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.

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 you’re 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 Levi’s 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 Penguin’s 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 there’s a passage from his book All Tomorrow’s 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 Tomorrow’s 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 we’re in a post-industrial, post-geographical world, so I thought we could look at bohemias in
the physical world (‘meatspace’) and see whether comparable space to dream exists in the digital world (‘cyberspace’
- 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. “We 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.”
Yishin Wong, CEO, Reddit
Cyberspace
Reddit
Second Life
Real Name policies on Google and Facebook

8. Each one would have a dress code,
Meatspace
Punks

9. Cyberspace
Avatars & Duckface

10. characteristic forms of artistic expression,
Meatspace
Merry Pranksters
Beat Poets
artists and photographers of Montmartre etc

11. Cyberspace
Every meme a characteristic form of artistic expression
The GIF

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...

14. sexual values at odds with
the culture at large
meatspace

15. cyberspace
cybersex

16. and they did frequently have locales
with which they became associated
meatspace
Montparnasse
Mitte

17. Greenwich village
North Beach
Soho

18. And of course Skardarlija right here in Belgrade

19. Cyberspace
Every social network is its own closed circle

20. The darknet
And like the real world often viewed with suspicion and hostility by ‘the culture at large’

21. Eve Online - ‘what happens when the biggest trolls on the internet are given access to an advanced economy and
spaceships’

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? Where’s the space?

25. The good news - it’s all space, it’s all backwaters

26. Space
Needs
Difference
It’s what we do with those spaces that’s important. Own your own domain name, own some hosting, stay private,
stay independent. The world doesn’t need another facebook app or duckface. Difference needs space, but space
needs creative people to stay weird, stay different.

27. ‘Today truly is a wide open frontier. It is the
best time EVER in human history to begin.’
Kevin Kelly
It’s a great time to be alive and creative on the internet. The foundations are there, but we’re only just beginning. I
called this talk ‘where culture goes to dream’. We, the creatives, are the dreamers. It’s 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