The word company hides a meal. It comes from the Latin companio — cum plus panis, “with bread” — and that’s what we used to call those who shared bread at the same table. Before being a tax ID, a registered trademark, or a line on a spreadsheet, company was this: people sitting together around food. The essence of the word doesn’t fit on a server, wasn’t made for a robot, and even less for an abstract belief like money. Company, at its origin, is a human and warm thing.

Worth remembering precisely now, when nearly everything seems to push in the opposite direction.

We tend to tell the story of capitalism as the story of a self-made man: a free market, clever and self-sufficient, that owes nothing to anyone. It’s a good legend. But anyone who looks closely sees something else. The first great companies — the East India Companies, Dutch and English — were not born in garages or out of solitary geniuses. They were born of royal charters, of state-granted monopolies, of private armies authorized by the Crown. The so-called “free” market was, from the cradle, assembled and sustained by public power. Karl Polanyi already pointed out that a market that regulates itself never truly existed: it was always a construction, defended with law and with force.

Capitalism only forgot this later, once it had enough muscle to think itself independent. And it was roughly there that it turned cruel — as those who convince themselves they owe nothing to anyone often do.

Now the landscape has shifted again, perhaps more deeply. Yanis Varoufakis calls what we are living technofeudalism. The idea is simple and uncomfortable: the great platforms have stopped being merely companies that sell things and have become territory. They are digital fiefdoms in which we live without realizing it. The seller pays a toll to appear, the creator pays a toll to be seen, the user hands over attention and data the way one once handed over the harvest to the lord of the land. The profit of the old capitalism gave way to rent — and rent is a feudal word. We don’t compete in a market anymore; we pay to use someone else’s backyard.

And it is into this scene that artificial intelligence walks, changing work before our eyes. Here I am optimistic, or at least I want to be. David Graeber wrote a whole book on bullshit jobs, the jobs that serve no purpose — invented roles that the very person performing them secretly knows could disappear tomorrow without the world noticing. If the machine takes over what never needed to exist, good. That leaves time for what matters: caring, creating, teaching, repairing, being with each other. In theory, people would have better things to do day to day.

But then comes the question nobody likes to ask out loud. What becomes of the companies?

Because we have a serious problem ahead, and it looks a lot like what I would call the empty-office syndrome. I don’t mean only the building without people, though that already exists — entire floors with the lights on and the chairs empty. I mean something deeper. If a company is, at its root, people breaking bread together, what is a company when there is nobody left at the table? When the task became a prompt, the team became a queue of API calls, and the meeting became a report that writes itself, what exactly remains as “company” inside? What’s left is the shell: the brand, the contract, the stream of rent. Everything’s left — except the bread.

That’s the knot. Technology can empty out the useless jobs, and that’s good. But if we let it run on the autopilot of technofeudalism, it will also empty out what was human in the idea of working together — and concentrate the bread in the hands of a tiny few platform owners, while the rest watch the fiefdom from the outside.

The good news is that this is not yet decided. We forget too easily, but it’s worth repeating: capitalism was never a natural phenomenon that happened to us. It was something we made, with rules we wrote, sustained by governments we elected. If it was invented, it can be reinvented. Companies were created to serve humans — one way or another, that was the pact. When they stop serving, that’s not nature speaking; it’s a choice someone made and that someone else can unmake.

So the question is not whether the machine will change work — it already is. The question is who we will break bread with after it does. Whether we use the freed-up time to build companies that mean something again, or whether we watch, from an empty chair, the bread served only to those who own the table.

It is up to us to decide. And, for now, it still is.