By David Swan
Publication Date: 2026-01-11 00:03:00
Las Vegas, Nevada – The first thing you notice at CES, the world’s largest technology trade show, is how smoothly everything is supposed to work. The televisions anticipate what you want to watch. The robot vacuum knows where you left the cereal. The Lego bricks now talk to each other.
The second thing you notice when you look at your phone between press conferences is that a 37-year-old woman has been shot dead by an immigration agent in Minneapolis, bushfires are raging in Victoria, and US federal troops have captured the president of Venezuela.
This year’s CES in Las Vegas was defined as much by what happened outside the conference rooms — the tariffs, the violence, the overwhelming volatility — as by what was seen inside.