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If I had been born a century earlier, I probably would have found myself in Paris rather than Bali, hanging out at a bookstore instead of a coworking space.
In 1919, an American woman named Sylvia Beach opened a book shop, Shakespeare and Company, on Paris’s Left Bank. It was a good time and place to be a bookseller: Paris was a literary and artistic capital, home to all the major French book publishers, literary journals, event spaces, and art galleries. The country’s best thinkers—Marcel Proust, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Anatole France—flocked to the city to be part of its unique culture.
But Paris wasn’t just a hotspot for France’s experimental creative scene—it was a gathering place for writers and artists from all over the world, favored for its embrace of extravagance, diversity, and creativity. The core selling point of Beach’s shop was that it stocked only English-language books; it quickly became a hub for the city’s growing expat community. A variety of North American and European writers abandoned their countries of origin to take up residence in Paris, where they lived, worked, and played as part of a global crowd. The ideas that came out of their movement still influence our thinking and culture today.
Beach published James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922, which is still considered one of the 20th century’s most notable works of fiction. The book was banned in the US, the UK, and Joyce’s home country of Ireland for over a decade, censored for its scenes depicting masturbation and menstruation. It was one of many books to emerge out of Paris between the First and Second World Wars. Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934) is a first-person account of the sexual and travel adventures of the stereotypical American bohemian in Paris. George Orwell was also there, working as a dishwasher in restaurants—an experience he immortalized in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). Ernest Hemingway wrote a memoir, too—posthumously assembled as A Moveable Feast in 1964—which features the city’s cast of characters in that period: James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Ford Madox Ford, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein.
Stein, in particular, grew to foster the community by hosting regular salons for creatives to exchange ideas, critique work, and collaborate. As well as writers, experimental artists such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Mattisse, the entertainer and activist Josephine Baker, and the world-renowned dancer Isadora Duncan were also part of the scene. This group of artists became known as the Lost Generation.
Looking back on his time in 1920s Paris, the American poet Archibald MacLeish wrote:*
It was not the lost generation which was lost: It was the world out of which that generation came. And it was not a generation of expatriates who found themselves in Paris in those years but a generation whose “patria,” wherever it may once have been, was no longer waiting for them anywhere.
The ideas of nomadism predate laptops and smartphones. Throughout history, writers, musicians, painters, and photographers have drawn inspiration from their travels to enrich their craft. An artist’s work has rarely required their physical presence or daily proximity to a particular location—at least not with any regularity. The Beatles spent time in ashrams and wrote songs with local musicians in India. Allen Ginsberg met the Indian poets Sunil Gangopadhyay in Calcutta and Malay Roy Choudhury in Patna. The Rolling Stones fled London for Tangier, working with a traditional Moroccan music group called The Master Musicians of Jajouka while they waited out drug charges.
Writers and journalists, in particular, feature heavily in the archives of work from anywhere. Almost every country has a roaming writer or two, across all geographies and cultures, from Ibn Battuta in 1300s Morocco to Jack Kerouac in 1950s America. Think of it like this: Before digital nomads, there was the analog version—notebook nomads. Or, in the case of writer Emma Smith, typewriter nomads (pictured below in 1947, by the River Seine in Paris).
Figure: Writer Emma Smith (1923—2018) in a famous 1947 photo by Robert Doisneau, as featured on the cover of her memoir, As Green as Grass.
Travel exposes people to different norms, perspectives, ideas, and solutions, which helps artists make more globally relevant and ambitious work. The demand for creativity is rising across all industries in the 21st century; the World Economic Forum predicts it will be among the most important labor market skills by 2030.* Now, remote technologies are making it possible for not only artists, but other kinds of workers to pursue experiences that capture the imagination and inspire innovative ideas.
In March 1983, a recently-formed technology company called Compaq Computer Corporation shipped an exciting new product: the world’s first portable computer, the Compaq Portable.
Despite a price tag of US$3,590 (equivalent to around US$9,500 today), the model sold upwards of 50,000 units in its first year. This beast of a machine weighed 28 lb (13 kg) and folded up into a luggable case the size of a portable sewing machine. Crucially, it was designed to be taken as carry-on luggage. The tech journalists loved it. In 1982, PC World Magazine ran a cover story titled “Traveling with the IBM PC’s First Portable Competitor.” It features a photo of a man seated beside a swimming pool, transfixed by the rectangular screen of his bulky Compaq Portable. Next to him is an empty cocktail glass. This just might be the first portrait of the work from anywhere movement we know today:
Figure: PC World Magazine, 1982.
