The teaspoon

My son Dario plays football. He has the clarity that comes from not yet having learned to pretend. When he talks about teammates or opponents, he uses an expression I find perfect: "that one's got a movie going..." It means the kid walks around with a whole narrative in his head — stories, excuses, fantasies about himself — but doesn't put in the work. Lots of noise, little substance. Dario spots it in seconds. He doesn't need a performance evaluation framework.

I read an interview with Guido Tonelli, the Italian physicist who participated in the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN. Tonelli says something I haven't been able to get out of my head:

"We are made mostly of emptiness. If we were compacted, we'd fit in a teaspoon."

He's talking about physics. About atoms. About the literal reality of matter. But the image works as a slap of humility: you think you're a lot, you take up a lot of space, but if you're compacted — if everything that isn't substance is removed — you fit in a teaspoon.

The corporate movie

Organizations are full of emptiness. We call it other things: processes, governance, alignment. But a significant portion of what happens in a company is not substance. It's movie.

The manager who never touches the material but has an opinion about everything. The approval chain that exists to justify those who approve. The executive who needs an assistant to manage his calendar of meetings with other executives. The "it has to go through X" where no one remembers why X exists.

If we compacted an organization — if we removed all the emptiness — how much would be left?

There is one especially egregious case: people who run technology companies without understanding the technology. Who got there by managing people, budgets, narratives. Who don't understand how what their teams build works, who have never touched the material they make decisions about, but who take up enormous space on the org chart. Compacted, they'd fit in a teaspoon. And they wouldn't even fill it.

The compactor

Technology has been compressing emptiness for decades. The internet eliminated intermediaries who lived by controlling access to information. Management software eliminated entire layers of manual coordination. Every technology wave squeezes the substance and reveals how much of what existed was air.

Now language models are compressing another layer. When anyone can analyze data, draft text, research, prototype code — the space between the decision-maker and the material shrinks. And those who lived in that intermediate space, whose work consisted of processing, relaying, "managing" without touching anything, are left with no place to stand.

It's not that technology destroys jobs. It destroys emptiness. And it turns out some jobs were mostly emptiness.

Having substance

Dario hasn't read Tonelli. But he says the same thing in different words. In a football changing room, the difference between the one with a movie going and the one who works shows up in the first week. There's nowhere to hide. The ball doesn't understand narratives.

In organizations we've built many places to hide. Layers, titles, jargon, processes. But the compactor is coming. And the question isn't whether your position will survive AI. The question is more uncomfortable: if you were compacted — if your title, your assistant, your meetings, the processes you feed were all stripped away — how much substance would be left?

Would you fit in a teaspoon?