The ad agency Bartle, Bogle, and Hegarty pronounces on their website, “When the world zigs, zag.” Their “innovation unit” is apparently zagging all over Austin with the year’s most seemingly parodic South by Southwest idea: “Homeless Hotspots,” in which humans without anywhere to live are paid to give off an Internet signal. “The hot spot is a way for them to tell their story,” said the director of BBH labs; taking donations is an added bonus, as is the T-shirt declaring, for instance, “I’m Clarence, a 4G Hotspot.” It’s legitimately hard to tell if the “raising awareness” argument is sincere, albeit tone-deaf, activism or a high-concept publicity stunt (or both). Wired said it “sounds like something out of a darkly satirical science-fiction dystopia,” but this pilot program would probably also be embraced in Portlandia.
