It matters that their reality is described by them in terms of what it lacks, and what it lacks is stuff, meaningful stuff, stuff they know other people have. The grid means something. It connects to the vital fluids of Arabic and Western civilization, to the circulating water, vehicles, electrons, sewage, and the capital that never quite seems to circulate this far up the hill. There is meaning to these things, but it is not imported wholesale, in chunks, from the great purveyors of crap in New York, Los Angeles, Paris and Casablanca. We are not just talking about concepts, though, not holograms of pure meaning.
People move on to the grid, certainly, but they move back off too.
Indivisible bodies negotiate divided social disciplines. They spend time in schools and hospitals, in stores and offices and factories of the flat land below. They acquire numbers. They come to see the magic as normal, to expect their shit to disappear with the touch of a button, for rooms to fill with light with the flick of a wish. Their minds and bodies themselves become gridded.