While the definition of “portable” has changed a lot over the past 40 years, the recognition that technology would uncouple work and location—challenging the foundations and certainties of 20th-century society in the process—has been clear for decades. Every generation has thinkers and tinkerers who dream of connecting seamlessly across borders, locations, and time zones—and some go the extra mile to articulate what that world might look like.
Figure: In 1964, Arthur C. Clarke predicted a world “where we can contact our friends even if we don’t know their physical location. … It will be possible for a man to conduct his business from Tahiti or Bali just as well as he could from London.” (Photo from 1965.)*
As far back as the 1960s, the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke predicted the emergence of global remote work, speaking specifically about nomads working from Bali in the 2010s. Fifty years before I arrived in Ubud, Clarke had anticipated the presence of people like me in that part of the world, using digital tools to do exactly what I was doing.
In 1973, a former NASA engineer named Jack Nilles proposed telecommuting (an earlier name for remote work) as a solution to congestion in US cities and the deepening global oil crisis. He was the lead author of a paper arguing that technology meant workers no longer needed to commute from the suburbs to downtown offices, but could work from home instead.* Today, Nilles is celebrated as “the father of remote work.” Of course, not all remote workers choose to become digital nomads, but remote work is almost always the gateway drug. By 1981, Intel co-founder Robert Noyce spoke about the end of commuting, the rise of remote work, and a future where people locate “where it’s conducive to live, not where it’s conducive to work.”
The earliest digital nomad, though, wasn’t equipped with a smartphone or even a laptop. Between 1983 and 1991, Steven K. Roberts traveled 17,000 miles across America on a bicycle.* He was working as a tech writer in Columbus, OH when one day it dawned on him that he didn’t much like his city or his expensive lifestyle. So, he sold his house and left.
Roberts wasn’t just a nomad—he was an inventor, too. When I spoke to him for this book, Roberts talked about hacking together his custom bike with a four-button keyboard and LCD screen on its handlebars. Solar panels, connected to batteries, powered everything but the wheels: “I carried a RadioShack model 100 laptop, 5 watt solar panel, and had an account on CompuServe that I used to communicate with my base office,” he told me.
With this admittedly janky tech setup, Roberts could now work while he cycled.* He spent eight years living as a nomadic freelance writer. His bicycle received various upgrades over the years, ultimately becoming an object worth $1.2M by 1991.* Today, it resides in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Roberts’s pioneering journey was an early experiment in a new way of living, made possible by portable technologies.
Just a few years after Roberts completed his journey, “digital nomad” entered the lexicon. The term originated in a 1997 academic textbook of the same name, by Tsugio Makimoto, a celebrated Japanese technologist whose contributions to the field of computer science earned him the nickname “Mr. Semiconductor.” The author’s note in the front of the book summarizes its main argument:
Times are changing. The driving force of change in the world is technological advance. It is pushing in two directions: towards smaller, cheaper, more portable personal tools, and towards the imminence of cheap, high capacity, global communications networks.
Technology does not cause change but it amplifies change. Early in the next millennium it will deliver the capability to live and work on the move.
The world’s major technology companies are targeting the lifestyle of the “mobile professional” in developing the tools for leading a nomadic business life. In time these tools will become cheap enough for everyone, and the biggest lifestyle change for 10,000 years—since humans stopped being nomadic and settled down to farm—will be delivered to most people in the developed world.
People will therefore be able to ask themselves, “Am I a nomad or a settler?” For the first time in 10,000 years that choice will become a mainstream lifestyle option.
When Makimoto wrote this in 1997, the technology environment was a little different than today. It was the year DVD players were sold commercially in the US for the first time, at a cost of $599 to $750 per unit.* The first-ever Grand Theft Auto game had just shipped on PlayStation 1, the MP3 file format was newly invented, and AOL was rolling out unlimited web access for $19.95 per month.
If Makimoto was right on the trend—and he was—he was off on the timing. Technology did advance to make remote work and global communication possible in the early part of the 21st century, just as all the futurists and technologists had predicted, but real-world enthusiasm for this way of living developed at a slower pace. While the technologies for a nomadic life would emerge within a decade of Makimoto’s Digital Nomad, the wider cultural shift to embrace them was slower than predicted—the 2010s rather than the 2000s.
The lesson here is that tools often move faster than people. The ability to do something on a technical level doesn’t mean it’s destined to become a lifestyle movement. For that to happen, people first need a human character to represent whatever the new possibility might be; to make it feel more real. In 2007, a book provided exactly the right mix of ingredients. With its release, the face of modern nomadism would emerge—and usher in the beginning of location-independence as a 21st-century subculture.
