In Defense of Pointlessly Collecting Hats That Don't Exist

In 2020’s summer pandemic doldrums, I began a new morning ritual. I started a Twitter account called This Hat Does Not Exist, which simply retweets posts from This Person Does Not Exist that include hats. The latter account, created by Babak Fakhamzadeh, automatically generates headshots of algorithmic people and funny little biographical captions.

The “people” of TPDNE look uncannily real at first glance, even if sometimes they appear slightly off-kilter or eating their own mangled fingers. Most fans of TPDNE focus on the eerily repulsive “side demons”—the often mutated partial beings lurking just out of frame that pop up every once in a while.

But for some reason I was more interested in the hats. They encapsulate the uncanny valley effect in a soothingly mundane way. In most cases these hats could absolutely plausibly exist. They just wouldn’t be very good hats. They’re like the hats made by a home crafter who’s just starting out and isn’t very skilled at knitting.

One of the most common hats is a sort of pullover toboggan thing. Shapeless, thick, ill-fitting, questionably stitched and not very comfortable-looking. These come in all colors, sizes, and pseudo-fabrics.

Presumably because a lot of TPDNE’s source imagery comes from graduation photos, quite a few of its subjects are wearing mortarboard hats. But usually these are weirdly tall or attenuated.

There’s also a lot of baseball caps, frequently emblazoned with a nonsensical symbols or gibberish that could almost be a sports logo. I spent some time trying to figure out if I could get these symbols printed on actual hats to sell, but that appears beyond the practical economies of niche boutique hatmaking.

Of course some hats are quite outlandish—still believable albeit tacky.

Other hats do not appear to be of this world. They do not fully exist in our physical dimensions, though it may take a second glance to see where the hat is going awry in terms of physics.

And still other hats don’t look right in isolation but seem to really go correctly with their people. Like I do not believe this hat would exist, but I do believe it exists in context on this guy.

I especially believe this hat on this particular guy. This is definitely the hat of a 48-year-old swinger who lives in the Philippines and is named Seth Hopkins. No notes.

One rare but regular subgenre of hat is a sort of headdress or bonnet that looks organic, possibly even like brain tissue growing out of the cranium of the subject. Very Annihilation.

Rarely a hat appears imbued with strange and powerful energies, though it’s unclear if the hat grants its power to the wearer or vice versa.

And then sometimes a hat takes over completely, infesting the head, hair, clothing, and soul of its wearer. In fact, in this case one could argue that the hat is wearing the person.

So those are some hats. Who cares? I’m not even sure I care. Almost every day, with my first sip of morning coffee, I check the TPDNE feed for hats and dutifully retweet any I find. I’m certainly not smart enough to automate the process, so it’s manual retweets all the way. But it might take thirty seconds, and I’ve completed a task! Hooray!

This could not be more pointless. This Hat Does Not Exist has 190 followers. There is no goal here, no side hustle that might eventually generate anything. It’s the opposite of the dopamine hit from social media engagement. And yet it’s satisfying in its way—like marking an X on a calendar to indicate another day has passed. Or another day has begun.