The Weirdest Shit to Come Out of Silicon Valley in May
Seeing how everyone responded well to last month’s “Two Truths and a Lie, the Silicon Valley Start-up Edition,” I decided we should play it again.
Out of the following three start-ups, which is the fake one? One that bioengineers bees to pollinate specific plants. One that provides on-demand electric skateboards. Or one that is developing plant-based milk for pets. (Scroll to the bottom for the answers.)
And if you’re wondering why I’m not discussing Apple’s antitrust lawsuit, Samsung’s no-so-foldable phone or Facebook’s foray into cryptocurrency, it’s because that’s not weird shit—or at least not the weirdest this month. Hey, you read the headline, so you knew what you were letting yourself in for.
Know of some ridic stuff happening in June? Shoot me a message to include next month.
This feels like an April Fool’s story, but sigh—it’s just another example of how Silicon Valley can disrupt regular working industries with COOLNESS! FUN! CRAZY TEXT ABOUT MURDERING YOUR THIRST!
This time, they’ve figured out the future of water—and it comes in a can.
Yes, with all that buildup, you’d kinda expect something more…edgy? Alcoholic? Whatever. Cool marketing, bro. The idea was dreamed up by cofounders Mike Cessario and Billy Veasey, whose respective water-industry experience includes designing viral marketing for House of Cards and “comedic campaigns for Gillette.” Apparently, that’s all you need to raise $1.6 million in Silicon Valley. Investors include Twitter founder Biz Stone and Dollar Shave Club CEO Michael Dubin.
These water-preneurs cooked up Liquid Death, the not-beer canned water, which is priced like a mid-range beer (a 12-pack of their tallboy waters is $19) and makes drinking water a thing, y’know, because otherwise you might not bother with the fluid that’s the root of all life on this planet. On the environmental front, they posit that canning water is more environmentally friendly than putting it in plastic bottles — and you’ll get 100 percent water that “instantly decapitates your thirst.” At least the guys have a sense of humor about the inherent ridiculousness of their company. Under the listing for Liquid Death on Crunchbase (a website that reports on start-up investments) is the line “Liquid Death is a real product.”
Introverts, rejoice! But only if you’re well-off. Starting on May 15, UberBlack and UberSUV riders across America (in Boston, Cleveland, Dallas and San Francisco) could opt into Uber’s concept of what “exceeds [passengers’] expectations on every ride.” They want their top-paying passengers to experience a “high-quality service and premium comfort.” Fair enough.
That’s until you realize that what they mean by that is a new level of elitist entitlement. Behold the Quiet Mode. Now an UberBlack rider who wants their driver to turn off the music, turn up the heat, help with their luggage or just STFU can let them know with a flick of the finger instead of communicating through the spoken word. I’m sure Jack Dorsey is thrilled. Martha Stewart for sure is—Uber tweeted a pic of her looking contentedly at her phone. Yay, no more small talk with the proletariat. I think comedian Jamie Loftus summed it up best: “Uber Quiet Mode is a great option for cowards with expendable income.” After all, there’s no need to say “please” when you don’t use any words.
This month, Daye, the world’s first “cramp-fighting tampon,” raised $5.5 million to fix lady parts. Now I hate that time of the month as much as the next woman, but I felt my spidey sense tingling when I scrolled through this company’s marketing material.
First, they’re using CBD as their main pain reliever, and I have very strong feelings about the vast number of CBD products being touted right now. My concern isn’t that you’re going to get high this way — that’s a whole different business idea — but more that CBD for pain relief in its current commercial form is basically bullshit. Yes, I know there are studies (with limited amounts of people/rats) and lots of anecdotal evidence, but essentially, the quantities needed for most CBD oils and such to work aren’t there. A good example of the hype: the Guardian called CBD “2019’s avocado toast.”
To be fair, Daye references this in its literature: “CBD products often come without specified dosages. They’re safe for use but likely not providing the benefits advertised.” Kudos, but I wish they’d mentioned how much CBD their tampons will contain. All they say is that they’ll have “30% CBD” and “not the usual 5%.” Umm, OK?
Then there’s the icky fact that the company was formerly known as “Anne’s Daye” after Anne Frank. Yes, the Anne Frank (in her diaries, she calls her period “a momentous event”). It’s also quite possible that their name change has more to do with the fact that there’s a Japanese tampon brand called Anne’s Daye (also named after Ms. Frank) than any feelings of “Hey, maybe this isn’t appropriate.” But whatevs — they have a couple of million now to try to make this a thing.
Hail to the latest way a tech firm is optimizing worker productivity while pretending it’s for their employees’ benefit. Amazon’s latest sneak attack is to turn its warehouse workers’ repetitive tasks into video games.
How they’re doing this: putting screens next to workstations and gamifying actions, like assembling orders, into arcade-level games, such as Mission Racer, PicksInSpace, Dragon Duel and CastleCrafter. Details on the exact way to play the games are scarce, but it’s likely that one of them deals with factory workers who are maneuvering Amazon’s robots through the aisles in real life, picking items off of shelves (a red light indicates the correct product was chosen) and dropping the items into boxes. The video-game action mirrors their real-life work—likely adding blocks to a castle or beating a dragon — and their battle/build is over when their real-life task is completed. The more they do, the better their score; the better they score, the more “virtual badges” or “goodies” they’ll accrue. This is Black Mirror–level shit.
