of the New York City Anti-Hipster Forum. Aimee Plumley, touted by many to be the anti-hipster saviour, ran the site. This was irrespective of the fact that she resembled a white upper middle class hipster herself. What genius! What would be more ironic than a hipster parodying herself?

The forum began in September 2002, and featured regular entries by Plumley, describing in explicit detail everything from encounters at the perennial hipster bar The Pink Pony, Friendster dates, and fake vintage t-shirts from Urban Outfitters. The writing was satirical, mostly conversational dialogue, and undeniably witty.

It boggled my mind. Who was Aimee Plumley? What were her motives in writing this Anti-Hipster blog?

I met up with the elusive Aimee Plumley at a pastry shop in Morningside Heights on a chilly November afternoon. Seated outside on the patio and ordering some warm tea, Plumley was not at all who I thought she would be. Not only that, but Plumley was not even female.

Aimee Plumley is actually Brian, a 25 year old from Colorado.   He arrived in New York almost two years ago to pursue a career in writing, in search of living the oft-fabled bohemian lifestyle. He was referred to Williamsburg, only to be dismayed at what he found.

"It's like Disneyland or something, this one big mass consumption pattern.   It's like a movie set, one of those places that are so highly coiffed to not look highly coiffed.   It was totally not what I had expected," he explained.

Brian admits that he had high expectations before coming to New York.   "I was so taken aback by it all, and didn't realize there was such a prescribed industry for being cool and looking cool."

Why then, did Brian choose to write from the point of view of Aimee Plumley, rather than as a white male from the Midwest?

"I think it's fun to have a pseudonym, and I don't think enough people do so.   It's sort of liberating, freeing myself from constraints to, in a sense, 'hone my inner bitch.' At the same time, I can't really disclose a lot of facts about my life without blowing the cover, and it's been difficult working my way out of it."

Brian's dislike of hipsters stems from an insincerity that they seem to project to him. This insincerity materialized itself in the form of a hipster musicologist when he first arrived in New York two years ago.

"I went to a house party in Greenpoint with a friend of mine who was a professional musician. We were talking to this hipster guy who claimed that he was a musicologist.   He started naming off all these bands, and my friend, being the good natured guy he is, told the guy that he hadn't really heard of any of the bands that the hipster was mentioning.   'You must not listen to any music,' he said to my friend. 'What do you do for a living?' And my friend was just like, 'Well actually, I'm a professional musician.' I just found that so absurd."

While that entry, entitled "The Musicologist", is 100% true, the entries from that point on were about 10% truth and 90% fiction.   I am baffled by how one singular, seemingly minute event would have such a huge impact on so much of one person's writing. I ask Brian why he chose to pick on hipsters.

"Well, they're an easy target, easily lambasted. I think people will look back at the hipster phenomenon with some kind of discerning eye and I think it's a worthy subject although it doesn't seem like that from the outset. It's not serious, but it's definitely something that has infiltrated our culture.   By that virtue, I think it should be dealt with, [and] criticized and examined."

Hipsters, as much as we don't want to believe it, do have a large impact.   According to the New York Times, tapping into hipsters and trends is a big business for Youth Intelligence, who creates the Cassandra Report.   The company taps 300 hipsters as to what they think is "next" or "cool", and this is communicated in a report which they sell to companies like Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Target and Nike. This information is then used in advertising and product development and repackaged for the "mainstream" consumer.

Vice Magazine, over the past 3 or 4 years, has been expanding their incredibly strong brand horizontally into films, music, television, and marketing.   They have been typically lumped into the hipster bunch, while the validity of such a classification is up for argument.   I ask Brian his thoughts on the magazine.

"I don't like it, because they are just this tremendous brand.   It seems a bit convergent, considering that Nike and Starbucks are these tremendous brands, and their main audience are people who wouldn't like Nike or Starbucks, because they're too 'big'.   They have these big money backers, jumping on the wagon probably without reading it or seeing what it's about," he says.

"I mean, they have a nice layout, and it's obvious that they have great business savvy, but I don't think their message is positive."   He thinks about it for a second.  

"Although my message isn't positive either. It's very conflicted - I think I just get a visceral nasty reaction from them," he says, a little flustered.

Brian admits that he does have some hipster friends, he does have a Friendster profile (for material of course), and reads Pitchfork and Craigslist.   One of his hipster friends was unknowingly his feeder into the hipster world, and didn't realize this until a year later.  

"He had a good sense of humour about it, and when I admitted to him that I had been 'Aimee Plumley' he told me that he had been to the site a number of times and enjoyed it. I know him as a person, and I know from afar it's easy to criticize people."

He pauses.

"I suppose that if I did get to know some of these 'hipster' people I'm sure I would find that they had redeeming qualities. But as a whole, they seem like they're very manipulative."

Brian is well aware that he has been flogging a dead horse for the past year with the Anti-Hipster Forum.

"I don't know where to go with it, and I don't have time to update it.   So I'm letting it age gradually," he says.

Brian did make some plans to put together his hipster stories into a novella.   For now, he continues to work a 9-5 job for a large news organization, and is in the process of writing a "hot burning love story" about young love.

"I'm trying to get out of this anti-hipster, or anti-whatever stuff. I think it's bad for the soul to be so mean, and in the end it might come back to you. To some extent, it's cathartic, but I think if I continue I'll probably get an ulcer or start losing my hair."