Post-Texture Food for Post-Employment Laborers
Post-Texture Food for Post-Employment Laborers
A photo posted by Soylent (@soylent) on Dec 11, 2014 at 10:07am PST
There are a few ways to look at Soylent’s reception of twenty million dollars in fresh venture capital from Andreessen Horowitz, among others. One of them is that it’s a savvy investment in the point at which the uniquely American desires for miracle-yet-often-wholly-unnatural health foods, extreme convenience, and utterly quantified life-hacking converge into a single slurry of painstakingly iterated gruel rich in vitamins, minerals, macronutrients, self-confidence, fiber, karma, and upvotes. Another, perhaps, is that these firms are wisely investing in an exciting new online community that just happens to be oriented around science-based food products.
Yet another still — if one harbors the slightest shred of belief in the possibility of a vast unremitting conspiracy that is designed to hurtle civilization toward any of the less uncomfortable dystopias featured in science fiction of the last hundred years or so, the ones in which we are at least not dead and still conscious — is that the same people who have funded a broad expansion and re-structuring of a semi-permanent undermiddleclass of on-demand, quasi-employed, independent laborers — who have been fed to the maw of this new economy by the recession and stagnant wages in order to drive cars, pick up groceries, clean floorboards, write blog posts, and perform other tasks teetering close enough to automation to be relegated to a button in an app — are now also funding the development of nutritionally sound sustenance that can be afforded by even the least entrepreneurial UberX drivers and TaskRabbits. Especially as the research and development provided by this new venture capital allows the price of Soylent to fall toward zero from its already low price of three dollars per meal. (And who could go without mentioning that workers don’t even have to ever stop driving, shopping, or cleaning in order to drink Soylent whenever their brains determine that their bodies require nutrition?) Just thinking out loud.