If you were in Silicon Valley in the early 2000s, Tim Ferriss needs no introduction. He is, after all, the person who won, by a huge margin, Wired magazine’s “self-promoter of the year” by public vote back in 2008. You might have encountered him at somebody else’s party, distributing copies of his five bestselling books. Or maybe you’ve come across his blog, YouTube channel, or podcast, where he interviews the crème de la crème of entrepreneurship and entertainment: celebrated characters like Marc Andreessen, Jimmy Wales, Margaret Atwood, Hugh Jackman, Malcolm Gladwell, and Amanda Palmer.
Ferriss’s first and most popular book was The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, published in 2007. Its core argument is that people should design the life they want and see the world now, not work in a soul-destroying job and wait for retirement to really live. In popularizing this idea, Ferriss piloted and promoted a new philosophy of life and work—one that has been simmering away in the background ever since. This notion of exploring the world and enjoying the good life became digital nomads’ guiding principle, and a global subculture of people began pursuing remote businesses, blending work and travel in new ways.
The same year The 4-Hour Workweek was published, Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone. Facebook was three years old, and though it already had 14 million users,* its addictive qualities were not yet so expertly tuned. (For context, 2.8 billion people now use Facebook at least once a month.)* Twitter had been around for just a year, a niche microblogging site populated by the small, fascinating subset of early adopters who still wear the “joined in 2006” badge on the platform today. YouTube was in its terrible twos, blubbering and buffering its way toward relevancy. Instagram, and the shiny influencer culture it is known for, had yet to be invented.
The mainstream internet may have been in its infancy, but the tech builders of Silicon Valley could see what was coming just as well as their predecessors had: all the tools necessary for people to work from anywhere, conveniently, affordably, and effectively. Ferriss was a prolific networker in the Bay Area, detecting those same signals as he wrote The 4-Hour Work Week. But would anybody choose to use their ever-thinner laptops and fancy new smartphones to actually do this? Or would “running away to Bali” just be something Californians excited themselves about at acid parties?
Enter Ferriss. In an environment not yet so saturated by the internet, he emerged as a self-help and “life hacking” guru, selling an alternative path to a familiar vision of success. He made a career out of teaching people how to think about money, harness their productivity, and be their “best self.” In the world according to Ferriss, these things are all simple to achieve—you just have to want them.
Millions of people bought into Ferriss’s philosophy, though far fewer took action in their own lives. Ferriss offers himself up as the guinea pig for every action he tells others to take. In doing so, he becomes his audience’s yardstick to measure themselves against: If he can do it, what’s stopping me? Through his blog, Ferriss made people feel like he was sharing insider knowledge—your successful friend who spills their secrets over dinner and a few drinks. He took ownership of the “self-experimentation” genre, and achieved astonishing success.
In the years following its release, The 4-Hour Workweek slowly spawned a movement of location-independence. To fund their adventures, Ferriss recommends his followers design a “low-lift” business. In this kind of venture, the owner has simplified operations sufficiently that it’s possible to minimize the hands-on work while also maximizing profits. The business itself can be anything. The approach is what’s important. Ferriss suggests readers do as he did and start a dropshipping company, buying cheap goods from manufacturing hubs like China and India, and using the internet to sell them to wealthy consumers in the West.
Ferriss’s own dropshipping business was that most noble of endeavors: a sports supplements brand. He founded BrainQUICKEN in 2001; by the time he sold the company to a private equity firm for an undisclosed sum in 2010, it was known as BodyQUICK. In The 4-Hour Workweek, Ferriss claims he was able to reduce his working hours at BodyQUICK from 80 per week to just four. (Notably, friends and colleagues say Ferriss works many more hours than that each week as an author, podcaster, YouTuber, speaker, entrepreneur and investor, and has done so every single year since The 4-Hour Workweek was published.*)
Many people arrived on the ground in a faraway country, however, and decided to skip a step. Rather than following Ferriss’s entrepreneurial path, they used the internet to create online courses and digital learning materials to aid others in becoming digital nomads. Some developed products on how to build a dropshipping business, despite never having done it themselves. These people aspired not to the “low-lift business” part of Ferriss’s vision, but wanted to become self-help gurus instead—often without embarking on the “self-experimentation” path at all, unless buying a plane ticket counts.
