Everything Is Five Years Away

CES—the Consumer Electronics Show—lands in Las Vegas every January like a very expensive hallucination about the near future. In early 2012, I was there for it, invited by MTV and Microsoft: a week in the desert surrounded by product reveals, press junkets, and every major tech company staging its vision of the next three years. Google, Facebook, Sony, the usual crowd. Microsoft handed me a Windows Phone and a laptop and pointed me at things. I pointed back. I said things on camera in German and in English, with the confidence of someone who has not yet been proven wrong.

The keynotes described a world perpetually five years from being real. The showroom floors were dense with kitchen appliances that could do your laundry, televisions controlled by eye contact, refrigerators that would report their own contents and possibly collect your children from school. There was a sincere collective faith in all of it—that these objects represented progress, that progress was inevitable, that inevitability was the same as good. I found it seductive despite myself. The scale, the light, the shared delusion. Casinos the size of airports. You could stay lost in it for a week without feeling like you’d missed anything real.

Right after CES I took a bus south to Los Angeles. Alone. My first time in the city, and I was the most obvious tourist it had ever seen—Hollywood Boulevard, Chinatown, the Universal Studios lot, the chronic confusion about how the geography actually works. LA is too large to understand in a few days. I spent mine getting turned around and genuinely delighted by it anyway. I thought about staying, selling hot dogs on Sunset Boulevard, becoming a different kind of person entirely. I didn’t. But the thought lasted longer than it probably should have.