>the 20th century was overwhelmingly a flight from rural areas to cities

You're talking about an entirely different phenomena. The move from rural areas to cities and exurbs happened in the 50s/60s with cheap mortgage rates, WWII-provisioned education, and large sweeping social services being enacted. White flight is a phenomena that started in the mid-60s to 80s that specifically coincided with integration.

>The median adult is spending 5+ hours on their phone a day. This is what is exhausting people

There's much to be said about the behavioral manipulation and dark patterns in apps and devices, sure. But I don't think television inherently was employing Skinner-boxes to get people to watch and that's what I was specifically speaking to. Regardless, that dark pattern of it is class struggle related if that's the direction you want to frame it (I see it more as just MBA-brained corporate sociopathy) because it seeks to extract capital from its users while externalizing all negatives onto the users themselves.

>Maybe that's true for some people, but the data usually shows that income and free time is inversely related to community time. Poorer people are making more time for friends and family.

Obviously. And this is clearly related to the fact that the more impoverished you are, the more you need to pool resources to survive. The pain points I illuminated are for individuals who are still showing up to community organizing work and much of what we do in these spaces is effectively providing enough mutual aid for them to survive.

> A steelworker in the 1920s coming off of a 10-hour shift would still find the time and energy to go out dancing.

You have proof of this? That they wouldn't just go home and get shitfaced or otherwise incapacitated? All steelworkers, per capita, were going out dancing regularly? And even so, this wasn't because they were economically incentivized by the rise of labor unions to be in community with others, building power and fighting for better rights? The 30 years of post-Reagan neoliberal expanisionism has effectively neutered unions - and that's something that wasn't covered either by Putnam.

I suspect another thing largely missed by Putnam was the rise of online social spaces. Connecting with friends via the phone, on Discord, in video game spaces - that's community. It's just different from the community envisioned by people in more elderly generations. The fact that you're even commenting on HackerNews is effectively proof against Putnam's claims.

You don't connect with your friends on these platforms, mostly. You connect with amorphous anonymous mobs of people. Like on HN, you aren't my friend, just someone posting, and your username is interchangeable with the one attached to any other reply.