Limiting Not Just Screen Time, But Screen Space

Environmental historian Laura J. Martin traces how the internet stopped being a place you visited and became an environment you live inside — from the ceremonial dial-up of the late 1990s (a fixed window in your parents' computer chair), through Wi-Fi-era "dead zones and hotspots" that reorganized our houses, to the smartphone era when connectivity "buzzed against our thighs." She argues the right response is not just less screen time but less screen space, and reminds us that the supposedly weightless internet is heavy industry — undersea cables, cobalt from the DRC, lithium from Chile's Salar de Atacama, river-cooled data centers.