A Pastry Chef's Disillusionment: Feeding the People Building Meta's Metaverse
By
Titty Boobowitz
Crisp on the outside, thoughtful on the inside. A keeper.
Summary
A former pastry chef at Meta data centers shares a personal, critical reflection on working behind the scenes for the people building the metaverse and AI infrastructure. The article contrasts the mundane, human labor of food service with the grandiose tech ambitions of Meta, exploring themes of male ego in tech, the disillusionment with technology as magic, and the author's journey from believing in tech's transformative power to seeing it as a human-driven, often flawed enterprise.
Key quotes
· 3 pulledI used to work at Meta. Not in tech. God no. I was a pastry chef at one of the Meta data centers, which is somehow an even stranger sentence to say out loud now than it was at the time.
I worked in the cafes on campus making pastries, desserts, breads, and catering corporate events for the people building the infrastructure of the metaverse.
I do not mean that metaphorically. I mean the actual corporate vision of it. The servers. The engineers. The people building the guts of AI and virtual reality while I stood down the hall trying to figure out if the cinnamon rolls
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