I was somewhere around the Aria, on the edge of Las Vegas Strip, when the drugs (two DayQuil tablets) began to take hold. I had been running around all day, lugging a brown leather satchel, a recorder, a notebook, and an acid-green lanyard from which dangled a badge with a photo of my face, my name, a QR code, and the label MEDIA. I had just left the Bellagio’s Monet Salon, where I had attended a 100-person China Night – a gala, really, complete with cream-coloured tablecloths, wrought-iron chandeliers, and liveried waiters. The men and women at the tables wore dark business suits and pantsuits. There was a stage at the bottom of the hall, where a presenter introduced a series of high-profile speakers.
Said speakers spoke while the diners wolfed down filets mignons with a side of mashed potatoes and wine reduction, followed by tiramisus in edible bowls. I only had a hazy idea of what the speakers had been talking about: they all spoke Mandarin (Microsoft vice president David Chen had started in English, before cruelly disabusing me) and the simultaneous translation, done with a speech-recognition algorithm and projected in minuscule font on a screen, returned gems such as “The refrigerator is turned into a headset.” But the feeling from everyone in the room was clear: that China was getting ahead of the West in every single technology field. Artificial intelligence? Covered. Virtual and augmented reality? Covered. All-around innovation? Ahead, totally.
I was nibbling on the mashed potatoes when someone tapped me on the shoulder and asked whether I wanted to chat with Lei Chen, the CEO of cloud computing giant Xunlei. Lei Chen, in a dark suit and checkered shirt, was not having the best time of his life as we started talking by a red marble table in the hall. Like virtually everybody else in the building, he was jet-lagged, probably flu-stricken, and dripping with exhaustion sweat. “This year at CES is interesting, as there are more Chinese companies than US companies,” he said — incorrectly, but not by much. “I think in some ways it tells a story: that China has become the centre of innovation of the world.”
“Why do you think people come to CES?,” I asked. “We just want more people to be aware of what we are doing,” Lei said, staring at his shoes. “Each participant is looking for something. Why did you come?”
Like everyone else, I was in Vegas for CES, the mammoth technology trade show scheduled to start the day after, but which had in fact already commandeered the whole city. Over 170,000 people and 3,900 companies, from more than 150 countries, were expected to attend the event, from January 9 to 12. On the eve of it, lanyarded individuals – mostly men, mostly middle-aged, mostly white or Asian – could already be spotted in every corner: in every casino, hotel and high-end shop.
But why does anyone bother coming? It sounds like an idle question, but everybody loves being snarky about it. Have a look on Twitter and you’ll find thousands of variations on the theme: CES is irrelevant, gimmicky, lacking in diversity (which is true), old-fashioned. Most importantly, it is big. Way too big. Still, everybody keeps coming as if this rotten party were unmissable: in 2017, 7,460 journalists produced nigh-on 60,000 reports about the show. Something similar was expected to happen this year, too. I wondered why.
The day before China Night, I stepped out of my hotel — the Tintagel-themed Excalibur — stood next to a designated Uber-and-Lyft-waiting area, and ubered to the Las Vegas Convention Centre (LVCC), one of the several venues where CES takes place. The centre, one mile north east of the Las Vegas Strip, is a blocky, white-and-grey 1950s megastructure comprised of three massive halls, all of which had now been devoted to CES. I met up with Steve Anderson, executive vice president of events services company Freeman, which has worked with show organiser the CTA on CES’s logistics and operations for the past five years.
Anderson, who is 54 and has brown hair, sparse freckles, and frameless glasses, gave me a tour of LVCC’s 185,000-square-metre exhibiting floor. It had the vibe of a theatre stage in the hours immediately before a play’s premiere: strewn objects in hundreds of half-empty booths, half-finished brand signs, plastic dust sheets on the floor, the clangour of drills, heavy-duty vehicles trudging by. Workers hurried around, or stood by booths to tweak their structure or wiring. As a beeping orange forklift plied past, Anderson halted and pointed to a bunch of cables hanging from the roof, the diameter of a birch trunk. “This building alone will consume 836 homes worth of power,” he said with a cackle. “It’s something ridiculous.” I laughed along, not sure why.
