The first thing to know about a hipster is that he is not aware of being one, or at least would never admit to being one. Indeed, the worst thing one of this breed can accuse the other of being would be a hipster. (The second-worst thing would be a marketer.)

Hipster has become a derogatory term. (To prove this, you can go to the uber-hipster music review site Pitchfork, and search for “hipster”, and you will, amusingly, get not a single result. Term not found. That’s like searching Cuba and not finding the word communism. Hipsterdom is furiously and determinedly not aware of itself.)

You can already identify them by their appearance: the narrow jeans, the plaid shirts, the facial hair, the second-hand dresses, the heavy glasses, the woolen hats worn in withering heat, the canvas sneakers worn in slushy cold. (Discomfort is crucial to the hipster aesthetic.)

Fine, but what do hipsters do all day? Well, the one defining thing about a hipster is that he must think of himself as an artist or at least as primarily creative. The favourite hipster art form is music, so all hipsters are, almost by definition, in a band, but they may also work peripherally in that industry, for a record label, or as a technician, or as a music writer for a free weekly magazine or a blog.

Note that hipster music is not at all arch and difficult and impenetrable – only a few of them are into experimental electronica or new classical music. Hipsters are generally afraid of the highbrow; they are terrified of the overly serious, which strikes them as pretentious. This is why they temper all their art with pop-culture references. In fact, perfect hipster music is quite mild and often silly pop music, or earnest and whiny folk.

Hipsters are also interested in visual art, so they may paint or do sound installations or make videos, or they may make and sell their own clothes or jewellery. They are very adept with computers, and so many will subsidize their artistic activity by doing web design for “douchebags” at advertising agencies, and a great part of their social discourse will revolve around complaining about their unbearably conservative clients.

One very commercial thing that hipsters do not, curiously, disdain, is social networking, and so they are all on Facebook and Twitter. The musicians still maintain MySpace pages, too, because of that network’s capacity for uploading samples of their music. Of course I hardly need mention that a true hipster will avoid LinkedIn as one might avoid a Jack Astor’s, for fear of contamination by douchebag contact.

What are hipster political views? Vaguely leftist but basically apathetic and non-committal. Hipsters do not get involved with politics. The only political issue they are likely to be passionate about is environmentalism. That’s the default hipster cause. Vegan and organic food and bicycle lanes and neighbourhood preservation are offshoots of that, but the anti-gentrification neighbourhood preservation thing is really merely a form of self-interested snobbery.

Okay, it’s time now to address some overlaps with other species. It can be difficult to distinguish between a hipster and an emo. Emos are angst-rock listening kids also with tattoos and skinny jeans and lots of floppy hair. Their markings can make them look a lot like hipsters, particularly in low light. But the primary distinction is one of habitat: emos live in suburbs and small towns. Hipsters are a purely downtown species. And emos are, as their name confirms, emotional; their music is unabashedly angry and violent and fast, they’re not afraid of a kind of stadium-rock sound too, which strikes the laid-back cool hipster as overblown. Emos, fundamentally, are not ironic enough.

And there’s a class distinction at work here. Hipsters, despite their determinedly working-class accoutrements and poses, are by and large middle class youth, the children of professionals and white-collar workers. And as such they are largely white. Indie rock itself is largely white. So hip as they are, they represent a strangely old-fashioned thing, even in the multiethnic downtown – they represent ethnic segregation.

Hipsters choose bohemianism, an anti-materialist student lifestyle, they are not forced into it. They disdain “superficial” fancy night clubs and martini bars; they would never be caught in a very large nightclubs of Richmond street. They generally do not shop, either, outside organic markets and vintage clothing stores; they don’t go to malls.

The multi-ethnic young people who do go to martini bars with velvet ropes and have jobs in the private sector and are interested in business, the people who actually buy things — are they influenced in their fashions and their lifestyle choices by the so-called early adopters, the hipsters? I’m not really sure they are, and that’s why I don’t think marketers should be wasting any effort targeting hipsters with any marketing campaign – they will recognize it and despise it right away.

You may point out that hipsters, who are so obsessed with creating the perfect uniform, are obviously drivers of fashion and so possibly influential in this way. But that brings up another subtle and difficult distinction: what’s the difference between a hipster and a fashionista? Contemporary high fashion certainly borrows a great deal from the hipster esthetic, and vice versa. The guy covered in tattoos and hidden by a mammoth beard, riding his fixed-gear bicycle and wearing a saggy wool tuque in the middle of summer I am tempted to call a douchester, and he is so fashion conscious he must indeed be vulnerable to the evillest of subliminal and manipulative of advertising you can inflict on him.

Go nuts, you have my blessing.