The phone becomes a person

The real discontinuity, and a much narrower one than the standard story. The feeling was not new; the possibility of contact was. The reply is now structurally impossible in a way a letter never was - an email is not paper, it does not have to be opened, and the person reading it has a thousand. The conditions that made a reply work were small enough for one human to hold, and they are gone permanently.

Application. One-sided attachment put to work on purpose. Creator economies, community, fandom as infrastructure, and the things that genuinely help people. Not automatically good - a tool with an obvious use is a tool that will also get a bad one.

Consideration. The part where somebody stops and thinks. The research, the diagnosis, the ethics, the lawsuits, the regulators. Roughly fifty years of arguing with itself about whether this is a relationship.