Anderson managed a 1500-strong workforce, in charge of installing the electrical wiring, building the metal-and-PVC booths used by smaller exhibiting companies, and working with some of the big-shot corporations on their more elaborate displays. This year, to help China’s Baidu with its booth, he had to ask nine people to fly to Vegas from Freeman’s office in Beijing. “Nothing comes into the show that we don't touch or power up,” he said as we stepped out of the building. Outside, the Vegas sun was gleaming over Google’s pavilion— fitted with a coiled, sky-blue slide. “Google got in touch to start planning this thing some three months ago,” Anderson said. “They clearly looked at their sales versus Amazon Alexa’s and decided they had to be here.” Unfortunately for Google, the booth wasn’t built to withstand the wily desert rains of Vegas.
Next to Google’s pavilion was a $2 million temporary tent structure that was supposed to be a sort of grown-up foil to both the tech giants’ opulent stunts and the desperados in the small-potato booths. Here, wannabe hardware entrepreneurs would find the chips, LCD screens and other computing guts needed to make their gadgets. Called the Design and Source marketplace, it was built to accommodate 899 booths at $10,000 a pop — mostly for South Korean, Japanese, and Chinese companies. Anderson said it had taken his team two weeks to put the tent up, but they should manage to take it down in just a couple of days, once CES was over. After that, he would fly to Washington for a debrief, and then start planning for CES 2019. “It never stops.”
Anderson began working in logistics when he was a teenager, and since moving to Vegas in 1999 has managed dozens of different shows — from the Marijuana Expo to the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo; but none of them, in his opinion, could be compared to CES. “CES consumes the entire city,” he told me. “For me it’s the Superbowl, the World Cup.” The way CES essentially takes over Las Vegas’ megamachine for an entire week—stretching over eleven venues and infiltrating the Strip with innumerable side-events — had earned it, in his mind, a quasi-totemic status. “If you have a good CES, it’s gonna be a good year for the city,” Anderson said. “It’s just how it works.” So can CES only happen in Vegas? Anderson thought so. “Las Vegas has everything it needs: the best hotels, the best restaurants, the most meeting spaces, year-round good weather,” he said. “It is built for that.” One thing’s for sure: while CES started in Vegas mostly for logistical reasons — Las Vegas has some of the world’s largest hotels and convention centres — over time the two have become so deeply intertwined that it would be impossible to imagine CES taking place anywhere else. Vegas is CES. And CES is Vegas.
For Las Vegas itself, a sudden divorce would be an outright dangerous scenario: in 2014 it was reported that the show added $200 million to the city’s economy every year – without counting gambling money. (A weird thing not to factor in, given the energy with which CES attendees descend on casinos at the end of every show day.) For one week, everything in town seems wrapped around CES. LED signs become turfs to conquer with ad after CES-themed ad. This year, needless to say, Google Assistant’s hyper-aggressive campaign trounced everybody else. Cab drivers barely asked me where I needed to go: they just saw the lanyard and supposed I was LVCC-bound. Many did not hide their delight at the show’s beginning. “It’s all blocked solid with CES,” one bellowed as we bolted to the convention centre. “I love this week!”
Hustlers and skimpily-dressed ballerinas on the Strip target the CES bunch with particular care, always asking “Here for CES?” as an ice-breaker. Strip clubs also cater to the CES crowd in style: on the eve of the show, everybody in town was talking about how the Sapphire club had enrolled robotic pole-dancers (actually, art installations powered by windscreen wiper motors) in order to lure techies in. Not that they needed to: when I dropped by the club on the second day of CES, the robots were languishing in a corner near the entrance, while the actual dance floor was crawling with people bleary-eyed from a long day trying to find the future of consumer electronics. When I tried being an edgy tech journalist with a stripper, asking her whether she feared losing her job to a robot, she looked at me with commiseration. “I only plan to do this for one year more,” she answered. She made a gesture with her arm, as to encompass the whole room. “And look at these people: they’re here for humans, not for the robots. CES is a boon.”
The first Consumer Electronics Show, held in New York in 1967, attracted roughly 100 exhibiting companies and 17,500 attendees. Las Vegas’ CES 2018 attracted 3,900 exhibitors and about 170,000 attendees, including exhibitors, investors, buyers, industry analysts, journalists and government officials. This hypertrophy is at least in part the consequence of “consumer electronics” meaning pretty much anything these days.
In the 1960s, CES was about VCRs, televisions, and mainframes. This year, I scheduled an interview with chopper-maker Bell Helicopter without batting an eyelid. When I asked Bell vice-president Michael Thacker whether a helicopter could be regarded as a piece of consumer electronics, he nodded and said: “Sure.” Bell didn’t actually bring a helicopter to the show, but a VR flight simulation. The day after, when the CES was finally in full swing, I stopped by the booth of Orig3n, a company that promised to reveal one’s true personality by analysing their DNA; to do so one has to swab the inside of their mouth and mail the sample to the company’s HQ in Boston. The electronic device, as is so often the case, was hidden away.
