2026-03-21
45 分钟The Economist.
In what now feels like a distant past, I was a technology reporter.
In that world, the single biggest event every year came in January:
the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Big, like Vegas does big.
Flashy, all the movers and shakers and the very latest gizmos.
I never managed to get there, but I knew lots of colleagues who did.
And every year, every one of them came back and mentioned another conference
going on in Las Vegas around the same time.
So you 're just going to see the class of the class,
the most dressed up, the wildest dresses, the wildest suits.
Everyone, this is it, this is the Oscars of porn.
Imagine hordes of goggle-eyed technology journalists moving around the same spaces
as the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, a five-day conference capped by two big awards nights.
This is no coincidence.
There's a fascinating link between tech and porn going way back.
The printing press gets invented in the 15th century.
Sure, Martin Luther's pamphlets and the Reformation and all of that,
but what 's the real trade in, given this newly available mass medium?
Erotic stuff.