San Jose. Adobe headquarters. Glass and steel rising from the valley floor like some techno optimist’s Burning Man epiphany. I get it, these places aren’t designed for humans, not really. They’re designed for productivity, for synergy, for whatever Stanford or Harvard MBA horseshit makes shareholders tingle.
But shit, inside these towers, people are actually making something. I’m not talking about apps and software that help you hide your middle age man boobs. It’s food. Outstanding food. Better than these code monkeys deserve, frankly. Mirit Cohen makes sure of that. While the engineers are busy disrupting whatever industry hasn’t been disrupted this week, Cohen’s running a kitchen that would make most restaurants weep. The pastries alone, the pastries. Flaky, buttery, layered perfection that belongs in a Parisian boulangerie, not a corporate cafeteria in San Jose.
This isn’t your standard-issue campus slop. This is real food, made by people who give a shit, for workers who probably don’t even notice between Slack messages and stand-up meetings. These people are eating like kings while staring at pixels. It’s almost obscene.
The irony isn’t lost on me: the best meal some of them will eat all week is free, served on a tray, in a building designed to keep them there as long as possible.
But these, wide-finned in silver, roaring, the light mist of their
propellers in the sun, these do not move like sharks. They move like
nothing there has ever been. They move like mechanized doom.
Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
And that plane overhead, Hemingway’s mechanized doom. it’s passing over people eating croissants that would cost twelve bucks anywhere else.
Silicon Valley, even when it feeds you well, it’s still a gilded cage.