Soylent is, in many ways, a perfect metonym of the software engineers’ obsession for efficiency. It’s what you get when that worldview—speed everything up, remove friction everywhere—becomes second nature, a twitch instinct. Each moment of life becomes a target for Taylorization, a world of nails to be hammered into submission. Everything should move as rapidly as possible: communicating, working, shopping. Indeed, Amazon’s success is predicated on rendering life into a carousel of instant gratification, as the computer engineer and director Ruhi Sarikaya notes: “Friction is any variable that impedes your progress toward a goal, whether it’s purchasing a product or navigating traffic to make your nine a.m. meeting on time. Amazon is obsessively focused on reducing or eliminating friction—think one-click ordering, Amazon Prime, or Amazon Go.”

This fetish for efficiency is what has driven the delirious explosion of “on demand” services. By the mid-2010s, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs started flooding the market with apps designed to optimize nearly every fiddly task of everyday life—offering to do work so you didn’t. There was Washio (a service that dispatched laundry “ninjas” to pick up your dirty clothes), Handy (on-demand apartment neatening), Instacart (to pick up items from the local grocery store), and the endless phalanxes of TaskRabbits (to do basically anything else for you).