BBH Labs thought it was being clever, and perhaps even slightly humanitarian, when, at this year’s South by SouthWest technology conference, it enlisted thirteen volunteers from a homeless shelter, strapped Wi-Fi devices onto their bodies, gave them business cards and T-shirts that read, (for example), “I’m Clarence, a 4G Hotspot” and sent them out into the throngs of the technorati to keep their phones and laptops humming. The volunteers were paid $20 a day, and any “tips” customers gave them for the wireless services provided.
Tweetstorms, and accusations of BBH’s marketing ploy being “something out of a darkly satirical science-fiction dystopia” duly follow. The central accusation? That BBH had ‘dehumanized’ the homeless by turning them into providers of Wi-Fi services. BBH’s volunteers, note, did not say “I am Clarence and I can provide you wireless services for a fee’. Rather they were the service, by being the HotSpot (I’m a Hotspot). Without exaggeration, this controversy would have been considerably less acute had the former line been used.
BBH’s stunt is not markedly different from the many ways in which the human body is utilized for marketing: young women wearing tight T-shirts advertise car-washes, human Statues of Liberty advocate for tax-return preparation services, animal-suit-wearing-youngsters advertise electronic goods sales. The list of these humiliating encounters with some advertising agency’s brainstorm is a very, very long one. (The dogged persistence of these human billboards in adverse weather conditions often seems like a particularly cruel instantiation of “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers…”)
Given the ubiquity of such advertising strategies, it is perhaps astonishing that we have any outrage left over to be directed at BBH. And in each of these scenarios, were accusations of dehumanization to be leveled, the defense mounted would always be the same, “What would you have the unemployed do? Stand around at street corners, selling drugs?” Or, “Gee, we tried to provide employment to people, give them some dignity and this is what we get in return.”
The fallacy of the false dichotomy was never on better display. Apparently, car washes cannot be advertised without skimpily-clad women, tax services without mobile Statues of Liberty and so on. Similarly, there was no better way for BBH to have shown its support for the homeless than by making them into mobile HotSpots. No more visible, provocative, or genuinely-engaging-with-the-homeless-issue strategy was possible other than by using their bodies as wireless hubs, and paying them what seems like below-minimum-wage rates (plus tips). Thus, straightforwardly, “We need to advertise our services and there is no way we can do so without dehumanizing these employees of ours. If not this, then unemployment. The choice is clear: so-called ‘dignity’ or employment? Make up your minds.”
Even if fallacious, there is something admirably honest in this defense: Business riches and profit margins require the immiseration of one class with the exploitation of the human body in the workplace one its resultant side-effects. BBH might not have had this explicitly in mind, but at the least, they, and their defenders appear to have successfully internalized a very particular component of the corporate zeitgeist.
Samir Chopra 