Around this ecumenical lack of focus revolves much of the flak lobbed at CES (which, by the way, doesn’t stand for Consumer Electronics Show anymore, according to organisers the CTA.) One criticism is that the show has been fragmented throughout a number of locations – this year, they included the LVCC, the Sands-Venetian, the Aria, the Westgate and Mandalay Bay — and shuttling between them on coaches can be an exhausting routine. Mainly, though, the problem is with the show floors themselves. Forget about the Googles, the Samsungs, all the tech giants with their own pavilions, eye-catching king-size booths and publicity stunts, which they wield like bludgeons against each other.
To really understand CES, have a walk among the $2,000 to $10,000 stands of smaller companies. Venture to Eureka Park, the startup pit in the Sands-Venetian’s basement and you find a grim place of toil and sweat: it is crammed, sweltering, slightly mouldy-smelling; its low metallic ceiling is decorated by large pipes and dim light fixtures that wouldn’t be out of place in a prison break flick. Here you will find a bazaar of two-by-two meter metal-and-PVC booths manned by one or two people in matching T-shirts. Their products range from sophisticated internet of things platforms, to computer mice with an extra button, to “thermic” game console speakers that release a heatwave when a character gets angry. The whole thing leaves you with the feeling that CES is about everything – which, in turn, means it’s also about nothing in particular.
How to stand out? By resorting to every recipe in the hucksterism cookbook: from twinkling lights, to free sweets, to amiable yet iron-gripped PR operatives skulking on the floor and forcibly dragging journalists and investors to the booth. If there are cute robots, they will totter around and try to strike some inane conversations. If there is any sort of vehicle — foldable bike, scooter, skateboard — you can bet they will be ridden around in an affected devil-may-care way. So-called “booth babes”, not as common as they once were, are employed as live eye-candy. Even in 2018, they popped up at a booth or two, in one case sporting bunny tails. Of course, there are booth dwellers who would just stand there with an awkward look on their faces. Ever hopeful.
Ask any of these people — whether in Eureka Park or on the larger show floors — why they are at CES, and there is one thing nobody will tell you they are expecting to take home: a great breakthrough. Very few of them, if any, are pinning their hopes for success on such a bloated hypefest. What are they looking for, then? “Everybody comes to CES,” was the pithy answer of Brian Bourgerie, the vice president of privacy startup Daplie, who was presenting at Eureka Park. “That’s the reason we put up with all this crap.” He had driven to Vegas from Utah, a four-hour trip through the desert. He had no regrets: it hadn’t been that expensive or tiring, but traffic in Vegas, especially with today’s rain, was far worse. People were stopping by and asking questions, hence he had almost lost his voice. All in all, though, he was liking CES.
“As long as you’re prepared well and you set up ahead of time with people to talk to and have a strategy, it’s worth it,” he said. “But I could easily see a startup wasting money and not getting much out of it. If they think they just have to show up and all of the sudden they’ll be famous, that’s not it.”
One person who helped me understand CES was a prince, a Dutch prince. Prince Constantijn of the Netherlands was at CES as his country’s special startup envoy and member of tech network StartupDelta. When I met him, in a pastel-coloured suite at The Venetian, he was still reeling from a jolty flight from Amsterdam. A tall, bespectacled man in his late 40s, he was wearing an azure suit over a white shirt, a golden watch on his wrist. He told me he was for a soft Brexit, and that he was 500th in line for the British throne; the two facts taken together made a soft Brexit all the more improbable. Constantijn clearly is not a CES fan. “It’s so big. Look at these hotels,” he said. “I privately wouldn't go here and spend my week to go around CES.” Still, he could see why it was valuable for Dutch companies. “What you get at CES is a critical mass of the most relevant people, all physically present at one time slot, in the same place,” he said. “Once you know they are there you can do many of your meetings here.”
