There are ducks, and there are decorated sheds.

Most booths at CES are decorated sheds, boxes adorned with color and light, structures with signs to entice you to look at the gadgets within. They call to you with thumping music, colored kliegs, and shouting carnival workers hawking their wares with boy-band boom mics floating an inch from their mouths like buzzing flies at the end of thin electronic wires. Sweeping yet taut reams of fabric are buttressed by steel and mesh create faux tents and false ceilings to reorient the gadgets held within. Hordes of shuffling convention goers conventionally turn their glazed gaze towards an endless kaleidoscope of logos and stock photos of smiling models without seeing any of it. Decorated sheds: forms whose function is to direct you within to the consumer electronics collected inside.

CES belongs in Las Vegas and is informed by Las Vegas. What you learn from CES is what you learn from Las Vegas: while we sometimes pretend that the spectacle is there to bring us to the gadgets, the truth is that the gadgets are the spectacle.