You know what the woman in Oslo had for breakfast. You watched her introduce her new puppy to her older dog in a reel that autoplayed somewhere between a genocide update and an ad for running shoes. You know she works in UX, recently went through a breakup, is trying to get into ceramics. You will never meet this woman.
You cannot tell me the name of the person who lives eleven feet from your bed, on the other side of a wall you can sometimes hear them cough through.
This is not a personal failing. It is a routing decision, and nobody asked you before it was made.
Your feed doesn't care whether someone is three feet away or three thousand miles. It optimises for engagement, not geography. A stranger in Oslo is, it turns out, more engaging than the person you share a bin collection with. The algorithm assigns zero weight to physical proximity. It literally cannot see the person next door.
Neither, increasingly, can you.
What you have instead is intimate distance. You know a stranger's aesthetic, politics, and takes. You've never spoken. This passive, peripheral awareness accumulates through their feed until it feels like knowing them. It isn't. It is surveillance that flatters itself as friendship.
The connections that actually hold a community together were never the deep ones. They were the casual ones. The neighbour who notices when your post piles up. Who takes in your parcel. Who you nod at without knowing why that nod matters. That infrastructure has been gutted inside a single generation. Only about a quarter of people know most of their neighbours now. Among under-30s, closer to one in five. The whole architecture of reciprocity — the thing that made streets into communities rather than rows of closed doors — quietly disappeared. The erosion started before the smartphone. The smartphone finished the job.
Your apartment hallway has become a non-place. A transit zone that generates no social bond. You walk through it with headphones in, eyes on your phone, performing a kind of polite erasure, a studied obliviousness that would have been considered pathological two generations ago. Now it is just Tuesday.
You probably remember the early pandemic, when knowing your neighbours became a survival question overnight. Who is vulnerable. Who needs groceries. Who is alone. Mutual aid networks sprang up across cities, and the irony cut deep: you were being told to check on your neighbours by a global broadcast reaching people who could not name the people they were being told to check on.
In Japan, tens of thousands of people die alone in their apartments every year and are not discovered for weeks. Sometimes months. That is not a failure of technology. It is a failure of proximity — a nearness without notice. The most basic animal knowledge, that someone nearby is alive, quietly extinguished.
The postal service would notice. The algorithm never will.
Last Tuesday I heard coughing through the wall again. It went on for a while, longer than usual. I put my phone down. I stood in the hallway for a minute, listening. Then I went back inside and picked up the phone and watched a woman in Oslo make sourdough.