Alexis C. Madrigal

LAS VEGAS -- At the official end of the Consumer Electronics Show, another grueling ritual takes over. Everything that came into Vegas has to go back whence it came. The booths are packed up. Trucks are loaded. Small exhalations of relief and satisfaction puff up from the exhibitors even before they've finished the task of loading out.

I wandered the halls and loading docks of the convention center watching this mini-city get pulled apart at the seams and packed neatly into heavy plastic cases. You'll find photos of that operation below.

But the best moment I captured was out on the loading docks. I could not believe how many different types of wheeled vehicles were being used to move people and things around. All sizes and shapes were represented, and not a single car was among them. I felt like I'd landed on the Galapagos Island of automobile technology. Here were undiscovered branches of the car evolutionary tree and each specimen was perfectly adapted to its role in the ecosystem.

I could have stood there forever watching the rough choreography of skilled work.

LAS VEGAS -- The more time I spent wandering the great halls of the convention center, the more I grew obsessed with how conference booths were designed. From the choice of floor covering to the arrangement of products, every company was trying to say something, even if it wasn't always clear what.

The oddest manifestation of this newfound interest is the gallery you see above. It's a bunch of (mostly) stock photos that different companies used to illustrate their products. Stock photos like this tell you nothing about a product, obviously. They could be used to sell salad or cell phones. Stock photos are photographic emoticons. They tell you how a product will make you feel.

I found all these particular specimens in South Hall, but they were scattered pretty evenly throughout the thousands of booths. I'd say one in four booths made heavy use of them, though not all stock photos are quite as ridiculous as these.

LAS VEGAS -- "Hey, man, do you want a free beer?" the bearded man asked as I walked by his booth. Like any good conference attendee, of course I said yes. He handed me a card. On one side, there was an image of Jesus Christ with an Xbox 360 controller in his hands, a headset in place of a crown of thorns, and a Twitter bird on his arm. On the other, there were the details for a USB stick giveaway, and the note that for four hours a day, they'd be giving away free Sam Adams bottles to passersby.

 "Are you a Christian game developer?" I asked.
 "No," he said. "We are just here telling people that Jesus loves them, making sure they hear that Jesus loves them."

This is the GameChurch.com booth, which consisted largely of tattooed, skater-style hipsters wandering around talking about Jesus and videogames. It turns out GameChurch is a Christian gaming website. Their slogan: "We are all for killing pixels on a screen but loving people in real life. Love Without Agenda."

The site is part of Fireproof Ministries, a site founded by Craig Gross, a former youth pastor with edgy hair. Gross aims to spread the word through "culturally relevant" programs, reaching people outside traditional church events. GameChurch is actually a junior member of Fireproof's website network. The original site was XXXchurch.com, which tries to connect with people making or looking for pornography.

XXXChurch actually sent a team to the Adult Entertainment Expo with a simple message: "Jesus loves porn stars." Or as the man at the GameChurch booth explained, "Jesus loves porn stars. He loves people wherever they're at."

LAS VEGAS -- You've seen them countless times. They pervade cities, suburbs, truck stops and bars, but you probably haven't thought about where all those LED signs touting an ATM or coffee actually come from. You haven't imagined the global supply chain that delivers them from somewhere in Asia to your local 7/11. But there is one.

The signs you're looking at here were made by a company called GTK Systems, a three-person global enterprise. Jitender Saggu makes these signs in Delhi, but he's been itching to break into the US market. So, he called his brother and sister-in-law, Pavinder and Meenu, and asked if they wanted to give the LED sign business a go. For the last several months, they've been preparing for CES, hoping to find some places to distribute these signs.

GTK is just one startup in the global LED signage market, and a fledgling one at that. But it's a jumping off point for a powers-of-10 mental experiment in the scale of the world's commercial networks. This one company -- three people spread between California and Delhi -- is a tiny player in the LED signage market. The LED signage market is itself a subset of the overall digital signage market. Which itself is a small piece of the overall consumer signage and consumer electronics markets. Which are themselves very thin slices of the American economy, which is a small but significant chunk of the world economy.

But when I pull money out of an ATM machine selling itself with one of these signs, I touch the entire web not just in the money itself, but all the other pieces of that system. Here, you could find the people who make ATM casings and the people who make the boards inside and the keypad makers and the card readers and the networking technology. For that reason alone, CES is worth visiting.