Their corporate reason for the games: to make employees feel less like nameless cogs in a machine. The (likely) real reason: studies show that gamification makes workers more productive. And now for the dark side: Amazon says they’re not monitoring game scores, but they do fire people who underperform, and a correlation between gaming and output seems probable. And you thought they were just trying to be nice.
Every freelancer gets the appeal of coworking spaces, the WeWorks, Wings and Covos of the world. It’s not just their free coffee, WiFi outlets and Instagrammable decor. They’re not selling the space; they’re selling the community—shared spaces for remote workers where they can connect with people with similar lifestyles. Y’know, friendship. But here, it’s friendship you can afford to pay for.
So it makes sense that companies like WeLive (flat-share for coworkers) and Tribe (a coliving space)—which provide easy-to-move-into apartments where you know the people won’t be creepers—are doing well. Yes, the need for people to find an apartment when they move to a new city isn’t new, but for an increasingly dislocated workforce, the idea of ready-made relationships is appealing. We also have apps like Bumble BFF and Hey! VINA, where you essentially date for friends, not fucks.
I’ve never stopped to quantify this before, but writer Laura Entis’s take on this modern phenomenon is to coin it the “loneliness business.” And Silicon Valley is cashing in. “Modern life is studded with situations that sever us from our social networks,” she writes.
We’ve come full circle when it comes to greenery. Medical cannabis gave way to recreational weed, which, in turn, spewed out a bunch of scientifically dubious CBD drinks and accessories. Now Silicon Valley has a new take on something green: nature. That’s right—they’ve reinvented the outdoors.
It’s like all those life-optimizing desk-bound techies have woken up and realized that maybe there’s some benefit to experiencing nature firsthand. Sometimes you just need to feel the grass and bugs below your feet to motivate you to solve those systemwide problems.
Sure, the concept of going outside — for fun — is a valid one; going for a walk outside can improve your short-term memory, reduce blood pressure and ease anxiety. But the act of prescribing it, whereby a doctor actually clicks a button and issues park prescriptions, is a sign that something is truly wrong with the world. And that’s what’s happening.
In San Mateo, home to numerous tech start-ups, health official Dr. Scott Morrow has initiated a park-prescription program for people in his district. He mostly prescribes park time to children (those Silicon Valley kids under a lot of pressure) but is starting to prescribe it to adults as well. “It’s a culture change we’re going for,” he told the SixFifty blog.
ParkRx is now part of the county’s electronic medical system. A preset dose recommends “spend[ing] time in nature, one hour, twice a week.”
In a move that harkens back to its hippie roots, San Francisco has become the first city in America to unilaterally put the ixnay on the use of facial recognition by police or city agencies. “Surveillance efforts have historically been used to intimidate and oppress certain communities and groups more than others,” the ordinance stated. “The propensity for facial-recognition technology to endanger civil rights and civil liberties substantially outweighs its purported benefits.”
To be clear, San Francisco’s police have never actually used facial-recognition technology in their work, so this is more of a future prohibition rather than stopping anything that’s happening right now. But as this technology evolves, it is being more frequently used in security services across America, from border protection to police departments (including in New York City, San Diego and Boston). When it works, it can be used to great effect — Bangkok airport security used it to confirm that a man was traveling on a counterfeit passport. But when it fails, there can be serious consequences—for example, automated racism. And that’s before we consider the high error rates this tech still has, especially when assessing people of color.
In a city with a long history of being welcoming to immigrants and the disenfranchised, the approval of this ordinance (the ruling was eight to one) by the city’s supervisors is a way to emphasize San Francisco’s status as a sanctuary city. They’re also trying to make a point: the techies of the city regularly get heat for allowing people to misuse their services, and as tech evolves faster and faster, it often outpaces regulation. By preemptively laying down the law like this, SF is effectively telling the tech companies: that won’t fly anymore.
As a vegetarian, I’ve never tried a Chick-fil-A nugget, but from multiple sources and Reddit posts, I’ve gleaned that it’s both “delicious” and “diarrhea making.” No proven correlation. Loyal customers don’t seem to mind (despite their anti-gay-marriage stance), but no brand wants to go viral time and time again for poisoning their customers, so they set out to fix it. Of course, the best way to stay on top of bad food is to pay workers fair wages, ensure sanitary conditions and source chicken from reputable sources.
Nah, jokes, it’s to use AI to fix the problem. Chick-fil-A’s in-house tech team used Amazon’s natural-language-processing system to devise an algorithm that scrapes social media for comments about the company. Then it filters them through 500-odd “food safety” keywords. I’m going to guess that “exploding poop” and “watery stools” are in there. Surprisingly, their “I got the shits” AI is working. They say it can identify food-safety issues across their 2,400+ US restaurants with 78 percent accuracy. Store managers get push notifications to alert them of problems, and they can reach out to affected customers to try to make it up to them.
They’ll also be rolling out a computer-vision system that rebukes employees who don’t wash their hands, which could reduce illness by another 80 percent. It’s great that they’re Big Brothering the handwashing, but I think they could give more attention to making food that doesn’t invert your insides. But what do I know? I don’t eat meat.
Answers to Two Truths and a Lie: The plant-based pet milk is the lie; Rollr, a California-based start-up, provides on-demand electric skateboards through their app; and BeeFlow is developing superbees.
The Weirdest Shit to Come Out of Silicon Valley in May
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