I Fed the People Building the Metaverse
Titty Boobowitz
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I Fed the People Building the Metaverse<br>On AI, male ego, and other reasons I no longer believe technology is magic
Titty Boobowitz<br>May 29, 2026<br>∙ Paid
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I used to work at Meta.<br>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.<br>When I say “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 needed two more minutes in the oven.<br>I had interviewed online during Covid, so my first day onsite felt surreal. I remember pulling up and thinking, “holy shit, this looks like a prison.” A really expensive tech prison, but still. Cement buildings. Security gates everywhere. Bleak fluorescent lighting. Stainless steel industrial kitchens. The whole campus had the emotional warmth of a refrigerated Costco.<br>The inside wasn’t quite as dystopian as the exterior, but it was still obnoxiously sterile in the way modern tech campuses are sterile. Hyper-optimized. Weirdly juvenile. Like if a WeWork and a boys’ dormitory had access to unlimited venture capital.<br>The break rooms had foosball tables, video game consoles, giant couches, and fully stocked snack areas where employees could grab basically anything they wanted for free. Including alcohol.<br>Rumor had it Meta software tracked who took what and how much. I have no idea if that was true, but I chose not to care. I pilfered enough sodas, chips, and full-sized candy bars that whoever stopped at my house for Halloween was leaving with the junk food equivalent of a college fund.<br>One time I was hiding in a couch during my 10 a.m. lunch break trying not to be perceived by another human being for thirty consecutive minutes when a middle-aged white guy walked in, silently took a shot of Jameson, and walked back out to continue building the future.<br>I genuinely do not think he even knew I was there.<br>There was also a kombucha club for a select group of engineers called Faceboosh.<br>These are the people building the future.
The Kombucha Club had its own branding and swag. Because of course it did.
The Metaverse Didn’t Fail
The metaverse, for those fortunate enough to have forgotten, was Meta’s attempt to build a digital universe where people would work, socialize, shop, attend events, and generally spend more of their lives online. Like if a video game, a shopping mall, LinkedIn, and a corporate retreat had a baby.<br>People act like the Metaverse failed because nobody wanted to attend a virtual staff meeting as a legless cartoon. Fair enough. But the broader vision never disappeared. It just dissolved into everything else. And it hasn’t even actually failed. The adults left, children stayed.<br>The metaverse still attracts more than 700 million monthly visitors. And of those users, tens of millions are kids.<br>Kids already move seamlessly between virtual worlds, algorithmic entertainment, digital identities, and AI-powered tools. They inhabit online spaces with the same ease previous generations inhabited malls, Denny’s, and food courts.<br>If you’ve never visited a VR world before, allow me to save you some time: it’s children. An astonishing number of children. Unsupervised. Children running. Children yelling. Children inventing entirely new forms of bad judgment. Children doing whatever the digital equivalent of licking a public handrail is.<br>The metaverse is not the future of work. It is the present of recess.<br>The metaverse may not have arrived in the form Meta originally imagined. But the basic premise—that more and more of human life will be mediated through digital systems—is already here.<br>This Substack is reader-supported. Subscribe for weekly food thoughts from a pastry chef with a diverse professional background. Upgrade for bonus stuff.
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Rainbow Maritozzi, a random breakfast during Pride Month<br>The Future Still Needed Breakfast
While all this is happening, I was making at least a hundred servings of breakfast pastries every morning. Muffins. Croissants. Scones. Cinnamon rolls. Coffee cakes. Donuts. Breakfast bars. Then two dessert items for lunch service, usually around three hundred portions total. Cheesecakes, brownies, cobblers, custard-based parfaits, cakes, bars, pies, profiteroles. Then warm cookies for the cookie jars around campus in the afternoons. Then breads twice a week. Then happy hour catering twice a month. Everything was individually portioned.<br>And everything was made from scratch.<br>Which honestly felt a little ironic for a company obsessed with automation.<br>The engineers loved steak day. They lined up for steak...