LAS VEGAS -- If anything is true, it is that Las Vegas has the most awesomely bad carpets in the world. The Convention Center, airports, and hotels collectively show a stupefying dedication to installing bad-trip psychedelic carpets. Perhaps they introduce massive amounts of cognitive noise, thereby distracting gamblers from their profit-losing enterprise. Maybe an evil sorcerer cursed the town long ago, following a dust-up with a conniving magician promoter. Whatever the reason, these carpets exist, and that should be enough to make you question this whole idea of Western civilization.

LAS VEGAS -- Two retired cops, one from New York, the other from Dallas, were sitting on a black faux-leather couch off a hallway of Central Hall. Both are men of a certain age. Bruce Powell, the Texan, has a glorious belly and moves like an old athlete, creaky but graceful. He calls the New Yorker, Artie Mahor, his partner. Artie, dapper in a surprising pink shirt, is the suspicious type, and he's not too sure he wants a reporter sniffing around the CES security apparatus. He would be the bad cop, at least from my perspective. In fact, he'll later tell me that he thinks "the press is a greater threat to the security of the United States than Osama bin Laden." And he tried to look me in the eye while he said it. But terrorists don't like to make eye contact, so I laughed into my shoes.

There's a woman in the room, too. Mrs. Davidson, I think I hear her called. She's the sweet, silent type and listens with admirable patience as the boys tell her stuff that it seems impossible she could care about.

They'd just finished lunch when I wandered into their midst and sat down. Powell was finishing up a Coke, which he got up to throw away. On his way back in, he let forth a tremendous belch, a and excused himself. "One Coke and look at me," he said. He struck me like a gentleman. Or at least he seemed gentle, with his nicely combed gray hair, hearing aids, and made-for-walking sneakers. You wanted him to be your grandpa and teach you how to fix a car or use a band saw. He now lives in Arkansas near the Crater of Diamonds State Park.

There'd been a third ex-cop in the room before. A guy by the name of Ron Duffy, who was one of the higher-ups in the Consumer Electronics Show security team. He'd been a Chicago beat cop, and took a joking (but real) pleasure in being the boss of Powell, who retired as a captain.

Duffy was cut from a different cloth from either of the other, too. His passion was drag racing, and he even brought out photos of his son's hotrod to prove it. He got his start in the part-time convention security business at the McCormick Place convention center in Chicago. He'd been helping guard CES shows for 17 years, since back in the days when the show was held twice a year, once in Chicago and once in Las Vegas.

The key to the job, he said, was to "try to create the atmosphere and perception -- perception! -- that Big Brother is watching." It didn't seem like there was too much crime or punishment going on at the show. In fact, Duffy, out of all those 17 years, couldn't think of a single war story, a single crime, or a single interesting incident. Mainly, he pointed out that doing hired-gun security work was a great way to make some coin in retirement.

He was about the equivalent of a captain, I'd reckon. He had a special go-cart in the hall to help him get around the show to meetings and such. It had his name written on it. There were three other guys like him, and then a security director above them. All the plainclothes security guys had been cops.

Duffy eventually had to run off to a meeting, and I was left with the two other ex-cops. We sat on opposite leather couches in the narrow room with Mrs. Davidson to my left behind a desk. Break time was over and they were readying themselves to head out and inspect the show floor.

I asked if I could come along, the equivalent of a ridealong or something. When Duffy'd been there, he hadn't seemed opposed, exactly, to my presence, but I'd noticed a creeping sense that I wasn't wanted. Mahor didn't like the look of me. Still, I pressed my request.

First, Mahor said if I tagged along all I'd see was them looking at people. Exactly! I said, perhaps a little too enthusiastically. "So I can come along?"

He eyed me. "Have you gotten this cleared?" he asked.

I felt my throat tighten a bit. I felt like he was about to shutdown my house party for not having the right permits. He'd used his cop magic on me.

"Well, no, I haven't run this by anyone, specifically," I said, silently stifling the urge to toss in a "sir."

"No?" he said. "Then you can't come. It's nothing personal."

There was a down beat. The two ex-cops, me, and Mrs. Davidson sat there quietly. Then Powell patted his big hands on his big knees, and pushed off from the couch.

"Ok, killer," he said.

"Truth, justice, and the American way," Mahor said. "Let's go fight some crime."

LAS VEGAS -- The insides of the Las Vegas Convention Center during the Consumer Electronics Show are as manicured as a golf course. The show is a Disneyland for electronics buyers and sellers that gets built in a few days and torn down just as quickly.

