Duncan Bell is going viral

Global lockdown has a positive effect: CES doesn’t involve going to Vegas in January

ech has not really been all that helpful during the Covid epidemic that made 2020 so ‘memorable’, has it? The UK splashed £40bn on a track and trace system based, at least in part, on ‘tracking’ our phones so we could be ‘traced’ later. Alas, somewhere along the line, a few little things went awry.

Nobody realised that if you have a tracking app with a switch that lets you turn contract tracing off, a lot of people will turn it off. It also didn’t seem to occur to anyone that a tracing system based on calling people up on their mobiles, from an unknown number, would lead to most people not bothering to answer the phone.

Seriously, who answers their phone to unknown numbers? I don’t even answer my phone to known numbers. It’s bad enough picking up to a guy asking about an ‘accident that was not your fault’, never mind them telling you that you may have the plague.

Then we had the ever-useful news source that is social media. Depending on which echo chambers you choose to inhabit, it was either telling us that the world was about to end NOW, or that there was no virus. No, this whole thing was just a cunning ruse to make Bill Gates a few quid – he’s down to his last few billion, you see.

Don’t even get me started on online grocery shopping – useless unless you used the same approach that people use to blag festival tickets or ‘hot Nike drops’ online. I’m just not that good at deploying bots to hoover up the slots.

However, there has been one fantastic tech side effect of our global disaster, for me anyway: no

Tmore tech trade shows. The move of CES to ‘digital only’ – ie a website and some Zoom calls – is an absolute blessing. Normally, it’s a real, live event in a clutch of dismal halls in off-season Las Vegas. The one time I went, I spent my entire time there feeling jet-lagged and, ironically enough, absolutely full of flu. I vowed never to go again. And now, there’s no chance I’ll have to go!

By moving CES online, we get to see all the actual stuff, without any of the usual effort. The thing about CES is that it has two main halls, and not only are they vast, but they aren’t even close to each other – they are miles apart, in fact.

So unless you are incredibly self-disciplined, which I’m not, you start out at 9am being a bit late for your first appointment with a brand. Then, by midday, you’re writing off about half of what you had scheduled, as the soles of your shoes wear out, and you start to become delirious from a deadly combo of hunger and hangover.

With the new, shiny and socially distanced Digital CES, all you have to do is browse and search your way through some web pages. Or, even easier, click a few links on emails from the same brands you used to have to walk five miles to see.

Any of my fellow journalists who miss the ‘good old days’ of CES being an actual event needn’t despair. Just buy a treadmill, glue some carpet tiles to your shoes with chewing gum and soft drink residue and scroll through that Digital CES website as you endlessly trudge along. To really get the full experience, you can have most of the oxygen sucked out of your home office, replace your lighting with a World War 2 searchlight, and have your Wi-Fi turned off. Ideally, have no sleep, and live solely on hamburgers as large as your head, washed down with a vat or two of Prosecco.

The best thing I can say about CES is that it’s not as bad as IFA. A tech trade show that takes place in Berlin, IFA certainly puts paid to tired, old, racist stereotypes about Germans running things efficiently. I’ve seen grown men cry trying to navigate the halls of IFA, thanks to a building map that seems to have been done by MC Escher and an internal layout that’s like a Tardis with bratwurst stands.

So here’s to getting back to normal in 2021… But let’s keep tech trade shows virtual. It’s the only way to be truly safe.

“By moving CES online, we get to see all the actual stuff, without any of the usual effort”