Old habits continue to die hard: Digital nomads aren’t tourists or migrants

Despite repeated attempts by scholars to dislodge sedentarist frameworks from monopolising how we analyse the social landscape and its emergent, and increasingly mobile, phenomena, this conceptual practice persists.

In the discursive space of digital nomadism, Olga Hannonen and Paul Green have cautioned against the application of historically-rooted conceptual categories such as “tourist” and “lifestyle migrant” upon contemporary expressions of mobility. The world has moved on, quite literally, since these categories were created, and trying to fit moving modes of life into these well-known conceptual containers, although tempting, fails to capture the nuances of this new social phenomenon.

Developments in technology, transport and the democratisation of travel, for example, especially in the last 60 years, have created a world that is increasingly on the move and distinct from earlier periods of late-modernity. Both John Urry and Zgymunt Bauman, two notable contemporary sociologists, both argued that mobility had become the defining feature of our age.

Recently, the COVID-19 pandemic and the uptake (and social sanctioning) of remote work has untethered millions from their formerly rooted lives (primarily in the Global North). Their remote jobs and strong passports allow these relatively privileged individuals to effectively “work from anywhere” – and many, in fact millions, are doing exactly that.

Change the base, change the superstructure. This Marxist maxim reminds us of the centrality of economic production in producing society. Technological innovation changes the how and where of our production, simultaneously changing the social and political systems built in its wake. To cite just two examples, coworking and coliving spaces are changing where we work and even who we live with, and digital nomad visas are restructuring immigration policies.

In other words, remote work is not only changing the way we earn our living, but it is also changing the way we live. Therefore we need a new set of conceptual tools to analyse this changed world and new ways of living within it. As Tim Cresswell has said, mobile lives need to be analysed with mobile thought or a nomadic way of thinking that recognises the fluidity of contemporary forms of life.

And yet, in both the academy and mainstream media, digital nomads are still often conceptualised through the time-bound optics of tourism and migration, which is problematic for a number of reasons. Tourism, for example, implies a return and casts mobility as a temporary exercise of movement before eventually coming back home. Through this optic, travel is viewed as both a space and practice of leisure. But for digital nomads, travelling isn’t a temporary reprieve from ordinary, everyday productive life, but the existential space in which a life is built and sustained through (remote) income-generating activities.

And migration is equally problematic becomes it doesn’t recognises the ongoing mobility of digital nomadism. The pursuit of a better quality of life doesn’t end for nomads once they land in a new place. It is in fact an ongoing project, like it is for all of us. Unlike settled populations, nomads use mobility in pursuit of this end for multiple and often conflicting reasons.

But having said all this and despite increases in both the speed and scale of affordable travel in the contemporary world, mobile lifestyles – with far few exceptions – are still often analysed through frameworks and imaginaries that had their conceptual roots sewn during a time when people were far less mobile.

As such, they bear the mark of a particular historical period of limited mobility and hence have diminishing analytical use in accounting for contemporary mobile lifestyles that do not so neatly conform to their conceptual (and temporal) borders. As a whole, they fail to capture the lived experiences and life trajectories of those who exercise ongoing mobility, through space and time.