Badwater
“Today we hear so much about local food, but what about local water?”, a voiceover says at the beginning of FindASpring promo shot, after a bearded, tattooed not-so-young man, presumably the “CEO” or “founder” of this initiative, is shown staring at a small creek and then entering the woods to collect it – with a glass barrel, of course. A piano starts playing slowly, as if we’re in the middle of an indie flick or, better, as if an indie director decided to recreate earnestly the genre of 50s educational films. “We aren’t any more adapted to refined H20”, the man continues, “than we are to refined carbohydrates”, before he teaches us about the problems of tap and bottled water. At the end of the video, he approaches the cutted trunk of a tree, where flows a small line of water, lowers his head and drinks directly from it, as if kissing Mother Nature herself.
At another video, a young man, blonde and blue-eyed, shoulder-length hair, stares into the camera and shares how he discovered natural water. He then narrates how he got into his hybrid-electric SUV, travelled far and wide, before he found an unnamed jungle, established contact with the supportive locals and encountered the cleanest, pure spring water he could find – and then (glass-)bottle it and sold it to Californians who can drink it in their homes or at their cars. The whole video is reminiscent both of New Age and exotica and, in typical Silicon Valley fashion, it states that this is not just any other business but also a way, through personal transformation, to save the world. Ten percent of the revenues, the young man says, will be donated to organizations that aim to improve water conditions in impoverished parts of the word – that is, Africa.
Both videos are part of the “raw water” trend that hit the news this week. As The New York Times article on it expands, drinking unfiltered water became a fashion between young entrepreneurs at the Silicon Valley. The trend regards not only personal habits, but also tries to establish itself as a business, and FindASpring and Fountains of Truth, crafters of the two videos I presented above, are just a small sample of the start-ups that already exist to explore “raw”, natural water. One strong support is Doug Evans, ex-CEO of famed Juicero, who self-reportedly drank only his own collected and transported raw water during the last Burning Man Festival, to great awe of his fellow desert-gatherers.
This latest fad is only one in a long line of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs trying to commodify every single aspect of a “raw”, natural way of living. From paleo diet to Mark Zuckerberg’s faded habit of eating only the animals he himself killed, it makes of nature – or what someone says that is – both a standard of living and a product that can be sold. In this way, personal conduct is socialized through the market and becomes trend; that is, it becomes not a personal choice but a market imposition. Though it will not become a mass commodity, “raw water” shows how Silicon Valley transforms business into fashion. The habit of drinking it will form a silver lining stating who’s in and who’s out, who deserves to participate in this eccentric culture and who will perish trying.
Silicon Valley takes on nature, however, are full of contradictions. One of them regards masculinity. The “raw” in “raw water” indicates not only some of the characteristics of the product – that is, unfiltered water – but also the conditions to get it. Bearded, often shirtless, young men go into the woods not only to find water but also to rediscover their manly-selves. It is often said of millennials that they aren’t good employees, but only often this is related to the ideal of self-employment that is fulfilled by start-ups. Not having anyone bossing around, controlling their own time, making what one wants to do, even going out of business several times, this is all part of a culture of incontinence that feeds itself of the dream of excess, and recycles the pop-culture romantic ideal of living on the edge and potentially destroying itself. Only this time this is isn’t done through drugs, but by negligence of the potential hazards of drinking unfiltered water.
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The whole business of selling water is suspicious. As one of the basic elements of life, treating it as a commodity represents the intromission of market into every aspect of everyday life. Initially, water was bottled as an extension of the spa culture that was created when the first experiences of leisure were crafted around the Industrial Revolution. Hotsprings and mineral water became famous among European elites that could travel to then. Later, they could transport some of this water to their homes and extend the period of appreciation of it. In the late nineteenth century, those springs became brands themselves, and were responsible for turning it into a fashionable commodity. By the turn of the century, however, the introduction of mass-sewage systems and of chloride into drinking water turned the habit of drinking tap water into a reality and represented the long decline of bottled water, now exclusively a luxury product. Even tough available drinkable water is a common feature only of some parts of the world, and not a given everywhere, one could say the introduction of running water into households was a major feature of twentieth-century Welfare State, so was the creation of public-run water treatment facilities and companies. Water, so as housing or education, for much of the twentieth century, was not regarded as a commodity into itself, only for those who could boast of paying not a small amount for it.
The ascent of bottled water in late twentieth century pop culture and industry is part of the general decline of the State in everyday life. This decline also represented a shifting of its functions, and from a State that regarded itself as a general provider, it became a facilitator of the concurrence, always presented to the consumers as freedom of choice. State water, that is, tap water, became only one of the “brands” of water available in the market, and the defunding of public companies, as well as their privatization, marked the overall decline of everything State-related and public-oriented in the neoliberal reality we now take for granted.
Needless to say, as one of the most concrete – though unnoticed – experiences of modernization in charge of the State, the introduction of running water was always met with some degree of paranoia. From man-created scarcity to the faking of health reports, water quality could become a disputed issue. Why is tap water sometimes colored? Why does it have flavor? What kind of substances are they putting into the water-filtering process?
As a product of Silicon Valley, “raw water” also participates in this paranoia surrounding the State. Raw, natural water not only represents the freedom to go into the woods and return to nature but the freedom of choosing against filtered, State-run water. Nonetheless, it also tackles Silicon Valley underdog type narratives and places start-ups against big business, showing the populist strain of its high-minded ideals. With “raw water”, one can choose not only against tap water, but also against all those only for-profit water brands which sell their goods without regarding provenance or the fate of the plastic bottles they use to sell it. Raw water is a way to make profit not only with a healthy body but also with a clean consciousness.
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“Raw water” is, especially, a matter of bad faith. This problem has many facets to it, and I will discuss some of them.
