The hipster effect: Why anti-conformists always end up looking the same - MIT Technology Review

Complexity science explains why efforts to reject the mainstream merely result in a new conformity.... mathematician who studies the way the transmission of information through society influences the behavior of people ... in a vast range of scenarios, the hipster population always undergoes a kind of phase transition in which members become synchronized ...
a computer model that simulates how agents interact when some follow the majority and the rest oppose it.... generates some fantastically complex behaviors...could be useful for understanding financial systems in which speculators attempt to make money by taking decisions that oppose the majority in a stock exchange..