”LAS VEGAS” — The air in the press pen smells like ozone, stale coffee, and the distinct, copper-tang of desperate hope. It is Tuesday, January 6, 2026. Outside, the Nevada desert is freezing, a dry cold that cracks your lips and makes your bones ache, but in here, under the blinding halogen sun of the Las Vegas Convention Center, the temperature is set to a permanent, sweat-slicked seventy-two degrees.
I am wedged between a tech blogger from Shenzhen who hasn’t blinked in forty minutes and a PR handler named Chad who keeps trying to hand me a QR code printed on a cookie.
“Eat it,” Chad says, his eyes dead behind rimless spectacles. “It downloads the press kit directly to your neural profile.”
I don’t eat the cookie. I am not here to eat the cookie. I am here to witness the autopsy of the American Dream, performed live by a Boston Dynamics robot dog painted in heavy-metal flake gold.
GOLD-PLATED CANINES AND THE EUCHARIST OF THE QR CODE
They call this the Consumer Electronics Show, but that’s a lie. There are no consumers here, only victims in waiting. This is the annual pilgrimage of the Tech Priesthood, gathering to decide how best to monetize our remaining attention spans before the whole house of cards collapses into the sea. And let me tell you, the vibe is terminal.
You can feel it in the carpet. You can feel it in the way the suits huddle in the corners, whispering about the “AI Bubble” finally popping, about Nvidia losing twenty percent of its value last year, about the “apocalyptic vibes” that Slate promised us were the shorthand for 2025. Well, we made it to ’26, folks, and the apocalypse is boring. It looks like a folding iPhone that costs three thousand Euros and breaks if you look at it wrong.
WEAPONIZED EYEWEAR FOR THE SOCIALLY LOBOTOMIZED
I push through the crowd, a screaming, fleshy hydra of lanyards and bad posture. I’m looking for the “Dystopian Tech of the Year,” as the pundits called it. I’m looking for the sunglasses.
You’ve seen them. The new AI Oakleys. The Meta Ray-Bans. They are everywhere this year. In 2025, they were a novelty; now, they are a uniform. Every third person on the floor is wearing a pair of slick, wrap-around shades that hide their eyes and record everything. It’s the return of the Glasshole, but this time, they’re weaponized.
I lock eyes—or rather, lens-reflections—with a man in a tailored suit near the Samsung booth. He’s grinning at nothing. He’s not seeing me; he’s seeing a floating ticker of my estimated net worth and a generative AI summary of my last three tweets.
“Hey!” I shout, leaning into his personal space. “Are you recording this? Are you feeding me to the Large Language Model?”
He doesn’t flinch. He just taps the side of his temple. “Hey Meta,” he mumbles, “Log interaction. Sentiment: Hostile.”
This is the horror. It’s not the killer robots—though the gold dog over by the Hyundai display is looking at me with intent—it’s the insulation. We are building a world where we never have to look each other in the eye again. A world of mediated reality, where the truth is just another setting you can toggle off in the privacy menu.
DIGITAL NECROMANCY AND THE SMELL OF SYNTHETIC FEAR
I need a drink. I need a drink with a jagged edge to cut through the digital slime coating my frontal lobe. I claw my way toward the exit, passing a booth demonstrating “Griefbot” technology—AI that lets you FaceTime your dead relatives. A woman in the demo chair is weeping softly while a deepfaked grandmother nods on a screen, reciting recipes she never cooked in life. It is the most obscene thing I have ever seen.
“Savage,” I mutter, scribbling in my notebook. “Feral. We are selling ghosts to the grieving.”
Outside on the Strip, the night is electric and cruel. The Sphere is watching us, a giant, unblinking eyeball projecting an ad for a Mars colony real estate trust. I light a cigarette, the smoke curling up into the neon void.
It reminds me of the Heathrow incident last September. Remember that? The “Mass Psychogenic Illness” at Terminal 4? Twenty-one people hitting the floor, gasping for air, convinced they’d been gassed. The cops found nothing. No toxins. No tear gas. Just pure, uncut fear.
That’s what we’re running on now. High-octane anxiety. We are a species on the verge of a collective nervous breakdown, and instead of therapy, we’re buying smart glasses that let us edit out the homeless people on the sidewalk.
TOTAL COVERAGE: NO EXIT FROM THE NEON CANCER
I hail a cab—a human driver, thank god, a guy named Sal who looks like he’s seen the devil and charged him a surge pricing fee.
“Where to?” Sal asks.
“Anywhere but here,” I say. “Drive until the 5G drops out.”
Sal laughs, a dry, rattling sound. “That’s nowhere, buddy. Signal covers the whole damn planet now.”
He’s right. There is no escape. The ride never ends. We bought the ticket—the three-thousand-dollar folding phone, the AI shades, the subscription to our own digital lobotomy—and now we have to take the ride.
As we merge onto the highway, leaving the neon cancer of the Strip behind, I check my pockets. I still have the cookie. I look at the QR code, pixelated and innocent. For a second, just a second, I consider eating it. Just to see what happens. Just to feel something new.
But then the nausea hits, that specific, chemically-fueled churn of too much information and not enough meaning. I roll down the window and toss the cookie into the dark. It bounces once on the asphalt and is gone, crushed under the wheels of a self-driving Tesla truck hauling server racks to a data center in the desert.
“Keep driving, Sal,” I say, leaning back and closing my eyes. “It’s getting weird out here.”
More of the madness? Check Trump, the Empire Strikes Back (Smells Like Burger Grease & Oil)
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