Superspaces have been on the rise for decades, since long before personal devices became ubiquitous. Years ago, when computers didn’t talk to each other much, my friend Damon and I would walk or ride our bikes from his place to a 7-Eleven a few blocks away to play arcade games. To play the arcade game, I should say; they had one, and the clerk would eventually kick us out if we lingered too long. “This isn’t an arcade.”

Read: When the world is an arcade

But arcades were still seedy places at the time. Some parents would dissuade or even prohibit their kids from going. And so we’d find bowling alleys (no less seedy, and possibly more), convenience stores, laundromats—places where people used to exchange idle time for diversion by dropping coins in slots.

Then Damon and his brother got a Nintendo. The purchase made the bodega and the arcade suddenly superfluous. Now we could murder ducks or pilot plumbers amid the thick pile of his bedroom carpet. Eventually they took the arcade machine out of the 7-Eleven entirely, and the arcade business collapsed. Bedrooms and dens imported the arcade into the home, like the VCR had done with the cinema. As Augé put it, people are always, and never, at home.

Bringing work home with you used to mean carting the actual work from the office to the house—files in briefcases, or lists of calls to be returned from behind a study door. Now it describes a more conceptual and holistic practice. Thanks to laptops, smartphones, broadband, apps, and cloud services, everyone can work all the time: Sending out emails under the dinner table, responding to Slack messages between closing the car door and opening the front door, processing expense reports by photographing receipts on the kitchen counter.

The disquiet associated with these activities is usually theorized as labor swelling to fill what was once private time. I’ve previously used the term hyperemployment for the endless jobs everyone has, over and above the job they may get paid to do. My colleague Derek Thompson has called Americans’ almost religious devotion to their jobs workism. But hyperemployment and workism are also partly consequences of the built environment becoming more super-spatial. It’s not just that the work comes home with you, but that the office does as well. Infinitely portable, the smartphone turns every space it enters into a workplace. Once Salesforce is launched, whatever room you occupy is a conference room.

Places exist for purposes, and when those purposes emigrate to new locations they also bring along the specters of their former homes. The bathroom is a place to shower or to cast out human waste. Bring your phone in there, and it’s also an office where you can complete procurement requests in enterprise-resource-management software such as Workday, and a theater where you can watch The Crown on Netflix, and a classroom where you can practice Latvian on Duolingo, and a travel agency where you can book a flight on Delta. And your office isn’t just at home, either: It’s anywhere. At the gym, on the train platform, in the gastropub, behind the wheel.