Have you been swallowed up by a digital cult? Forget the Flat Earthers, keep schtum on Q Anon — the online crowd to note are distributors of “daily reminders to drink more water”.
On Twitter this summer, algorithms have saturated my feed with abstemious hydro-prompts. “Drink ya water binch,” crows one user. “Keep calm and drink water,” rallies another. They sound like a cross between internet-age rants and do-gooding memes. The web is clearly liquid information — there’s a heatwave lingering, global temperatures are rising, plastic bottles are choking the oceans. Don’t simply stay woke, stay watered! And ethically so.
But 1.5 million Hydro Homies can’t be wrong. They have their own Reddit forum, trading in water memes and requests for reusable bottle recommendations. Another tongue in-cheek Twitter account, “reminding you to drink water”, has 197.7K followers (“always be hydrated if you cry a lot”). There’s always been a mysticism to water. Now the divining rod is digital.
None of this may seem rooted in the real world but bear with me. Commercially, we start with a thirst trap. Journalist Peta Bee reported on the rise of posh water in The Times this week. “At SoulCycle, regulars fill their reusable bottles (available to rent, naturally) from stations that provide seven-times purified water”, she wrote. While at the Cloud Twelve members’ spa in Notting Hill you sip water that’s gone through “advanced reverse osmosis” (supposedly to remove impurities). Apps such as Waterlogged and Gulp track water status. Drink better, you’re urged. Consume!
The posh water trade is, bizarrely, booming. When a parched friend hauled himself to a bar to ask for a water at the Lord’s Ashes Test, he was handed a jazzily-decorated can. “What’s this?”, he rasped. “It’s water! In a can!”, smiled the attendant. And so he, too, drank the squash-free Kool-Aid. “It was really disappointing,” he tells me. “The swish-click of the can triggered a sort of Pavlovian response to which I was expecting something fun. And it was just water.”
More interesting, perhaps, is what it tells us about the internet. Are water reminders a sarcastic riposte to Insta-worthy bottled Tasmanian rain? In Jia Tolentino’s essay collection Trick Mirror, the New Yorker journalist writes that any virtue-signalling (your 3k likes for a charcoal triple-filtered canned H2O, for instance) triggers an unequal, opposite and usually dreadful response. “The rise of trolling, and its ethos of disrespect and anonymity, has been so forceful in part because the internet’s insistence on consistent, approval-worthy identity is so strong.”
Yet there seems to be something so pure in the Hydra Homies. “For me, it’s not the amount, nor the ‘strict’ exclusivity,” says one. “It’s the appreciation of drinking water. The wellbeing (be it physiological of psychological) of being (or feeling) hydrated.” Raise a glass. Maybe the internet has been gamed into doing something vitally good at last.
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