Since creativity is so closely linked with novelty, it's necessarily shallow, fixated on surfaces. This may explain our culture's current fascination with design independent of function in such things as Apple's products, Wes Anderson's films, Ikea's furniture, Target's inventory. Because evident attention has been laboriously paid to the way these things look, they seem to exude creativity, even though they often fail to provide the basic functionality we'd hope from them, as when the touch wheel on the iPod becomes acutely sensitive, or the Ikea shelf warps on the first humid day, or the hermetic Wes Anderson film meanders pointlessly without ever engaging an audience emotionally.
In Hanson's view, people "often join the crowd behind a new idea just to declare their creativity, which distracts them from really trying to make that new idea work". One's eagerness to signify one's creativity becomes a surrogate for actual innovation. This recapitulates the hipster's dilemma (and the hippie's dilemma, before), especially for arrivistes whose primary creative insight is to appear on a scene already reputed to welcome and nourish artists: By moving to the right neighborhood they signal their desire to appear creative and associate themselves with it, but they can't ever be sure if they are being creative, which, after all, is impossible to measure. Again, like Calvinists who stockpile life's finer things in hopes of shoring up their sense of themselves as elect, hipsters surround themselves with the trappings of creativity and trust that this substantiates their claim to being cool.
Thus if we want to consider ourselves one of the special creatives, we are obliged to take great pains to seem creative and must figure out just how to decorate and fly our freak flag. We have to identify the most important up-and-coming trends, seizing on them and broadcasting our choices to everyone -- wearing the right clever T-shirt, living in the appropriate zip code, dropping the names of the correct films and bands and artists and writers, carrying the newest gadgets, and make sure everybody notices us doing it. I don't know about you, but I think I'd rather cut my hair.