That is not necessarily planned meetings. It can, and often is, all about serendipity. I walk out of the show one evening and accidentally start a chat with a startup mentor who is pounding a slot machine; later, in a club, I spot a guy with an “ASK ME ABOUT DRONE SAFETY” button and actually ask him about drone safety. As I queued for two hours outside of the Caesar Palace disco for CES’s opening party I realised that the people next to me — an American man in his forties and a bunch of twenty-somethings from India and Singapore – were not having the conversations you would expect while warming up before clubbing. They were talking about machine learning, self-driving cars, and the hardship of hiring a good AI developer in Singapore. They listed all the gadgets they had seen that day, okaying or shooting them down with as “vaporware”. They ended up exchanging business cards before entering, everyone going their own separate ways. Inside the disco, the non-CES crowd — young Las Vegans in high heels and well-pressed shirts — went wild, while the lanyard brigade congregated outside around glowing mushroom stoves.
If Las Vegas can be Venice, Camelot and New York City, CES can be networking event, media opportunity, or holiday. “It’s like the Smithsonian museum,” Bob Smith tells me, with a faint smile. We are in the media room at the Venetian, a large grey-carpeted area full of reporters who sneeze, cough and guzzle coffee while tapping on their laptops. It is the second day of CES and many are writing about the fiasco du jour – a massive blackout at the LVCC, which Anderson would later tell me was caused by a transformer getting soaked with rain and shorting. I feel like coughing too, but the medicines are keeping the flu tame. People were tweeting with a mix of amusement and schadenfreude from the dark halls where the future was supposed to be happening; somebody said it was the most relevant thing to happen at CES in quite some time.
Smith is a bonhomous 66-year-old who writes for medical news outlet Today’s Practice. Together with his brother and colleague Scott, he has covered every single CES since 1977. “It’s like going to the Smithsonian in Washington,” he repeats, “You cannot possibly see it in one visit. You have to pick the segment you’re interested in and, over the years, you focus on that. That’s why I come here.” CES, the brothers concur, is a long-term effort, a multi-year observation of how things evolve in tech. Not necessarily through the keynotes or the insight reports put on by CES organiser CTA, but simply by counting the bodies. Scott, who wears a red beret and tours CES on a mobility scooter, gives me a quick rundown of all the Fortune 500 companies he has seen rise, thrive and fall over his years coming to the show. He rattles off names from a bygone era: “Data General, Prime, Four-Phase, Apollo Computer, Sperry...” Bob smiles and adds a couple more names.
There are many other ways the show has changed throughout its four decades, the brothers tell me. First, the spirit. Back in the old days, it was all dreary corporate types and no-nonsense computer hardware peddlers. They haven’t completely disappeared, but a new crowd has emerged. “Some of the young people attending now make this seem almost a theme party,” Scott said, with a vague laugh. ”Looks like a Comicon.” Second, the geographical reach. When CES started, it was essentially an all-American affair. Now companies come from across the globe. “Our brothers and sisters from China or Vietnam, or France... I find the accents difficult to understand,” Scott explained, tapping on his ear. “I wear a hearing aid so accents are an issue. Someone was telling me today – five times – ‘Would you like a press kit?’, and I thought he was saying ‘a biscuit’. I don’t want any biscuit.” On the future of CES, Bob has no doubts: in ten years there won’t be one. Not as we know it, at least. Year after year, the show will grow too massive even by Vegas standards — that is: the standards of a city with the biggest hotels and convention centres in the world.
But there will be no incentive to shrink it down, as its much-reviled bigness is an asset. Bob’s solution then, would be to kill Las Vegas to save CES. “I bet that CES will eventually be done virtually,” he said. “VR: everybody attends and gets all the face time they want without being there physically. It will be very contrary to what CES is today. But I think it will work.”
Before the mad circus of CES began, I had left the gala-style China Night dinner just after they started serving tea. Outside, it was still raining. As I walked past Bellagio’s famous water show (Sinatra’s Luck be a Lady was playing in the background) I realised that I had never been to Como, which the Bellagio Hotel and Casino are allegedly modelled after; or to Venice, which the nearby Venetian Resort was a conspicuous nod to; luckily I had been born in Rome, which spared me the indignity of having yet another Vegas casino – the colossally tacky Caesars Palace – as my only reference for yet another Italian city.
I walked the full length of the Strip, until I arrived at my castle, the Excalibur. Inside, the turreted halls were still lively. Waitresses roamed the carpet, laying empty glasses on slot machines cup holders. Gamers chain-smoked, the stench from their cigarettes mingling with the artificial, sickly vanilla-cherry scent pumped into the air. Suddenly, a howl of joy came from a craps table: somebody had won. Two guys jumped up. “Yes! CES 2018,” they yelled, fist-pumping. They returned to their seats. One of the guys smiled. “Let’s play another round.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
