Digital nomads: freedom, responsibility and the neoliberal order
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Digital nomads: freedom, responsibility and the neoliberal order Fabiola Mancinelli1 Received: 16 October 2019 / Revised: 24 March 2020 / Accepted: 29 March 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Digital nomads are individuals who, taking advantage of portable computing technologies and widespread Internet access, can work remotely from any location and use this freedom to explore the world. Using ethnographic and netnographic research, this article outlines this recent phenomenon, framing it into the lens of lifestyle mobilities and individualization theories. It adds to existing research by focusing on the new set of responsibilities and commitments entailed by the individualization process. In research participants’ explanations, disengaging from sedentary life enabled them to express an ethos of freedom, in which minimalism, uncertainty and risk replace material accumulation, stability and comfort. It is important however to pay attention to the structural constraints within which their ethos of freedom operates. The aim of the article is twofold: on one hand, it contrasts digital nomads’ sociocultural imaginaries of (in)mobility with the specific economic strategies they use to sustain their continuous mobility, including geoarbitrage and the commodification of network capital. On the other, it provides fresh ethnographic evidence on how digital nomads’ self-realization project meets the ideology of entrepreneurialism, allowing them to take advantage of privileged nationalities to navigate the global inequalities of the capitalist system. The article argues that, rather than a challenge to the system, digital nomadism is an opportunistic adaptation to neoliberal impacts. Keywords Digital nomads · Lifestyle mobilities · Freedom · Privilege · Geoarbitrage
* Fabiola Mancinelli [email protected] 1
Department of Social Anthropology, University of Barcelona, Montalegre 6, 08001 Barcelona, Spain
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1 Introduction Digital nomads are individuals who, taking advantage of portable computing technologies and widespread Internet access, can work remotely from any location and use this freedom to explore the world. Their aspirations blend tourism, leisure and professional activity to fashion a unique lifestyle based on remote work, global travel and multi-residential practices. In this article, I contrast the motivations of digital nomads with the economic strategies they adopt to make their lifestyle financially viable, analyzing the interplay between their discourse of freedom and self-realization and the structural constraints within which they operate. To understand why digital nomads decide to move, we must examine personal agency and cultural motivations. In the case of digital nomads, the “good life” (O’Reilly and Benson 2009), a general aspiration motivating many kinds of mobility, has more to do with a quest for meaning than with economic or political factors (Korpela 2014; D’Andrea 2007). Digital nomads embody this search for a
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