January 5, 2018

Silicon Valley Wants You to Cash In Your 401(k) to Buy “Raw Water”

The hip, expensive way to drink untreated H20.

Natural water in a glassArtTim/iStock

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Silicon Valley has an apparently relentless appetite for disrupting the way we eat. Now, it’s coming after your tap water. Behold Source: a Hydropanel, a home system sold by a company called Zero Mass Water that uses condensation to trap water from the air and deliver it to your drinking glass. “Just take a breath of air,” the company’s CEO, Cody Friesen, told The New York Times’ Nellie Bowles. “No matter how wealthy or poor you are, you can take a breath and own that air that you breathe. And yet water—the government brings it to you.”

Hear Nellie Bowles talk more about the raw water trend on the latest episode of Bite podcast. The segment starts at 1:40 in the episode below:

Unlike your lungs, which process your air for free, a Source rig goes for $4,500, installation included. Yet the concept of high-dollar, privatized water procurement apparently scratches Bay Area tech culture’s libertarian itch—Zero Mass Water has drawn $24 million in venture capital, Bowles reports. 

And it’s not the only tap-water-disruption scheme brewing in the Valley. Remember Juicero, the VC darling that peddled pricey subscription bags of pre-chopped produce and a $400 contraption to crush them into juice? After it crashed and burned last year, its founder, Doug Evans, “went on a 10-day cleanse,” drinking nothing but untreated spring water, Bowles writes. 

Since then, Evans has been skulking Northern California on the hunt for springs from which to slake his thirst. “I’m extreme about health, I know, but I’m not alone with this,” Evans told Bowles. “There are a lot of people doing this with me. You never know who you’ll run into at the spring.”

Who knows what the Juicero guy will do with this insight. But it’s fun to think of him teaming up in Silicon Valley pitch meetings with Mukhande Singh (born Christopher Sanborn). Singh is the entrepreneur behind Live Water, which for $36.99, and $14.99 per refill, sells 2.5 gallon glass containers of “raw water”—”unfiltered, untreated, unsterilized spring water.” Here’s Business Insider’s Kate Taylor on what could possibly go wrong with that equation.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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