I sift through the open pouch in front of me with a metal spoon. The powder's consistency falls somewhere between cornmeal and flour. Its smell is a combination of rancid vanilla and wet cardboard. I mix a few tablespoons with water and start to drink, yet it takes only a few sips for me to feel sick; it’s as if my stomach knows that I shouldn’t be drinking this. An hour after rinsing my mouth out, I can still faintly taste it in the back of my throat.
This mysterious white powder is Soylent, the mealy, off-white “meal replacement” marketed as “powdered food” that provides “100% daily nutrition.” If you’re feeling disgusted, that’s a pretty normal reaction, and one which the founders even cheekily embrace. Indeed, the powder’s name was partly inspired by the titular product in the 1973 sci-fi film “Soylent Green”; the film’s central conceit was that Soylent Green is secretly manufactured from human corpses. (To its credit, Soylent says “plant-based” on the packaging in big letters, lest you confuse it with Soylent Green.)
Unlike other products marketed as meals or quick forms of sustenance — say, energy bars or Slimfast — Soylent has a “neutral flavor profile,” according to its packaging. Hence, the point of Soylent is solely to provide sustenance, not taste. By mixing soy isolates with vitamins and binding agents, the makers of Soylent created a synthetic powder that offers all the means for survival. And yet its consumption offers no other benefits, besides slaking hunger.
Detached from a larger cultural context, my description of Soylent might make it sound as if it were a product for food refugees, or those living in blight-suffering regions. And yet, Soylent is very, very, very much a first-world product. Indeed, it is considered a premier example of the Silicon Valley hype machine. In March 2017, a group of venture capitalists, including prestige firms like Google’s GV and Andreessen Horowitz, invested $50 million in the company, bringing its total haul of investor cash to $74 million. Techies are eating — er, drinking — it up; after sharing the recipe in hacker forums, inventor Rob Rhinehart fundraised $100,000 in two hours from excitable consumers. That was in 2014.
The New York Times wrote a profile of some of its techie boosters in 2015; the list includes Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is quoted as saying, “If there was a way that I couldn’t eat so I could work more, I would not eat. I wish there was a way to get nutrients without sitting down for a meal.” “Silicon Valley’s workers are now increasingly chugging their meals, too, so they can more quickly get back to their computer work,” wrote the Times. “The time wasted by eating is, in Silicon Valley parlance, a ‘pain point’ even for the highest echelon of techie.”
I am not a techie by any stretch of the imagination. Living in San Francisco, there’s a noticeable divide, frankly, between their culture and everyone else’s. Perhaps this is why I can’t fathom the appeal of Soylent, nor understand it as a phenomenon — it is not part of my culture. It’s tech culture. Not being a techie myself, I struggle at times to understand what tech culture is — which would in turn provide insight into Soylent’s appeal.
Jan English-Lueck, a professor of anthropology at San Jose State and Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for the Future, has been studying Silicon Valley culture for years. English-Lueck said that an outsider peering into Silicon Valley might notice how “people are fascinated with speed and efficiency.” “They’re enthusiastic and optimistic about what technology can accomplish,” English-Lueck told Salon. That might explain some of the unbounded investor optimism for a product like Soylent, which owes its existence to food science.
David Golumbia, an associate professor of Digital Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, described Soylent as exemplary of the notion of the “quantified self” — an obsession with quantifying all aspects of life. You might be familiar with the idea of the quantified self through an array of consumer tech products, from Fitbit (which counts your steps) to the Apple Watch (which counts heart rate and other health indicators) to Last.fm (a site that tracks the music you listen to). “One of the things the Soylent makers have taken away is the pleasure of eating, which is both a physiological and a social pleasure,” Golumbia told Salon. “The people who advocate for Soylent would describe it as a type of freedom — I know exactly what to eat, I don’t have to think about it — but to most other people, that sounds like not an improvement on eating but a degradation. It’s a very algorithmic way of eating.”
That programmers are interested in Soylent as a means of sustaining themselves while relentlessly pumping out code speaks to the “speed and efficiency” culture that English-Lueck mentioned. “Food is very much a part of how we express our culture,” English-Lueck said. “Soylent is one form of highly functional, highly efficient food that isn’t going to interfere with your ability to be productive.”
So, the obsession with work, productivity and speed that dominates the tech industry (and especially startups) leads us right to Soylent. Most of us would likely balk at the idea of regularly sacrificing the pleasure of food so as to better serve one's employer. Yet the tech industry has been successful at branding itself as not merely about profit, but about progress and changing the world — in other words, calling to a higher purpose. “A lot of tech workers see themselves as future entrepreneurs, but really they’re not if you look at their relationship to production,” a former Google subcontractor, who wished to remain anonymous because of an ongoing unionization effort, told Salon. “I think that’s intentional. I think there’s a lot of ideology that gets spread throughout the industry… there’s the whole mythos around these giant companies,” she continued.
Perhaps you’ve heard the old quote, often misattributed to John Steinbeck, that says that “socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” A corollary: Labor unions have never taken root in Silicon Valley because the programmers see themselves not as exploited workers generating profits for investors, but rather as temporarily embarrassed millionaire startup founders. Indeed, such a belief, were it widespread, could encourage tech workers to do something as absurd as, say, sacrifice the pleasures of eating food in order to work longer and harder hours for their employer, in whose mission they so deeply believe.
These blurred lines between employer and employee characterize the situation of labor in Silicon Valley, too. The tech industry is notoriously devoid of labor unions, and has been for ages; a 1983 Associated Press article, titled "Labor Unions are Absent in Silicon Valley," wrote that "the union-free workforce is both a product of conscious effort and a byproduct of the forces that drive fast-track, high-technology companies . . . . It is also the result of a mystique as likely to seduce production workers as millionaire entrepreneurs." The same situation exists today in Silicon Valley, in that workers don't feel an antagonism toward the people who exploit their labor. If they did, they probably wouldn't forgo the pleasures of food for a neutral white powder so that they could work even harder lining their bosses’ pockets.
Knowing this, it seems like Soylent is merely the dead end of a "quantified self" tech culture that has obscured the relationship between workers and owners. Soylent isn’t made of people; it’s made of ideology.
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