Channelling William Gibson and Kevin Kelly at Belgrade Design Week, Jeremy Ettinghausen of BBH & BBH Labs looks at bohemias in the physical world and online. To be creative demands time and space, but with creativity also comes the obligation to create difference.
Powerful Google developer tools for immediate impact! (2023-24 C)
Â
Where culture dreams
1. WHERE CULTURE GOES TO DREAM
Belgrade Design Week
Jeremy Ettinghausen, BBH Labs
@bbhlabs/@jeremyet
BBH Labs
Thanks for inviting BBH to Belgrade. I hope youâre not going to be disappointed that the next 30 minutes is not going
to be filled with a showreel of adverts from the last 30-odd years. But I will show you one advert that is important to
BBH as an agency and important for this talk.
2. This was the first ad we did for Leviâs back in 1982 and has come to be emblematic for BBH and our belief in the
power of difference. Not simply difference for the sake of it, but difference to create space for brands to grow.
3. I arrived at BBH from a very different place, Penguin Books. Publishing is a very traditional industry operating in a
period of massive change. As Penguinâs first Digital Publisher I got to draw on blank canvas unencumbered by
precedent. There were no rules and freedom to experiment.
4. WILD WEST
It was like the wild west, with the whole digital frontier open and available. I could do things that were different
because there was the space to do so.
I also got to work with one of my favourite authors and thereâs a passage from his book All Tomorrowâs Parties that I
wanted to talk about today.
5. Bohemias. Alternative subcultures. They were a crucial
aspect of industrial civilization in the previous two
centuries. They were where industrial civilization went to
dream...
But they became extinct ... Authentic subcultures
required backwaters, and time, and there are no more
backwaters
William Gibson, All Tomorrowâs Parties
This passage, this thought is about difference and space - the need to have spaces where creative people can
experiment with different ways of doing things, different dreams. Gibson is talking about the physical world, real
urban places and now weâre in a post-industrial, post-geographical world, so I thought we could look at bohemias in
the physical world (âmeatspaceâ) and see whether comparable space to dream exists in the digital world (âcyberspaceâ
- another Gibson invention).
6. Text
A sort of unconscious R&D,
exploring alternate societal strategies.
Meatspace
The Bauhaus movement
The Kibbutz movement
Burning Man
7. âWe consider ourselves not just a company running a
website where one can post links and discuss them, but
the government of a new type of community.â
Yishin Wong, CEO, Reddit
Cyberspace
Reddit
Second Life
Real Name policies on Google and Facebook
12. a substance or substances of choice,
meatspace
Brassai with opium in paris
Opiates always a popular bohemian choice
Red wine and benzedrine for the beats
LSD for the hippies
13. Cyberspace
Artisanal coffee? Red Bull? Mountain dew? Prescription pharms?
No, approval is the drug that keeps the internet ticking over...
20. The darknet
And like the real world often viewed with suspicion and hostility by âthe culture at largeâ
21. Eve Online - âwhat happens when the biggest trolls on the internet are given access to an advanced economy and
spaceshipsâ
22. Difference
Needs
Space
Parallels between physical world and digital world shows that difference needs space to thrive - as Gibson says, time
and backwaters, but...
23. There are no more backwaters.
the backwaters are disappearing in the physical world. Commoditisation of cool and of property. Everywhere looks
the same. A mobile phone shop on every corner.
24. Who owns the future?
Jaron Lanier Cyberspace also crowded. More video content uploaded each hour than an individual can watch in a lifetime. Trillions
of web pages. Billions of domain names. Where are the backwaters? Whereâs the space?
25. The good news - itâs all space, itâs all backwaters
26. Space
Needs
Difference
Itâs what we do with those spaces thatâs important. Own your own domain name, own some hosting, stay private,
stay independent. The world doesnât need another facebook app or duckface. Difference needs space, but space
needs creative people to stay weird, stay different.
27. âToday truly is a wide open frontier. It is the
best time EVER in human history to begin.â
Kevin Kelly
Itâs a great time to be alive and creative on the internet. The foundations are there, but weâre only just beginning. I
called this talk âwhere culture goes to dreamâ. We, the creatives, are the dreamers. Itâs our responsibility to create the
spaces for us to dream, dream different and dream big.
28. THANK YOU
Jeremy Ettinghausen, BBH Labs
@bbhlabs/@jeremyet
BBH Labs