The Weekly Screed (#711)

A snatch of trade-show jazz
by David Benjamin

BARCELONA — If it’s March, it must be the Mobile World Congress (MWC). January was Vegas and CES. Been to IFA, NAB, CATV, DVB (in Dublin, with whiskey tastings and dog races — loved that), Electronica, CeBit (in Hanover, proudly known as “The Armpit of Lower Saxony"), IBC, even once hung with the leisure suits at the RCCC wing-ding in Grand Rapids.

Here, it’s “cellular devices,” everyone peering into 5-inch screens, thousands of phoneblind geeks veering and stumbling, like the first reel of The Day of the Triffids and I’m Howard Keel. What am I doing here? My only phone sits on a table at home.

I’m a spy at a Star Trek convention. Everyone is breeding tribbles and hoarding dilithium crystals to warp themselves into strange worlds (5G, wherever that is) whence no nerd has gone before. Over there, back to back, two propeller-heads staring into the hypno-screens of their “communicators,” executing a Vulcan mind-meld and catching up on Kirk’s weight-gain issues. Except, well, this starship voyage is real. These mooks are serious. They have the power, the money, the technology to make all of us into trekkies, transporting us into text-eternal exile on the mothballed transport Botany Bay, somewhere beyond the Neutral Zone.

I’m the only one without a smartphone. But I’m a certified smartass, and I’m carrying a book (Deadwood by Pete Dexter), just in case things get boring.

And they do get boring.

Up on the huge screen before the “keynote” session (how can a speech be “key” if there are two or three of them every day?) a six-foot portrait of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook feuhrer. A hero here. For most of us a lot more ambiguous. Internet pioneer or a greedy little dropout with a Napoleon complex? What have you done to my privacy, Zuck?

Oh God, there goes the music. Throb, throb, wham! At 120 decibels. Every high-tech trade show I’ve been to… How many years? Giant speakers and a beat dumber than Diana Ross singing “Baby Love.” Thump, thump, thump, not even a “thumpety” in between. Speakers the size of a two-car garage, and music composed by gifted gorillas force-fed barbiturates. Makes Iron Butterfly and Twisted Sister sound subtle and sophisticated. Wham wham wham, screech, THUMP.

Picture Beethoven here, feeling the throb. Smiling. Glad to be deaf.

But it works, Makes you grateful when the human speakers finally hit the stage, spouting drivel but so much more tuneful than the alleged music of the concussive fanfare. It’s hard to trust anyone, or any organization, or any  collection of 90,000 like-minded trade-show zombies whose musical taste stinks this bad.

Next year, I bring tomatoes.

Not to eat.

As the alleged “music” humps and thunders, words two yards tall explode on a stageful of screens. Theme seems to be “ME.” Mobile entertainment? Massive entropy? Mind-numbing ennui? The flicker-flashing, epileptic uber-images — shades of The Andromeda Strain? — assist in conveying the existential apotheosis of consumer gadgetry… my Internet, my money, My health, My education, MY travel, MY entertainment, MY friends, MY identity, MY lobotomy!

OK, I added that last one.

By and by, a woman marches on stage. She has quiet self-assurance of a wounded cobra. Her name is Anne and she’s Director General of the GSMA — which used to stand for something, but now it’s NBI. She makes it clear that she wants everything “connected.” Connected cars, bikes, mopeds. Connected toothbrushes. (You get a shock if you skip a molar.) Connected suitcases. Connected suicide bombers destroying five different Burger Kings simultaneously.

Oops. Wait. We already have that.

Even so, what they don’t seem to have is connected security. To get as far into the Fira Barcelona as this “keynote,” there are security checks over and over. Six times. The only guys not carrying mobile phones are shlepping machine guns. And the uniforms! Lapis lazuli with red epaulets. Charcoal from head-to-toe with a jaunty maroon beret. Dark khaki with form-fitting body armor (a full metal jacket) and bloused pantaloons. Desert camo with forest-green trim highlights and patent-leather, steel-toe jackboots. Spain is the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré of military haute couture. Generalissimo Francisco Franco lives!

Nice thing about Spain? They hire pretty girls to stand around directing the clueless. Uniforms aren’t as varied and flattering as the cops and soldiers’ outfits, but they’re cute, in navy blue with red blazers, red scarves. One senorita smiles glowingly and Ray Charles bubbles ineluctably upward…

“See the girl with the red scarf on! She can do the dog all night long, oh-oh yeah…”
 
Along the way to the keynote, tall unnerving banners declaring the “unleashing” of various “markets.” From what? I pass under “South Africa Unleashed.” But didn’t that happen, finally, in ‘94? There are more unleashings — Colombia (a little scary — cocaine, anyone?), Peru (would anybody notice?), Russia (fine, but can we snap that idle leash onto Vlad the Terrible?). Wait a minute. “Germany Unleashed”? Even after 70 years, the idea of the Fourth Reich — unleashed Rottweilers and Dobermans (and Angela Merkel in a pants suit!) galloping amok across the Englischer Garten, mangling poodles and swallowing Yorkies whole? — tends to trigger my weltschmerz.

Besides “unleashed,” the big word here, in the corridors, on banners, printed in nine-foot letters on the show floor, is “INNOVATION” (all caps). Same as at CES, same for years at IFA, NAB, IBC, Electronica, etc. Marketing types in geekworld use “innovation” the way teenagers use “like,” “y’know,” “dude,” “awesome.” Y’know? Like that, dude.

Picture a precocious Mobile-Worlder, 13 or so, checking it all out, saying, “Whoa, hey! Awesome, I mean, like, the innovation here, I mean, y’know, these innovative dudes’re awesome at y’know, like, innovating, dude! I’m like, whoa. Y’know. I mean, that’s what it is, dude, like, innovation!”

Yes. I know. (Scotty, quick! Beam me up.)