Techies in wonderland as IT meets Las Vegas

There's only one way to arrive in Las Vegas, and that's by plane. Not necessarily because you're a successful, moneyed technology company chief executive, although most of them giving the glitzy keynote speeches at Comdex, the huge American computer show, wouldn't think of arriving in anything other than the corporate jet.

Flying in - at least by daylight - is the required mode of transport because it places in context this expensively faux city, this kitsch temple of artifice: Las Vegas, the surreal home to downsized Eiffel Tower and Empire State Building replicas, enormous black glass pyramids and companion sphinxes, Roman temples, French rococo overstatement, artificial East Asian colonial splendour (and those are just the hotels), gamblers' avarice and showgirls' breasts. Everything that is least pleasant about human nature luxuriates in Vegas, hidden behind the fabulous and costly interiors and exteriors of extravagant themed hotels built on money gambled and lost, and designed to lure more money into the same cycle.

But flying high above the desert, the visitor coming from any direction has a beautiful view of some of the most stunning scenery in the United States. Coming from the west, one arrives over the vast Sierra Nevada, a formidable range of immense glacier and snow-cloaked mountains that stretch down the spine of the state of California. From the east, the visitor travels high above the many-hued magnificence of the south-western desert states, the heart of the Great American West.

Below are the ancient lands of the Navajo and Hopi tribes and the cliff-side dwellings of the legendary Anasazi, who were there first: flat-topped mesas and glowing red canyons, dried-out beds of twisting rivers and vast expanses of desert that turn every shade of the earthen palette, from ochre to pale yellow to crimson, then revert to bland tan. Then comes the real heart stopper, a site that entirely surpasses any expectation or even live memory of it, though it features in miles of film and photographs: the southern rim of the Grand Canyon. This complex of jigsaw cliff-tops, striated rock and plunging canyon is so deep and so enormous that even the view at 34,000 feet cannot take it in in more than small segments.

Even after the Grand Canyon, one relishes the alien shapes and colours - treeless, peopleless landscapes of bare rock mountain, then soft, doe-brown spiky hills startling against the deep blue of the great reservoir behind the Hoover Dam, then the mixed browns, tans and reds of the Nevada desert looking out towards the merciless sweep of California's Death Valley. And finally, there's Vegas, the towering hotels and casinos of the famous strip, the pulse of the always-on neon signs, visible even in the painfully brilliant sunshine of late autumn.

Once you arrive in Vegas, you lose all sense of context and reality. You say farewell to the natural world and enter the heavily-hyped land of the unnatural. And that's doubly true of Comdex, which heaves with 250,000 technology aficionados, 2,000 exhibitors and a motley army of journalists waiting to hear about the next big thing.

Vegas has been the home of Comdex, which stands for Computer Dealers Exchange, for more than two decades. At first, the contrast between 1970s-era bewhiskered geeks and big-time Vegas gambling, glitz, showgirls and legalised prostitution must have been pleasing - the cliched image of guys eternally without girl friends went so humorously well with the city where flesh was easily purchased and vice a civic virtue.

Nowadays, perhaps no city anywhere on earth more suitably, lovingly, pairs with the technology industry. Las Vegas, meet IT: new money, squandered money, money and reputations gambled and lost, vast riches questionably or skillfully or riskily won, bloated clouds of hype, a surface veneer of glamour, a desire to spend and spend and spend some more, the desperate longing of the not-yet or never-will-be successful, the self-satisfaction of those who have made it. Stretch limos (and this year, weirdly, stretch Humvees - those odd, flat little vehicles used in the Gulf War), scantily-clad women, enormous parties, live entertainment and a fixed, sometimes grim, determination to have fun, fun, fun!

And of course, Comdex, just as Las Vegas, is great fun if you have a sense of context (thus, you'd better fly in), a well-developed sense of irony, a good dash of scepticism and a willing suspension of disbelief at crucial moments. You will be shown demos of things that do not work. You will be subjected to a non-stop barrage of marketers. You will fall in love, over and over, with the possibility of certain products, certain visions: the wireless revolution; the connected home; ubiquitous computing. The entire Las Vegas Convention Centre is inside a reality distortion field of epic proportions. Just go back and read the coverage of previous Comdexes, the excited babble back then about products, trends and sexy tech futures that never materialised.

But then again, very little eventually gels in the world of gadgets or computing that didn't make its first stage appearance at Comdex in some way, shape or form. This is why it's so utterly addictive - Comdex is the opportunity to see the future, to hear the talk, to meet the names, to watch the demos and to try the products that will shape tomorrow. If only the way were clearer, the true path less obscured and the hype not so overwhelming. If only one didn't have to battle a quarter of a million people all looking for a shuttle bus back to their hotel at precisely 5 p.m. when the exhibit hall closes. If only the slots were paying out, the royal flushes running and the wheel spinning the way you placed your bet. But that's the IT industry and that's Las Vegas, and it's just as well always to have that 34,000-foot perspective in your mind's eye because, ironically, in that oh-so-Las-Vegas way, it's the only way to keep your feet firmly on the ground.

Next week: walking the walk inside the halls.

Karlin Lillington is at klillington@irish-times.ie