Every year 2,000 exhibitors rent 2 million square feet of convention space in Las Vegas, the synthetic city. Every year more than 100,000 people stroll through this grand flea market to sell, buy, or promote a bit of the future.
The fall Comdex is the most important annual trade show for digital consumers. Every year 2,000 exhibitors rent 2 million square feet of convention space in Las Vegas, the synthetic city. Every year more than 100,000 people stroll through this grand flea market to sell, buy, or promote a bit of The Future.
The Moronic Inferno is a book title that Martin Amis took from Saul Bellow, who took it from Wyndham Lewis. We now take it to christen Comdex.
For one week Comdex convenes a socioeconomic nation - the future of advanced capitalism - which many of us only read hints of in the business section of our morning papers.
Don't think Comdex is just a carnival of booths - it's a war zone. The companies are going at it banner to banner, promotion to promotion, image to image.
The crowd on the floor is so afraid of missing the new, the hot, the latest, that - like ravaging insects - it seizes every brochure, every press release at every booth, laid in its path like bait.
Comdex is a jarring urbanscape - Microsoft's cathedral and Vivid Video's porn shop, 3M's Century City tower, and Micrographx's armadillo racetrack - a sprawl of (mostly) men and moving things in which you lose your way and your head.
More than 100,000 digital road builders live out the simulacra of Steven Spielberg. A simulacrum, like the entirety of Comdex, is a substitution where you forget what the substitute is substituting for.
The floor is Fellini's Satyricon - a city of hell that is laid out, every booth and footprint of it, as entertainment.
At Comdex, the gold of the future - info tech - is transmuted into lead, the whole cosmology of retailing and reselling. The nerds hit pay dirt and party out, but do they know what to do with their treasure?
