The Best Part of CES, in Photos

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The Best Part of CES, in Photos

Trade shows feel a bit like an anachronism because, hey, we've got the internet, where anyone can announce anything at any time.

Thousands of companies spent roughly $42 a square foot to show off their goods to tens of thousands of eyeballs at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, not to mention the many more who forewent the show, instead renting suites and hotel rooms to pick up on some side action.

Trade shows feel a bit like an anachronism because, hey, we've got the internet, where anyone can announce anything at any time. A decade after its collapse, it's hard to remember COMDEX, which used to rival CES back when computer hardware was sexier than it is now, ever existed. Ignoring the obvious reality that it's become a guaranteed media frenzy year-after-year, why has CES held on?

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It's easy to lament how stressful and hectic it is—it most definitely is—but walking around feels a bit like trying to comprehend the massive size of the diesels that propel cargo ships.

It's not so much the show itself, but what it's made of: This enormous, noisy, complicated thing, all of these people scrambling to secure distribution deals and press for whatever shiny new object, is the engine that powers the tech economy, and by its nature, powers all of its constituent parts.

​It's also easy to write that it's easy to be jaded about CES. Google found about 1,490,000 results for exactly that in just 0.71 seconds. Just about everything that can be said about CES has been said, including that.

Writing about an event for brands that hundreds of other journalists with varying states of froth around their mouth also write about is occasionally an exercise in recursive self-loathing like accidentally looking in a pair of bathroom mirrors while really hungover and seeing an endless reflection of The Fear.

But things are only bummers if you want them to be. I keep coming coming back to seeing people wandering the floor who immediately beeline to a booth to paw at whatever widget is on offer. I've found myself more curious in that attraction more than anything.​

The engine is noisy. You can hear the excitement as you walk around, of people who, beyond feeling excitement about the possibility of finding success, are genuinely stoked to be awash in gadgets, in TVs that are so HD that "ultra" doesn't even cut it as a descriptor anymore, in homes that talk to you, in mind-boggling possibilities for the future.

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​I find the attachment of weighty thoughts to gadgets to be inherently silly, because they're just things, and every year they become that thing again, but MORE so. And really, is a refrigerator that you can tweet from all that surprising?

But seeing people lose their collective shit for all these things is pretty awesome, and doubly so when the object of excitement is actually clever.​

From the perspective of someone who has to think about what it all means, seeing a mirror that will quantify just how attractive you are is fairly horrifying. We're facing a world in which our selves, our babies, and everything else will be quantified in detail and networked together into a disaffected, monetized behemoth of data. No wonder people get bummed on all this shit.

​On the other hand, seeing many more people be very not bummed on the gadget future, enthralled even, is proof positive that it's coming, however ridiculous it may seem. I'm not convinced that there's anything else to say, other than perhaps simply: Hold onto your butts.​