The Unfettered Selfishness of Digital Nomads
8 min read
In the years since the pandemic began, there are more digital nomads than ever—a reported 35 million people worldwide now embrace this lifestyle, over half from the US—but the surrounding culture has calcified into something quite specific. It’s one thing to work remotely and travel around while doing so, but the associated network of podcasts, YouTube channels, ‘Nomad Cruises’ and pop-up cities all lean towards a similar outlook: nightmarish.
When the term first emerged in the popular consciousness in the late 2010s, it was often associated with creativity, and carried a suggestion of free-wheeling bohemianism: digital nomads as the modern-day heirs to Burroughs in Tangiers or Gaugin in Tahiti (beyond fucking local teenagers.) But the digital nomad lifestyle has always been inspired by a more hard-nosed libertarian philosophy: its foundational texts include The Sovereign Individual, a 1997 book co-written by the conservative peer Lord William Rees-Mogg—hardly an ayahuasca bro—which argued that in the future, “anyone with a portable computer and a satellite link will be able to conduct almost any information business anywhere. You will no longer be obliged to live in a high-tax jurisdiction in order to earn high income.” A decade later, Tim Ferris’s The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich sold aspiring digital nomads the promise of abundant wealth with minimal effort—the trick, he revealed, was to outsource your work to an army of poorly paid “virtual assistants” in the global south.
Today’s network of digital nomad content creators are carrying on this tradition by way of paranoid libertarianism, byzantine tax evasion schemes, retail scams, and online courses which teach you how to teach online courses. Whatever traces of ersatz bohemianism remain can mainly be found in the treacly vernacular of therapy and self-help: Medium bloggers ponder whether nomadism is a trauma response, recruitment firms offer self-care tips, and podcast hosts explore self-actualisation, boundary-setting and “unlocking joy and happiness” as a corporate coach. There is a wealth of resources available for “neurospicy” digital nomads, and it’s surely only a matter of time before the “burnt out former gifted kid” and “eldest daughter” find themselves similarly catered to.
While some digital nomads are struggling creatives, eking out a modest living having fled their expensive home cities, 45 percent now earn over $75 thousand a year and many are the perpetrators, rather than the victims, of the global housing crisis—or at least they’re aspiring to be. One of the biggest innovators in the remote landlord business is the Maverick Investor Group, which—to use the language of founder Matt Bowles—is “empowering” digital nomads to purchase single-unit family homes in whichever locale is most profitable (mostly in the US) and milking them for passive income. Maverick offers “location-dependent” investors a smart, streamlined and optimized way of exploiting America’s housing crisis: its list of the best areas to purchase property include Cleveland, Ohio, which has in recent years experienced some of the highest rental increases in the US, and Charlotte, North Carolina, which a report from earlier this year found to have become “seriously and severely unaffordable.” Across the US, out-of-state investment has played a significant role in exacerbating the housing crisis and pricing out local residents.
“A certain kind of digital nomad is the vanguard of this campaign, a seasteader on dry land, always looking for cannier ways to elude governmental oversight and ready to bounce at the first sign their interests may be threatened.”
As destructive and mercenary as Maverick’s business model may be, the company’s podcast—The Maverick Show—typically approaches life as a digital nomad through the lens of social justice. There seems to be a constituency of nomad landlords who are interested in hearing about Black liberation, neo-colonialism and LGBTQIA+ empowerment, even as their investments are more likely to displace Black and queer people. As long as they consume the right content, as long as their lifestyle is aligned with certain progressive signifiers, perhaps they can still think of themselves as thoughtful and open-minded, their rejection of national borders itself a kind of virtue.
But this kind of reassurance isn’t necessary for everyone. In recent years, digital nomad nomad culture has converged more closely with a right-wing movement, which, as Quinn Slobodian details in his book Crack-up Capitalism, aims to protect the free market from democratic interference, to carve out zones exempt from taxes and regulation, and to use the threat of capital flight to ward off progressive economic policies. A certain kind of digital nomad is the vanguard of this campaign, a seasteader on dry land, always looking for cannier ways to elude governmental oversight and ready to bounce at the first sign their interests may be threatened.
As the blogger, author, and YouTuber Andrew Henderson (who goes by “Nomad Capitalist”) writes, “the digital nomad scene has evolved to take on more of the characteristics of the Nomad Capitalist scene—one where different niches of people turn to international solutions and lifestyles to better run real businesses and enjoy more abundant living.” Henderson himself—who renounced his own US citizenship to free himself of any tax obligations—epitomizes this new, harder-edged direction. In his blogs and YouTube videos, he advises his audience on how to escape the overbearing hand of “legacy-brand” nations in the West; how to “legally pay zero taxes anywhere,” and where to purchase the most advantageous citizenship.
