We used to think the extremely online were privileged. After all, who else had the time to spend twelve hours a day arguing about franchise media, maintaining elaborate digital personas, and keeping up with the relentless churn of internet culture? The assumption was simple: if you were terminally online, you must have money, leisure, and freedom.
We got it backwards.The chronically online are increasingly those who have nowhere else to be. They’re the new underclass, and the screen isn’t their escape—it’s their cage.The geography of this divide is already visible if you know where to look. The truly wealthy have largely retreated from constant connectivity. They take digital sabbaticals, employ assistants to manage their inboxes, and vacation in places where Wi-Fi is deliberately scarce. Meanwhile, the laptop class in desirable urban centers maintains a balanced relationship with technology because they can afford the alternatives. They have third places to visit, cultural amenities within reach, and social networks that exist in physical space.
But venture into the exurbs, the declining post-industrial towns, the sprawling apartment complexes on the wrong side of every metropolitan area, and you’ll find a different reality. Here, the screen is everything because there’s nothing else. Public spaces have hollowed out. Third places closed or require money to occupy. Friends and family are scattered across vast distances that take hours and expensive gas to traverse. The screen offers what the physical world has withdrawn: connection, entertainment, identity, and purpose.
This isn’t a moral failing. It’s an economic reality disguised as a cultural phenomenon.The chronically online are disproportionately those working multiple service jobs with irregular schedules that make planning difficult. They’re gig workers waiting between rides or deliveries, filling dead time with scrolling. They’re night shift workers whose circadian rhythms have been severed from normal social life. They’re the underemployed with college degrees and retail jobs, the disabled without accessible spaces to occupy, the socially anxious who found that physical spaces became increasingly hostile to loitering, to existing without consuming.
The internet promised to democratize access to information and culture, and in many ways it delivered. But it also created a trap. When your entertainment, social life, identity formation, and even work all collapse into the same glowing rectangle, you’ve lost the ability to diversify your existence across different domains. You become vulnerable in ways that people with rich physical lives are not.
Consider the person who spends six hours daily in online communities versus the person who spends that time at a climbing gym, a community theater, a neighborhood bar, a book club, or a rec sports league. Both are finding meaning and connection, but only one is building embodied skills, local relationships, and experiences that can’t be arbitrarily deleted by a platform’s policy change or algorithm update.
The wealthy have already figured this out. They’ve begun treating excessive screen time as a pollutant to be avoided, something that marks you as low-status. They send their children to expensive schools that restrict technology. They pay premiums for “disconnected” experiences. The signal has flipped: being perpetually online now suggests you have nowhere better to be.This creates a vicious cycle. The less access you have to desirable physical spaces and experiences, the more time you spend online. The more time you spend online, the less you develop the embodied social skills, local knowledge, and physical hobbies that might give you reasons to log off. Communities that are chronically online develop their own norms and cultures that can make re-entry into physical social spaces even more difficult.There’s also the labor dimension that we’ve barely begun to acknowledge. The gig economy and service work that increasingly defines working-class employment comes with fractured schedules and long periods of waiting. A delivery driver sitting in their car between orders, a rideshare driver waiting for the next ping, a retail worker during a slow shift—all are economically coerced into a strange hybrid state where they’re working but not working, available but not engaged. The phone becomes both the tool of their labor and the way they fill the gaps. They’re always on in both senses.
Meanwhile, professionals with stable employment, offices to go to, and clear boundaries between work and leisure can afford to “unplug.” They can afford to not check their email after six. They can afford to make their phones difficult to access. The irony is sharp: those whose labor is most mediated by digital platforms are also most trapped by them.
The future of this divide looks stark. As housing costs continue to concentrate in desirable urban cores, more people will be pushed to the periphery where physical isolation makes digital immersion nearly inevitable. As automation eliminates stable employment and replaces it with on-demand gig work, more people will experience that fractured, waiting-around time that begs to be filled with scrolling. As public spaces continue to be privatized or eliminated, more people will find that the screen is the only place left where they’re allowed to exist without spending money.
The chronically online won’t be a subculture or a lifestyle choice. They’ll be a class, defined not by their relationship to the means of production but by their banishment from desirable physical space and their confinement to an endlessly churning digital nowheresville. Their existence will be proof not of technological adoption but of economic exclusion.
This should trouble us more than it does. We’re creating a world where physical presence in desirable locations becomes an increasingly expensive luxury good while digital presence becomes the consolation prize for everyone else. The screen was supposed to liberate us from the constraints of geography. Instead, for a growing number of people, it’s become evidence that geography has already won.
