Nerd Heaven, Sin City
Twenty hours of flying—London, then LA, then the Mojave—and I arrived in Las Vegas looking like something that had been vacuum-sealed and forgotten in an overhead compartment. Microsoft had invited me to CES 2012, which is either the most exciting sentence a blogger can type or proof that consumer technology has simply run out of other people to flatter.
The arrangement was almost deliberately surreal: twenty-odd bloggers housed in a villa that MTV had previously used as a reality show location. I won’t pretend that didn’t say something about all of us. Oliver from Zeitgeschmack was there, Simon from Blogwerk, Anna from Hi-Tech. MC Winkel and Caschy were also nominally on the premises, though my working theory was that they’d located a strip club somewhere on the Strip and considered their professional obligations discharged.
The show floor promised the predictable next-generation parade. Microsoft was presenting Windows 8 and its phone lineup, with fresh Xbox 360 titles as sweetener. Nintendo wanted you to actually hold the Wii U. Sony was pushing the PlayStation Vita. Around these centerpieces sprawled the usual CES atmosphere: televisions fractionally thinner than last year’s televisions, gadgets engineered to solve problems nobody had, software promising transformation and delivering friction.
Then there’s the celebrity layer, which CES cultivates like a houseplant no one waters but which somehow never dies. Justin Bieber. 50 Cent. Eliza Dushku, who makes sense in any room she walks into. Tiësto was doing a live concert streamed on Twitter, which in January 2012 felt genuinely futuristic and in retrospect sounds like a muted laptop in a hotel corridor. Miss America 2011 was scheduled to give a speech. I’m sure it was fine.
I had until Thursday in the city they insist on calling Sin—I love that they insist on that—before catching a bus through the desert to Los Angeles and then the long haul back to Berlin. Twenty bloggers, one MTV villa, and the entire consumer electronics industry trying to tell us what we’d be wanting next year. I arrived wrecked. I left marginally more informed. The desert was exactly as large as advertised.