In one video he weighs up the pros and cons of Russia’s new “anti-woke” visa, which offers residency permits to anyone who agrees with a set of “traditional spiritual and moral values”; in another, he ponders which countries are “not part of the Great Reset,” referring to a racist conspiracy theory—inspired by an existing plan of the same name by the World Economic Forum—which posits that elites are plotting to institute a tyrannical global government. Within the Nomad Capitalist worldview, citizenship is something which should grant protections and entitlements to those wealthy enough to afford it, while incurring zero responsibilities or obligations in turn. The expectation that the free market should be subject to any kind of democratic accountability, or that the wealthy should pay their fair share of taxes, is an affront to human freedom so dystopian it would make George Orwell blush.
Henderson is perhaps further to the right than the typical digital nomad, but even the more mainstream content creators are entertaining some pretty far-out ideas. Badass Digital Nomads—a popular podcast by Kirstin Wilson—features interviews with experts, spanning subjects as banal as travel tips and dating advice to nightmarish omens of the world to come. A recent episode focused on Plumia—a new “digital country” which will eventually have its own passport, tax system, retirement pension, and healthcare. For now the company is offering a more modest “Nomad Border Pass,” where applicants can apply for a single visa and be granted entry to 90 countries around the world. Plumia was founded on the principle of “global mobility as a human right,” but the nomad pass requires a minimum annual income of $50,000, and a job in a “tech, digital, innovation or knowledge” field.
Like much of digital nomad culture, this yearning for a world without borders is not a radical new vision, but an articulation of how the world is already orientated. Freedom of movement, by and large, already exists for people with money, and doubly so if they have “good passports.” Countries all over the West, including the UK and the US, are in the grip of anti-immigrant hysteria, but these movements typically carve out exceptions for migrants who are “high-skilled” (as do 71 percent of Trump voters, according to a recent Pew survey.) In the spirit of universalism, you might defend the right of digital nomads to live wherever they want, but this right is not under threat: they are pandered to at every turn; economically disadvantaged countries are competing to entice them, and while there is growing local discontent in places like Mexico City and Lisbon, there have been no rampaging mobs carrying out pogroms against SEO consultants and Medium bloggers. Some people —wealthy and mostly white—glide through borders, moving from place to place without ever encountering the slightest friction, while others are left to drown in the Mediterranean. This is not the result of a hypocritical worldview but an entirely consistent one which ascribes people value only according to their earning potential.
“Like much of digital nomad culture, this yearning for a world without borders is not a radical new vision, but an articulation of how the world is already orientated.”
But it is hardly any surprise that vloggers might be obnoxious or that some people who work in finance and technology harbor loathsome political views. Some digital nomads are easier to sympathize with, and particularly so if they don’t identify with the term. One of the core tenets of the digital nomad lifestyle is “geoarbitrage” – in other words, making your income go further in a country with a lower cost of living. This is unpalatable if you’re moving to the Philippines so you can afford a luxury flat with maid service, and even at the lower level it usually has the effect of raising prices for the local population. But in and of itself, I don’t think it’s a moral crime to want to be able to afford to rent your own apartment—a basic dignity denied to so many in cities like New York, LA and London—or to dream of spending a bit less time working without being plunged into poverty. I have nothing but contempt for people trying to make their fortune through rent-seeking and online scams, but I sympathize with the stressed-out, the frazzled, and even the lazy. To a large extent, it’s the “nodamism” of digital nomadism which is the problem, rather than simply working remotely—the rejection of any sense of societal obligation, the endless search for more pliant, obsequious locals to serve you.
If the pursuit of an easier, slower and more pleasant life comes at the expense of others, is staying where you are and suffering the right thing to do? Maybe. As a remote worker, it doesn’t really matter how pure-hearted, curious and humble you are, or whether you eschew networking events, co-working and “Nomad cruises” in favor of learning the language, frequenting only independent local businesses and getting involved with community activism: you will still probably be contributing to a process of displacement and gentrification; your search for a better life will probably come at the expense of someone else. I think the least we can ask of these people is that they spare us all the self-serving posture of enlightenment.
Moving to a new country, staying there for a long time and setting down roots doesn’t make you a digital nomad, nor does it require embracing an ethos of unfettered selfishness in which the only investment you ever make in the place where you live is a financial one. It is hard to avoid being complicit in global inequality, but that doesn’t give us carte blanche to pursue this complicity so gleefully or to elevate it as a virtue. To find out more, I will be delving into all of these thorny issues and more on my online course, “The Ethical Nomad: A Trauma-Informed Approach to Living Your Best (and Tax-Free) Life Abroad” available now for just $500.
James Greig is the political editor at Dazed.
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