<P> The subculture rapidly expanded, and after World War II, a burgeoning literary scene grew up around it . Jack Kerouac described 1940s hipsters as "rising and roaming America, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere (as) characters of a special spirituality". Toward the beginning of his poem Howl, Allen Ginsberg mentioned "angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night". In his essay "The White Negro", Norman Mailer characterized hipsters as American existentialists, living a life surrounded by death--annihilated by atomic war or strangled by social conformity--and electing instead to "divorce (themselves) from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self". </P> <P> Hipsters are the friends who sneer when you cop to liking Coldplay . They're the people who wear t - shirts silk - screened with quotes from movies you've never heard of and the only ones in America who still think Pabst Blue Ribbon is a good beer . They sport cowboy hats and berets and think Kanye West stole their sunglasses . Everything about them is exactingly constructed to give off the vibe that they just don't care . </P> <P> In early 2000, both The New York Times and Time Out New York ran profiles of Williamsburg, Brooklyn without using the term hipster . The Times referred to "bohemians" and TONY to "arty East Village types". By 2003, when The Hipster Handbook was published by Williamsburg resident Robert Lanham, the term had come into widespread use in relation to Williamsburg and similar neighborhoods . The Hipster Handbook described hipsters as young people with "mop - top haircuts, swinging retro pocketbooks, talking on cell phones, smoking European cigarettes...strutting in platform shoes with a biography of Che Guevara sticking out of their bags". Lanham further describes hipsters: "You graduated from a liberal arts school whose football team hasn't won a game since the Reagan administration" and "you have one Republican friend who you always describe as being your' one Republican friend ."' One author dates the initial phase of the revival of the term from 1999 to 2003 . </P> <P> A similar phenomenon occurred in the United Kingdom, with young workers in the media and digital industries moving into traditional working class areas of London such as Hoxton, Spitalfields, and, particularly, Shoreditch . The subculture was parodied in the magazine Shoreditch Twat (1999) and the television sitcom Nathan Barley (2005). The series, about a self - described "self - facilitating media node", led to the term "Nathan Barleys" being used pejoratively to describe the culture it parodied . </P>

What do you call a group of hipsters