Like a Burning Man in which the point is to promote late capitalist commerce, not deny it, everything must be packed in and packed out. The storage area for a lot of the extra stuff turns out to be the parking lot and loading dock behind and between the Central and North Halls.

Seeing this staging area may give you an even better of the scale of the show than the exhibits inside. Plus, check out all those ladders!

LAS VEGAS -- Walking around the CES showroom floor, there is one specific cultural group that stood out to me. (No, it was not the booth models.) A surprising number of Hassidic Jews seemed to be exhibiting at and walking around the show.

When I wondered about that out loud on Twitter, a variety of New Yorkers told your humble West Coast lifer, "Duh, that's because of B&H." Apparently, B&H Electronics was founded and continues to be run by Hassidim.

"Known as 'Beards and Hats' because of the many Hasidic Jews who work there, B&H has become an authentic New York experience," the Associated Press wrote in 2006. "Shopping there is akin to ordering a pastrami on rye at Katz's Delicatessen."

The AP continued: "Ask how business is going and you get this: 'Baruch Hashem,' or 'Blessed be God' -- meaning, roughly, 'Thanks to God, things are good.'"

Like any successful company, some of its employees have gone on to found their own competitors and variations on the theme. So, now there are several electronics distributors run by Hassidic Jews that are here at CES.

I stopped to chat with Asher Shtesl, the CEO of one such company, Ideal Sales of Brooklyn, New York. They're a classic middleman operation: they buy from the manufacturers and they sell to independent electronics stores. They've long focused on photographic equipment but have been expanding their reach into more general electronics. Shtesl said he's built his business from a basement operation 10 years ago into a "multimillion dollar" enterprise now.

And how does being Hassidic impact the business? "People look at us as very honest people," he offered.

Image: Shtesl is flanked by his salesmen Joel Fischbein (left) and Leo Kish (right).

LAS VEGAS -- A few weeks ago, a post on the "ghost city of China" swept the Internet. The TIME story explained that the Chinese government had built the town of Ordos to be the home for one million people, but it's standing empty. I couldn't help but see the same symbolism in the New Jialian Electronics booth here at CES, which was all set up and ready to go. It just needed... People. And products. And everything else but the posters.

I particularly enjoyed this panel: "Sight-see of Our beautiful Industry Garden Area."



Read more of our coverage of CES.

LAS VEGAS -- Normally, when we show you pieces of technology, they come from the past. Because we have distance from the time, it's easier to pick out the elements of the technology that are so weird.

But the Consumer Electronics Show, held here in Vegas this week, is packed with new and obviously weird technologies. If you go hunting around the margins of the big showroom floors, you can't help but find odd stuff. I'll be posting a miniseries of new, weird tech from CES here, beginning with this television hat with a really long brim.

So, here's how it works. Inside the hat, there's a magnifier, so when you put your mobile device in the very front of that brim, it ends up feeling like the picture is right in front of your eyes.

I tried it and it does work, but man are those hats ridiculous looking. When would you wear one of these things? On a Greyhound? In a hunting blind? During the graveyard shift as a security guard? It's hard to know.



Here are a couple of their suggested use cases, which are hilarious:



In any case, if you'd like to get one, go to asseenontvhat.com.

Read more of our coverage of CES.

The Consumer Electronics Show is where all the gadgets you need and don't need come together to find out which category they belong in. CES (as it is always known) is defined by its scale: 2,700 exhibitors showing their wares on 1.6 million square feet of the Las Vegas Convention Center. It is a kind of profane Mecca for the tech world, and it spills out into the streets and hotel rooms of Vegas for days on end. It is obviously appropriate that the party is held in the nation's symbol for the wanton satisfaction of consumer desire.

It is what the Detroit Auto Show used to be: a place where America's industry got dolled up and went out with its new models, strutting to the smooth sounds of the near future. The show wasn't just about products but about creating the look and feel of the next year. There was a culture to it, and it was part of the culture.

Decades of advances in electronics have made our phones and computers the types of cultural objects that cars once were. The industry that makes them is rich and powerful. The CEOs of the most important companies are objects of veneration and disgust, they are celebrities.

Thinking about CES, I found myself reflecting on something Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story, told me back in August about the time he spends in upstate New York.

"Sitting at a fine restaurant, what's everyone talking about? They're talking about apps! These are their golden years and they are spending them talking about apps," Shteyngart said. "They would have talked about Portnoy's Complaint in the '60s and The Godfather in the '70s. There is enough to talk about, but technology has subsumed a lot of this culture."

