ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how CES—the world’s largest technology trade show—maintains assumptions about rapid, perpetual, and inevitable technological change by creating visions of the future. Though closed to the general public, press coverage of the event primes retail consumers to anticipate forthcoming technologies. Using ethnographic vignettes detailing experiences with the unseen practices of exhibitors and attendees, the chapter describes the day-to-day marketing work at CES that maintains the industry’s cadence of emergence and obsolescence. Still, the public facing dimension provides more than just a window into the “business of the future,” it opens up possibilities for public pressure to intervene into the culture of marketing work in the consumer technology industry. Thanks to public pressure from feminist journalists and activists the use of scantily clad female models as a marketing tactic—colloquially known as “booth babes”—began to decline during the late 2010s, leading the CTA to eventually codify the culture shift with a professional dress code in 2020. The trend toward professional attire signaled the beginning of a change in how women are represented in these visions of the future as professionals and innovators of, rather than overtly sexualized adornments to, emerging technologies at CES.
