Going places: Tourists gather and take pictures in the grounds of the Grand Palace in Bangkok. The Thai capital is widely seen as one of the permanent digital nomad communities in Asia. — AFP
CHARLES McCormick is the chief executive officer of City Bikes Inc, a couple of bike shops in Washington, one in Adams Morgan and one in Tenleytown, both of which do a healthy trade in e-bikes.
He is also a digital nomad who has spent most of his time since 2009 on the road. “You are sitting in front of your computer to get your administration done,” he says, “so why not do it somewhere nice.”
McCormick’s desire to be “somewhere nice” has driven him to ride his motorbike across Europe, South America, Africa and Central Asia (“it’s a progressive tour that is ongoing”), and involved him in some hair-raising moments, including being expelled from Mali during the 2011 coup.
He’s now decided to swap his motorcycle for a camper van re-engineered to accommodate e-bikes.
Our grizzled veteran notes three phases in the nomad movement. The housing crash in 2007-8 forced some people to abandon their houses for the itinerant life.
The idea of “going untethered” caught fire with younger people in 2015-17.
Then the pandemic took the nomad life mainstream, demonstrating that regular people can work from anywhere (paradoxically, McCormick went back to Washington during the pandemic because the e-bike business was growing so fast).
One force has been constant, however: the relentless improvement in enabling technology.
When he first started on his odyssey, he wasted a lot of time looking for a signal, today, thanks to satellite Internet services and Internet phone systems, life on the road is a lot easier.
Working-from-home is so well established that it has its own acronym (WFH) and, presumably, its own syndrome.
But what happens if you can’t abide the idea of even two days a week in the office?
Nobody knows how many digital nomads there are – the oft-repeated claim of 35 million owes more to evangelism than sober accounting – but a new breed of people is undoubtedly emerging and exploiting modern technology in ways that defy our most basic assumptions about the relationship between work and physical place.
The most conservative members of the new nomadic tribe are digital executives who want to combine high-level jobs with soaking up the sun.
Many of them own their own businesses and so can decide where they want to be.
Others have “gone plural”. They sit on several boards or offer advice to multiple companies and so can work over Zoom.
The most popular option for digital executives is to buy a permanent place in the sun and live there for several months a year.
Ever-sensitive to movements in the luxury property market, Savills Plc has recently constructed an executive nomad index based on climate, connectivity, both physical and virtual, and general quality of life.
The top five destinations are Lisbon, Miami, Dubai, the Algarve (also in Portugal) and Barbados.
Another method is the “workation” of “bleisure” break. Some executives have taken to extending business trips to include some leisure, some return to work virtually while staying on in their holiday resorts, still others work full-time on vacation while their families frolic.
Elite resorts are responding to this blurring of boundaries between work and leisure by providing on-call IT support, improving their conference facilities, installing Zoom rooms and throwing in massages.
Digital nomads proper contain lots of different tribes, from road warriors like McCormack to migratory birds who like to spend half the year in warmer places.
“Crypto Bros” want to build communities outside the jurisdiction of the state, hippies want to do much the same thing but with lots of tofu and yoga thrown in.
Trust fund nomads pretend to work while spending daddy’s money.
Californians want to cash in on that state’s exorbitant house prices or escape from its onerous taxes, and some middle-class refugees from rich countries can only afford to live the same comfortable lifestyle as their parents if they move to emerging markets.
Zach Boyette is an acute observer of the nomad scene partly because he is a nomad himself and partly because he recruits the employees of his company, Galactic Fed, from the nomadic community, which he regards as a deep and expanding pool of talent.
He argues that the average digital nomad is in their early thirties – the mean age is perhaps 33 – rather than backpackers in their early 20s.
It takes a certain level of discipline and experience to preserve the lifestyle, and most people who think that they can go on the road after college and make a living in a cloud of marijuana smoke and beer are soon disappointed.
He also points to an emerging paradox: the growth of permanent digital nomad communities in Asia and Eastern and Southern Europe.
The most prominent of these are Bali, Indonesia, Chiang Mai, Thailand, Danang, Vietnam, Cape Town, South Africa, Lisbon, Portugal, Barcelona, Spain, and, the scene of a recent digital nomad “unconference,” Nomad Fest, Bansko, Bulgaria.
Some digital nomads migrate between these various communities. Others fall in love with one place and create permanent nests. — Bloomberg
Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.