Some years ago, scientists discovered that most of Amazon’s water is not in the river itself or the soil, but on the clouds that constantly feed up the air humidity of the rain forest. They called it “flying river”, to distinguish it from horizontal, running water in the Amazon river and its many tributaries. Some time later, three entrepreneurs from São Paulo made the launching party of their start-up, called Ô Amazon Air Water, whose product was this “flying river”, only now bottled as a luxury product intended to be sold into foreign – that is, North American and European – markets. Making money out of thin air rarely gets so literal as this, but this would be just another instance of a luxury market in an unequal country if it wasn’t for the seemingly disregard to the circumstances surrounding this launching party. In the middle of 2015, the state of São Paulo and its eponymous capital city were experiencing the most dramatic moments of the longstanding water crisis that even today isn’t solved. That people were paying an exorbitant price for water was an unintended irony – if not a little bit sadistical – in a situation in which other people’s homes weren’t receiving any tap water. Just to add effect to it, one of the major issues in the water crises São Paulo faced and faces is the fact that big business, because of the high volume of water they use, pay a special, lower fee to receive the private-public partnership services offered by Sabesp, the state’s water company. One can think of the directorial board of some of these business trying to get a profitable contract from the company and all the while paying excessive price for buying bottled water themselves.
Ô Amazon Air Water’s case acts as a kind of archetypical case for “raw water” start-ups not only because of its blindness to society’s inequalities (on which I will expound later) but also for the whole dynamics of start-up capitalism itself. As I entered the Ô Amazon Air Water’s website to write this piece, I found it had only its front page, a short promotional YouTube video and a statement, on the left corner of the screen, saying “coming soon”. This “coming soon” means that, although by 2015 it was reported that the start-up amassed more than 30 million reais to start its business, it hasn’t done anything since. That money probably has gone nowhere but the bank accounts of the entrepreneurs, who in the end – if there isn’t an improbable twist to this story – will have succeed in what can be legitimately considered as a scam.
This is significative because in current capitalism one doesn’t need to produce anything, be it from goods to information, to have profit. Big sums are generated from an idea’s inception to the gathering of support from a well-financed backer, and not when or if the start-up’s intention pay off. I write this not as a condemnation of innovation itself, though the narratives about it circulating today need to be complexified to attend the multiple conditions on which innovation is made, but to show how start-ups, in the end, don’t need to be accountable for their business. This is money evading all responsibilities.
But, also, this is money being generated from scratch – or out of thin air, as in the example above. Traditionally, capital gathered its profits from the exploitation of labor. Though exploitation always bears a resemblance to speculation, as profit is generated between what one says something should be priced and the cost that actually went into is production, labor itself had a material reality as it was understood as the transformation of nature by human hands. In the case of “raw water”, however, what is the labor involved in making, “producing” it? As it has no real labor involved, but only speculation, its allure is also that of an infinite resource, for as long as it rains, there will be “raw water” to bottle, sell and drink. It is just as if someone bottled air and then sold it for the fooled costumers.
There is, however, something that could be put into the category of mental labor involved in it, which is the creation of the “raw water” concept itself. Profit is made when nature is repackaged as luxury commodity. That’s what happened to organic, whole food. The same is happening with water, as it becomes a marketable commodity. Along this rebranding – or, properly, branding – of natural goods comes the creation of its niche market, that is, those who buy and believe in this idea. An idea is nothing without its costumers.
Without state intervention, however, how to ensure the water someone drinks? And what if someone is not going to the spring itself, but only turning their taps or collecting rain water? The whole business sustains itself on a chain of beliefs, and it’s only because its costumers share their confidence on this set of beliefs that one can expect not being fooled by one of these start-ups. In a raw, brute way, these companies sell themselves through the same means Silicon Valley big business attend to user preferences in order to buy their loyalty. Customers should not be only customers, but also supporters.
Finally, bad faith reveals itself in the ironical realization that some people decided to pay an exaggerated price for what is essentially a bad product (or something they could have done themselves). This irony has a tragic twist, however, when one considers that non-drinkable water is a reality of many places, one enforced upon large swaths of population. It is not necessary to place a colonial gaze upon Africa to see it. The example of Flint, Michigan, is right over there, as it conjures the living ghosts of racism, management practices, rising public debts and lowering or slashing of public funding for basic services, all this packaged with the neoliberal state.
It should be outright scandalous that some people are naïve or so blind to this. But, once again, in a typical Silicon Valley or neoliberal way of doing, the whole “raw water” thing treats the water problem as if was only a matter of personal choice, and not a structural problem. And by structural I mean structural in the big, global, systemic sense.
What strikes me in all this is what could be considered an as-yet undisclosed consequence of the post-colonial reality we now live. One definition of post-coloniality is that of the internalization of frontiers that once separated civilized from savage populations. Every nation-state had their own savages, sacrificed for its constitutions. But, as twentieth-century liberation movements managed to end outright imperial domination by European powers, coloniality itself has not ended. Instead, its borders were redrawn, center and margin were conflated inside the Nation-state, and domination was eventually led and strengthened by the neoliberal state
In a sense, then, there are colonial realities anywhere, only some more manifest than others. I could say the one feature of current capitalism, then, is the uniformization of these colonial experiences. The way one posits itself through this continuum of coloniality is by paying or being convinced to pay in order to move up the ladder, while those that can’t pay can only be subjected to it.
To pay is to accept blindly the never-ending play of distinction involved in current capitalism. Believing one could control and master it by having options, by choosing its own water, for instance, is only the dream of some ill-informed subject. As “raw water” makes its way, either as a viable product or disappears to bring forth the next trend, what it discloses is that fooling and being fooled is the way capitalism itself has found to survive yet and once again.
