| > hard separation between work and home A lot of people prefer that, but solving that doesn’t require “an office” (i.e. a place far away from at least some people, causing at least some long commutes), but rather just that your job give you a stipend for renting a hot-desk at a work-sharing space that’s near to you. (Basically equivalent to them paying to have an extra room built into your house that you only go into to work, but for urbanites where that’s impractical.) > camaraderie of a team I don’t know about you, but my work Slack has about a similar level of camaraderie to any Discord group-chat I share with my friends. > we often play a game before going back to work Online games exist! (Though arranging this is kind of finicky; it requires that everyone already have a particular online-game client installed and signed up. There’s no “pick up and play” kind of group gaming available here. IMHO there’s a niche to be filled in collaboration software for one that seamlessly supports sharing entertainment — playing games together, watching TV/movies together, etc. — embedded within the workspace view itself.) > grabbing lunch with co-workers I mean, you could just keep talking to your coworkers while eating lunch, if you like. Make a #breakroom or #lunch channel. You could even make it a video call, if you want to induce the same physical pain in people with social anxiety at the idea that people are watching their eating habits. :P Certainly, none of these things are low-friction at first, or particularly low-friction even in the steady-state today. But they’re things where the friction could be greatly lowered. If tons of people are going to stay remote, that’s going to provide a good market for companies to create new products for. (I’m betting on VR groupware, myself. Some spiritual descendant to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_Project, for an age where that actually is something most people might want. Literal “virtual offices”, with an unlimited number of unboundedly-large virtual spaces in which to position whatever shared or private app-window views you like. Especially if consideration is made for it to also gracefully degrade into a less-immersive analogous view — e.g. a 2D infinite-zoom layout of all the open app-windows — for people accessing it on screens.) |