None of this is new, it’s just metastasized by the Bay-area tech scene.
The sales pitches are pure, old-school, New Age, crystal-power hucksterism that’s been around since the 1960s, slightly re-worded for the tech set.
“Special water” in general has been around since there were bottles. Perrier, Fiji, etc. I drink tap water pretty much all the time, but I do appreciate the differences in both tap waters and natural spring waters, especially the fizzy kind, have their own flavour. Gerolsteiner is better than Perrier, e.g. New York tap is better than Seattle tap, which is better than Livingston, MT-area, high-mineral well water.
This particular idea of “raw water”, however, taps into a more primal desire. I can remember the days before Giardia came to the United States. Until I was in my mid teens, it was understood to be safe to drink water from fast-moving streams high in the mountains in the Western United States. It was awesome. I did it all the time growing up, and from anecdotal evidence (my own experience) it was safer than eating at greasy spoon restaurants on the way back from hiking. Then Giardia arrived and all that stopped.
That said, even before Giardia, drinking untreated water was always a very specific thing, from specific sources, just like this “raw water” now. Implicit in the experience is that it’s only available to a small “elite” (not necessarily financial). Giving the experience to everyone who wants it would be impossible.
I’d definitely consider drinking spring water or meltwater from the right source. I’d even concede the possibility that a ceramic filter might change the taste of water, but not enough to make me take a risk. I’m skeptical UV sterilization would, however.
We should also be clear about the risks. It is possible exposure to run-of-the-mill microbes is required for normal human system function and immune system development. Getting cholera from mountain spring sources seems unlikely, but maybe I’m wrong about that. Giardia would only be a problem if infected animals or humans were literally shitting on top of the source, which is a definite possibility but let’s remember infections are a numbers game.
And of course lots of people drink untreated water from wells. This doesn’t scale for areas with large human or animal populations, which is why we have well-water-borne cholera epidemics.
So, public, treated water systems good; anti-public water system ideology/behavior bad.
But I get part of the impulse here.
A tech product I’d definitely buy would be a high-reliability water quality testing system that could be used by everyone, priced so we could give one for free to every resident of Flynt and other towns with poor public water systems, working out to every person/family in the world. It’s a shame we need such a device, but we do sort of need one (to help bring about systemic improvements). It would be sold attached to a filtering/treatment system that made water safe, removing critters and poisons. But if you wanted the “raw water” experience, you could just run the analyzer part and make a judgment call. Meanwhile we’d crowd-source detection of water source contamination. Crowd+IoT! Win-win. Of course, since it’s Silicon Valley, t would only be funded if it had a Juiceroo-style subscription model, and would only work with internet connectivity.
