The story is about a rather sad individual named Carl who
becomes badly disfigured after he agrees to be a guinea pig for a start-up named
Mayflower, the maniacal CEO of which believes grow lights could be used to
deliver nutrients to humans in place of conventional food -- while people are involved in other activities, such as using a computer.
“Disruption was the watchword. Carl and his team were
pressured to lift their legs and pee-shame the status quo. For a cash-yielding
invention to work, for it to leak gold pudding and really destroy the economy, in
Mayflower’s favor, maybe even change the meaning of money, Kipler (the CEO)
once said, it had to look inevitable, ridiculously obvious in hindsight. They
all kept coming back to food. What a problem it was and not just because there
was so little left hiding on the planet.”
According to the SF Chronicle, the way French venture
capitalist Vincent Prêtet
sees it, there are 7 billion people who have to eat every day, but technology has
yet to “disrupt” the world’s food industry the way it has other businesses. Think
Amazon, Uber, Airbnb.
So Prêtet
and his colleges are currently touring the U.S. in search of “an early-stage
food and beverage company that could become what he (Prêtet) called ‘the Google of food.’” Fortunately, in view of what happened to
Carl, there was no mention of grow lights in the newspaper article.
Why did Carl agree to essentially be tortured in the name
of future profit for Mayflower? According to author Marcus, he doesn’t seem to
know.
“Anyway, it’s what we signed up for, right?” Carl is
quoted saying in the story. He also feels that "simply by walking the halls at Mayflower, and not crawling into a hole, he was saying, Yes, yes, please test your equipment on me. Especially the equipment that burns."
"Since he works at a tech
company looking to cash in on the future, it wasn’t a stretch for him to be a
subject of a medical experiment gone wrong, a kind of walking cautionary tale
against his company’s drive to disrupt and innovate,” Marcus explained in a New
Yorker author interview.
“Carl’s boss, Kipler, proselytizes the sort of
invention that hides in plain sight, that doesn’t require the customer to adopt
new behaviors. Not a new gizmo out of nowhere, but a novel use for a device we
all take for granted. Grow lights already exist, and they already work, just
not on people. Yet. The future of food is precisely the kind of problem to
attract a forward-looking company, and it wasn’t too hard to get inside some
characters who, however foolishly, feel that they might have solved it, no
matter the ethics,” Marcus said.
In other posts, I’ve written
that one role of fiction is to explore the future, and one can view “The Grow
Light Blues” as falling within that genre. But it can also be viewed as a form
of social criticism, calling into question the tech industry’s current mantra
of disruption above all else.
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