It’s a meme come to life.

While we have yet to see whether coronavirus will be the end of the word, no big deal or something in between, Charlie Warzel sees an opportunity to put his “privilege” on display.

I’m a Times employee living in Montana and so social distancing is closer to the status quo for me than I care to admit. I work from home. I show my disheveled face in meetings via Zoom and Skype and Google Hangouts. I FaceTime my therapist who practices in New York City, where I used to live. I chat endlessly with co-workers, sources and friends via Slack and 49,000 other direct messaging channels. Recently, my partner and I calculated that we’d save on gym membership if we splurged upfront on a $2,245 Peloton. Hermit Tech has made my (definitely not typical) life wildly efficient. Thanks to technology, human contact has unexpectedly become a luxury I can choose to seek out.

And my lifestyle is a luxury.

Some might view his lifestyle as a caricature, but I digress. His point is that his job enables him to self-quarantine, leaving the question of whether human contact wants anything to do with him an open but irrelevant.

But that pleasantness is heavily underwritten by a “vast digital underclass.” Many services that allow you to stay at home work only when others have to be out in the world on your behalf. Worried the grocery store is a petri dish? A contract Instacart grocery shopper will go in your place. That overpriced Purell you panic purchased today from Amazon will show up at your door tomorrow thanks to a small army of humans who showed up at work because they can’t afford not to.

There was a time when the cry was for the unemployed, the uneducated, the underclass with no great expectations. Now it’s the underclass constrained to have human contact, unlike hermits like Warzel. They have no option to sit at home and call doordash and dog walkers.

This is by no means exclusive to tech. Turns out, a pandemic is a great way to examine American class inequities — from restaurant workers to health care. But there’s something especially clarifying as it pertains to the gig economy. Silicon Valley has long faced criticism for building products for itself, which is to say, products aimed at solving problems of upper middle class men who spend far too much time working and crave microefficiencies and greater convenience.

Except that’s not a very broad view of reality. Health care workers have to care for health. It includes physicians and nurses, who aren’t necessarily the poor and downtrodden. And while it doesn’t make it onto Warzel’s radar, people are still going to get arrested during this pandemic, and they’re going to go to court and need lawyers and judges. Also not particularly downtrodden.

But if the relatively obvious fact that Warzel’s myopic grasp of the workforce is limited to New York Times’ op-ed writers, he blows it completely by not demonstrating any grasp of how supply and demand works.

Should Covid-19 usher in a newfound work-from-home movement, it could intensify these inequities. Working from home is a privilege afforded almost exclusively to knowledge workers. More flexible work could take the burden of some families with regard to child care and make part-time careers or balancing work and family life easier. But scaling back on physical workplaces could also mean fewer stable building facilities jobs. Those employees could then be forced into a gig economy with few labor protections that expands to fill the needs of an increasingly homebound work force.

If engaging in work involving human contact presented a graver risk, then fewer people would do it, preferring jobs involving less human contact than more. This would increase the value of working willing to walk Charlie’s dog and those risking their health to solve the problems of “upper middle class men” (Are there no women in Charlie’s upper middle class?) would be better paid to accommodate the undesirability of the job.

But this isn’t the reality that most people face. Not everyone is a “knowledge worker,” as Charlie euphemistically calls himself, and not everybody sits at home in their bathrobe while getting paid. More to the point, not everybody lives the Peloton life. Some folks actually go to the supermarket and pick out their avocados by hand, despite the upcoming World War Z.

Maybe if the digital natives realize that most of society actually engages in human contact on a regular basis, eschewing “chatting endlessly with co-workers, sources and friends via Slack and 49,000 other direct messaging channels,” he would realize that it’s not so much a matter of privilege as the way non-hermits live.

It may be true that some lack the opportunity to hide in their homes, safe in the comfort of being far away from the infected class, but that’s the case for most of humanity, not just the slaves of Charlie’s digital world. And it’s the choice of most of humanity, who don’t prefer to hide in their rooms even when there is no fear of pandemic. Maybe if he got out more, he could spend less time and money FaceTiming his New York City therapist and more on his Peloton.

There have been, and always will be, people who have to work for a living, work for survival, work for success. They do what they have to do, and don’t piss away their hard-earned money on Peloton because they have more important things to do with it, like feed the kids or pay college tuition. And they’re pretty privileged too, because the alternative is to spend their life like Charlie, alone and safe, and without human contact.