This author is really, really bitter. I've never tried Soylent, I'm not particularly interested, but it doesn't bother me that some people want cost-effective meal replacements.
I tried, I really did, but I could not find cohesive thesis or argument here. Just rhetoric comparing personal preference with mental illness (??). An intentionally inflammatory piece meant only to provoke ire and get a few hits... seems like Donald Trump's tactics are rubbing off on the folks on the other side of the pond. ;)
Edit: Oh. I forgot this is a thing. Writers being intentionally negative and provocative, belittling other cultures and groups (somewhat hypocritically?) to entertain other similarly negative people within their niche. Misery loves company.
The thesis is that Silicon Valley is repackaging unglamourous, tried-and-true ideas in hipster-friendly format, i.e., by disparaging the mainstream delivery of the equivalent services. The author asserts that this methodology is shallow, transparent, and elitist.
Soylent is Slimfast, Airbnb is vacation rental, Tinder is personals...
It is abrasive, but he's got a (rather recycled) point. I'm not sure if the abrasive tone is intrinsic or simply giving his target a taste of its own medicine. The Soylent snippets really are a little ridiculous. "The home manufacturing center had been by far the most liberating to eliminate..." Allow me to bear your burden of having a refrigerator...
I get turned off by a lot of technocrat stuff, too. I do think that Uber and Airbnb are novel ways of delivering old services. I huff at Airbnb when I get the marketing emails about being in a caring world and all that stuff.
The takeaway, for me, is that with the proliferation of all of this new tech, the average consumer is becoming more keen to grandiose claims. Don't tell me that Soylent is a revolution and that I ought to have ditched my oven; tell me why it's a better product than Slimfast, because that's what you're really up against.
I don't get it. Maybe as a casual soylent user I'm defensive myself, but I don't understand why the author is so personally offended by this? Disclosure: I stopped reading part way through.
Soylent is a meal replacement that can feed people a meal for under $3. With a year long shelf life. That's a pretty impressive product (I know one can diy and careful plan one's own "perfect" meal, but many won't, and many can't). The use of algal oil as a major source of macronutrients is _huge_, in environmental terms as well as our ability as a species to distribute sustenance to everyone. The personal choices of the founder really don't concern me. The value judgements the author uses to make his point just hurts the point itself.
* Soylent _is_ liberating in a lot of ways, as are any other meal replacement.
* It's still possible to love food and enjoy human contact, even while eating it for every planned meal.
* Because he wants to get rid of his kitchen doesn't mean you have to.
There's kind of a pernicious implication that soylent isn't "manly" enough (gendered language used by me for effect here; it's not incidental). Real men know how to grow food and hunt food and cook it over an open fire! You're all going to die because you relied on Soylent! You are not a real human being, you are a robot!
I mean, I got carried away at the end there snarking back at the author, but that's exactly my point. How helpful is this snark other than as a rhetorical tactic to fill up space and manipulate people's points of view?
The problem on both ends is the tone, I think. The soylent guy is using really strong language to get you to think things are better his way -- he replaces his clothes rather than cleaning them, he replaced his kitchen/fridge/groceries with his shakes, he replaced the need for preparing solid foods with eating out on every occasion.
The author suggests he's disconnected from reality, because everything he says is only possible because he can afford it. In fact, soylent didn't permit him any of this, except possibly the ability to afford to live like this in the first place.
This article has as much a chance of getting a fair or understanding reading on HN as a scathing critique of capitalism by readers of The Wall Street Journal.
To do that you have to be open to and understanding of if not sympathetic to criticism of contemporary tech culture as well as hipster culture.
That, understandably, is harder than usual for the HN community. Dismissing the article as "bitter" or "angry", as many comments on this page are doing, is hardly a refutation, and comes off as tit-for-tat bitterness and anger. Furthermore the HN community has no problem with bitterness and anger when it aligns with the ethos here. For example there's plenty of anger at government regulation, or at GitHub's new Code of Conduct[1].
Another example is this community's reaction to charges of sexism within tech culture. While many HN commenters agree that this is a real problem, many commenters here and on other tech publications again label women as "bitter" and "angry". To me that's very troubling.
So, I'd like to think I'm generally an understanding person, but I don't really follow how my opinions on GitHub censoring the word "retard" in repos (which I have no problem with; almost every use of the word I've seen is vile) impacts my ability to give this article a "fair or understanding" reading?
The author of the article is essentially just lambasting someone that wrote from quite an abrasive and privileged (and often factually problematic) perspective in a blog post. And conflated it with both soylent the company and "tech" and "hipster" culture. And he basically tells them they're going to die because they're out of touch and will be put up on the wall in a firing line.
I find it hard to read that kind of bombast fairly, and even putting that aside, really don't find any kind of insight in the article whatsoever.
> someone that wrote from quite an abrasive and privileged (and often factually problematic) perspective in a blog post. And conflated it with both soylent the company and "tech" and "hipster" culture.
I think that's the key. You see a conflation, and I see the connection.
(FWIW I voted up your comment even though we disagree. I appreciate your good faith.)
There are no valid points in the article to argue against. Read the article again. This isn't some "oh well I wish they were working on clean water" post. It's "these out of touch elitist assholes will be lined up on the wall when it all comes crumbling down". That's something a paranoid fool would say. Calling it out as simplistic and being dismissive of it is the proper response imho.
I really didn't like the tone of this article, it was super abrasive and the guy sounded personally offended over what the Soylent CEO was doing.
"When the clean water starts to run out, the world crumbles, and our tech is no longer there to act as a crutch, the out-of-touch tech elite will be the first against the wall."
From the title, I think this is the boiled down point he's trying to make? I find this ridiculous considering the 'tech elite' are actively trying to solve these global issues along with engineers and all matter of scientists across the globe.
All that being said, I don't think anyone needs to take too much offense at his tone. Take a look at his other 'articles' and you can tell that he's just another blogger.
> And so I come to Soylent, the meal replacement plan that has taken the SlimFast concept of feeding you unpleasant gloop in place of real food and welded it to a dumbass ideology drunk with libertarianism, confused futurism and startup bro stupidity.
I dunno, there is a real kind of liberation you can have if you are on some diet that is all planned out. I did a week's fast and was amazed at how much free time I had now that I wasn't eating or shopping for food or preparing food or cleaning the plates, thinking about what I was going to eat or travelling to or waiting for food at restaurants.
Of course you can do it more wholesomely and cheaper than Soylent if you follow the bean plan of Tim Ferris.
I'm starting to get a little annoyed at how the perception of 'tech' seems to now be becoming synonymous with AC free nutjobs, hipsters, social media hype and rich Silicon Valley vultures. Very little of which is actually anything to do with 'tech'.
I'd even prefer that old Revenge of the Nerds stereotype to this. Oh well, back to shooing the kids off my lawn...
This guy is a very angry person without anything constructive to say as far as I can tell. His other articles reflect the same tone. Juvenile ranting, imho. If there's something to actually discuss here please fill me in.
I tried, I really did, but I could not find cohesive thesis or argument here. Just rhetoric comparing personal preference with mental illness (??). An intentionally inflammatory piece meant only to provoke ire and get a few hits... seems like Donald Trump's tactics are rubbing off on the folks on the other side of the pond. ;)
Edit: Oh. I forgot this is a thing. Writers being intentionally negative and provocative, belittling other cultures and groups (somewhat hypocritically?) to entertain other similarly negative people within their niche. Misery loves company.