videophony: to lie and to trust at once
you got to believe you were receiving somebody’s complete attention without having to return it. Regarded with the objectivity of hindsight, the illusion appears arational, almost literally fantastic: it would be like being able both to lie and to trust other people at the same time.
Context
The old voice-only phone ran on a comfortable mutual fraud, named here as a sincerity paradox: each party got to feel wholly attended-to while attending only halfway, "both to lie and to trust other people at the same time." Videophony's crime was making the fraud visible — you looked up and saw your interlocutor idly stripping a shoelace exactly as you were, and the whole bilateral illusion collapsed. The connection-failure mechanics underneath are communication-solipsism's; what's landed here is only the register point — that a certain kind of intimacy depends on a sincerity nobody actually performs, a trust that survives only as long as the lie stays unseen.