Gary obviously saw this as a major problem. He saw technology as something outside culture that was destroying the appreciation of italicized art forms like books and movies. But let's look at it the other way. Let's say, yes, technology is culture, and let's try to think about the dynamics of this industry and the products it makes as objects worthy of critical thought beyond whether or not they "work" for whatever purpose we might give them.

All that to say, I'm headed to CES tonight to write about the show, but expect profiles and dispatches, not reports on gadgets. I'm going to try to tell you stories from the trenches about how the people of the electronics industry work, while salting that deeper coverage with some of the whizbang of the showroom floor. (Those are like this movie's sex scenes, you could say.) If you want wall-to-wall gizmos, you can look to the excellent teams at Wired, Gizmodo, and Engadget. What we're after is more cultural coverage about the consumer electronics industry. Look for a day-in-the-life of a booth babe or a night out with the Ukrainian delegation, or maybe an up-close portrait of 50 Cent's appearance paired with a Viennese collective's performance at the simultaneously held Adult Entertainment Expo.

And I'll try to bring some context to the development of the industry, too. The paucity of consumer electronics history is surprising. So, to kick us off, let's go all the way back to 1967, when the very first CES was held in New York City. Bob Gerson's short history of that time lets us imagine what it would have been like.

But to get some excitement and a strong opening-day crowd, Sunday evening featured "A Night At The Waldorf." It was the industry's biggest gala ever. For just $10 each, attendees were treated to an hour-long open-bar reception, a full dinner and entertainment featuring comic Dick Shawn and songstress Jane Morgan, with music for dancing supplied by the Ray Block orchestra.

Thanks to the magic of YouTube, we can see what the Dick Shawn, Jane Morgan, and Ray Block Orchestra might have sounded like.

First, let's warm up with a little dancing with the orchestra.

Then, while you're wiping your brow and grabbing a drink, Dick Shawn would have come on to do a quasi-vaudeville routine:

And finally, Jane Morgan kicks it up a notch with a little French-pop song, "C'est Si Bon."

And on that note, see you in Vegas. If you're in town, feel free to get in touch via Twitter (@alexismadrigal) or email.

Rob Walker has a wonderful exploration of digital afterlives this week's New York Times Magazine. It's worth reading in full, but what struck me is that we're about to be overwhelmed by people dying and leaving behind accounts, avatars, and effects. Just a few years ago, it seemed novel to think about what to do about a dead person's online life. It was the sort of thing that digital anthropologists wrote papers about for obscure conferences.

Now, with the explosion of social media usage in progressively older age groups, deciding how to manage these situations will be commonplace and important. Walker cites one estimate that 375,000 American Facebook users will die this year; what had seemed bizarre is becoming banal at scale.

Walker:

Nevertheless: people die. For most of us, the fate of tweets and status updates and the like may seem trivial (who cares -- I'll be dead!). But increasingly we're not leaving a record of life by culling and stowing away physical journals or shoeboxes of letters and photographs for heirs or the future. Instead, we are, collectively, busy producing fresh masses of life-affirming digital stuff: five billion images and counting on Flickr; hundreds of thousands of YouTube videos uploaded every day; oceans of content from 20 million bloggers and 500 million Facebook members; two billion tweets a month. Sites and services warehouse our musical and visual creations, personal data, shared opinions and taste declarations in the form of reviews and lists and ratings, even virtual scrapbook pages. Avatars left behind in World of Warcraft or Second Life can have financial or intellectual-property holdings in those alternate realities. We pile up digital possessions and expressions, and we tend to leave them piled up, like virtual hoarders.

The Columbus Dispatch did something unusual this week. When a reporter came across a homeless man with a stunning Golden Age of Radio voice, they did not write a milquetoast profile or use it as a news peg for a series on the plight of the homeless in Ohio. Instead, they made a short, cheap video of the man, Ted Williams, and posted it to their website.

That, in and of itself, didn't seem to do much. But someone then posted the video to YouTube, where it has accelerated faster than almost any video that I've seen. It's received more than four million views in the last day and is the most-watched video on the site today. The man's voice is amazing and Americans love a good redemption story. Williams says in the video that he used to be addicted to drugs but he's been clean for two years now, yet still unable to get a job.

So, Reddit users organized around finding the man a job, actually raising money and coming up with gigs for him. And while all this was going on, Williams himself -- being homeless -- was nowhere to be found. People went out looking for him and eventually he was found, no doubt a little stunned that millions of people on the Internet had suddenly taken an interest in him.

At least today, he's got no shortage of work.