We've Been Going to CES for 800 Years

A new consumer electronic product debuts every ten minutes over the four days of the Consumer Electronics Show; eventually the 3,000 attendant companies will launch 20,000 of them. Huge TVs, the fastest computers on the market, wearable electronics, the newest and best in audio and visual technology. The most amazing thing about all this is, maybe, is that no one's amazed by it at all. It just seems par for the course; the logical continuation of a long trend. The sheer numbers may have grown over the years, but much of the above could have been written about nearly every CES since its inception in New York in 1967—46 years ago.

Or before that, even. CES was first convened to supplant the Chicago Music Show, then the dominant industry exhibition for electronics. Before that, trade fairs showcasing machine technology had been going on for over a century. The World Fair circuit was started to display industrial advancements in the early 1850s; the first was held in London in 1851. And the roots of showing off higher-tech products in a garish bazaar go centuries deeper than that. Yet the basic concept has pretty much always been the same: A large, packed space, stalls full of vendors displaying wares, and a swarm of businessmen, consumers, and scribes trying to take advantage of the whole mess.

So why go at all? We know most of CES's thousands of products will either fail, become one of a couple dozen mostly indistinguishable models on a shelf at Best Buy, or vanish into a niche market invisible to the average consumer. Despite the efforts of the industry to whip up zeitgeisty themes—this year's CES, for instance, is about wearable technology! the internet of things! senors! drones!—tech reporters will gripe about the monotony of the offerings and the bloatedness of the whole affair. Again, same as it ever was: they've been lodging such complaints for decades.

It's still a valid question. Especially considering that the top three tech companies—Apple, Google, and Microsoft—are withholding their wares from the proceedings, and the internet is pretty good at delivering information about new electronics products. So why wade through a torrent of soon-to-be obsolete tech and the grating neon facades of Las Vegas just for a glorified trade show?

Well, we go for the same reason we'd go to the earliest trade fairs ever, put on by medieval merchant capitalists. In medieval times, as regions began to specialize in products, merchants organized recurrent trade fairs to show off the best and newest technology. At the time that meant new foods, textiles and tools, mostly.

According to the History of Economic Thought, these trade fairs "flourished from the twelfth through the late fourteenth centuries. Held annually in the principal European trading cities, these fairs usually lasted for one to several weeks." GC Marketing Services notes further that "With the birth of capitalist competition came the desire to have better products. In a world still somewhat difficult and time-consuming to travel, what better way was there to find the best of exactly what is needed than to have an industry collective?"

In other words, it's all there, in one sprawling trade fair, for an entire week. We go to watch the wider trends—who's hocking what, and why? The size and prestige of the event—even without the giants—is still such that you can find a better snapshot of the industry in the oppressively fluorescent-lit convention halls in Sin City than just about everywhere else in the world.

Anyone dropping by those those old trade fairs would've gotten a pretty good idea of the latest technologies of the day, and what it was that people actually wanted: "Northern European merchants exchanged their grain, fish, wool, cloth, timber, pitch, tar, salt, and iron for the spices, brocades, wines, fruits, and gold and sliver that were the dominant items in southern European commerce." So this week, we're going to stroll through Vegas and watch vendors try to trade their super high def OLED TVs, biometric smartwatches, and consumer-friendly drones.

Eventually, those early trade fairs eventually evolved into cities; these conventions pretty much have, too. Over 150,000 attendees are expected, and the complex is erected and maintained for 18 days total to host the event. Meanwhile, the crude capitalism of the mercantile class has ballooned into the behemoth overdrive engine it is today, wherein a single one of its industries can spit out 20,000 different products in a single week. Now, much of the goods are useless, yet the underlying principles remain the same: more, better, life-improving stuff. Variety.

And, like all of those proto-trade shows, CES is mostly monotonous, and predictable. It has been running for nearly fifty years, and it's always an array of screens and circuits that are better than last year's. But it's a trade show in a centuries long tradition of trade shows, and that's all it was ever intended to be—a giant one-stop shop for a voracious industry that just so happens to make more headlines than most.

In fact, you're sure to see a lot of grabby, futuristic-sounding headlines about high-flying concepts and prototype gadgets that may never see life outside the convention halls and the blog posts that detail them. That's fun stuff, and it's worth looking at the wilder advances—a medieval journalist might have written about a new flagon of sulfuric wine or something. But the deeper question worth asking at CES is: what is it that we're getting in exchange for this hyper-advanced high-tech epitome of merchant capitalism? What's actually going to trade hands? What can we really use? What technology is it that people actually want to integrate into their lives? What would they trade their hard-earned grain and wool for?

Motherboard is here at CES to ask these questions, to get our hands on a bunch of stuff that might but probably won't be the future. To see where consumer technology could be useful for real, and where it's smoke and mirrors. To suss out whether all this overconsumption might finally have peaked—attendance and participation is down from two years ago.

Above all, it's worth remember that behind all of the glitz and glare, little of this is actually new. CES is just the highest-yet apex of a tradition that's been carried out for centuries.