Economics of geeks and hipsters

People want as much out of life as possible. One way of doing that is to maximize lifetime earnings. Another way is to maximize consumer surplus. When a marginal increase in earnings become too costly in time and energy, it is more efficient to start increasing consumer surplus. This leads to fragmentation of how people consume things. Hipsters and geeks are examples of this. The markets also respond by fragmentation.

Consumer surplus is the maximum price you would pay for a thing, minus what you actually paid for it. A person who likes standard milk chocolate, loves it even more than expensive chocolate, makes a killing in terms of consumer surplus, since milk chocolate is quite cheap. Appreciating second hand apparel could likewise make living in a first world country satisfying and affordable at the same time. Or old vinyl records. So that's an economic rationale for hipster culture. The advantage of consuming forgotten things (that are still commercially available) disappear when those things become retro, and price increases. A hipster who buys an overpriced item has in a sense failed (if the item was actually unappreciated, then it wouldn't be expensive). Then, that person is not a hipster but just someone who follows fashion. 

Now to geek culture. Being a geek is about doing one thing intensively at the expense of ignoring other things to the point that the it becomes problematic or embarrassing [1]. Sacrifice plays a part in geekiness. Hipsters don't want others infringing on their thing because it decreases consumer surplus, and geeks don't want it because it decreases the value of something that they have sacrificed for. When this happens, geeks either shrug and keep doing their thing (may be a sign of social illiteracy), or move into even geekier territory. This creates a market for even more specialized things. 

[1] Famous people who became famous through their own efforts are geeks who were lucky enough to be geeky about something that others became interested in later. Applies to arts, including science and development.