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, a lively cottage industry of course creators, virtual teachers, coaches, bloggers, and event organizers sprung up. The 2014 nomad study by Beth Altringer, the Harvard professor who visited Ubud, suggested that most of them didn’t earn enough to do well. This creates something akin to a multi-level marketing or “pyramid” scheme like Avon or Herbalife. These nomads’ finances rely almost entirely on converting others to the lifestyle. It’s a trend that persists to this day.
There has always been tension between the “social media nomads” and the rest. Aspirational content about nomadism is many people’s entry point to the movement, though it’s not representative of most nomads’ activities, intentions, or experiences. As a frustrated participant in the Harvard study put it: “They post pictures of themselves lying around on the beach, and then my clients start thinking I’m less reliable if I’m a digital nomad.”
The trend of nomad-influencers is a highly visible manifestation of Ferriss’s worldview, inviting would-be nomads to see the world as their playground and prioritize individual gain over everything else. Ferriss encourages his followers to leverage global currency and cost differences in what he calls “geo-arbitrage,” short for geographic arbitrage. The calculation is simple: If you’re earning a New York or London salary, your money lasts longer and buys you more away from those locations: tropical climates all year round, modern apartment buildings with gyms and pools, and varied, affordable dining options. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to travel and improve your lifestyle, but the very concept of geo-arbitrage highlights the stark inequalities between people born in different countries.
Ferriss also uses virtual assistants, usually located in much poorer countries, to stay on top of his admin work and anything else he doesn’t feel like doing. When asked about the ethics of outsourcing undesirable tasks to cheaper markets in a 2011 interview with The New Yorker, Ferriss said: “There are people I have outsourced to in India who now outsource portions of their work to the Philippines. It’s the efficient use of capital, and if you want the rewards of a free market, if you want to enjoy the rewards of the capitalist system, these are the rules by which you play.”
To look at all of this as a game is easy for folks with the right passport, born in the right place, at the right moment in history. Ferriss does not acknowledge the passport lottery he won, nor does he dwell on the matter of geo-arbitrage only being possible for some.
Ferriss’s perspective is perhaps easy to grasp if, like the majority of early nomads, you are male, white, wealthy and American. Of course, most of the world is not. But that point doesn’t get addressed in The 4-Hour Workweek.
Still, the book was the catalyst needed for the ideas of work from anywhere to move beyond being possible and become desirable. Without a character like Ferriss to slot the components of global remote work together, showing what our lives could look like, digital nomadism may have remained the quirky fascination of fringe futurists for another decade. Instead, there was now a guide and a guidebook—and it was a bestseller. But it wouldn’t be long before Ferriss’s ideas were remixed with new values.
In April 2013, an MBA grad named Pieter Levels, then 27, sold all his stuff and set off from the Netherlands to travel the world.
A few years earlier, when he was studying at Rotterdam School of Management, Levels accidentally launched his first online business. He uploaded electronic music mixes to YouTube and his channel, Panda Mix Show, quickly took off. By the time Levels graduated in 2012, he was making $2K per month.* A friend commented that this income meant he could live “pretty much anywhere.” He’d already spent six months studying abroad on an exchange program as a teenager, so the idea of going overseas didn’t faze him much. Plus, he was curious to see if he could maintain an income on the road.
Over the next few months, Levels got rid of everything that didn’t fit in his backpack, then boarded a one-way flight to Thailand. He kept hearing about The 4-Hour Workweek, but assessed that the business of dropshipping was “bullshit” and definitely not his scene.*
Yet being a YouTube music star wasn’t quite right either. For Levels, modest success on a third-party web platform, especially one owned by a global tech giant like Google, didn’t spark joy. He wanted to build something of his own—a different, more independent kind of online business. A self-taught coder, he decided he would launch 12 startups in 12 months while he traveled from place to place. These “startups” would be bootstrapped, built entirely by Levels, and have no outside investors. By the end of the experiment, he figured he would probably have come up with a longer-term plan.
Like many nomads at the time, Levels soon ended up working out of Hubud in Bali. There, he wrote the first lines of code for his seventh startup, Nomad List, a website that ranks cities according to their suitability for remote workers. The site uses APIs to curate data sets and convert them into an attractive user interface that updates in real-time. Its gimmick is perfect for the FOMO generation: the home page reveals the best place in the world for nomads to be at any given moment.
Between 2014 and 2017, as the site and interest in what it offers grew, Levels became the poster child for digital nomads as we now know them. Media brands from Wired to the BBC to CNN ran stories on nomads, and Nomad List became both a resource for and a symbol of a new global subculture.
Levels took Ferriss’s lens on the world and remixed it with maker values. Yes, nomads wanted to leverage their location and mobility, but there was a bigger picture too. They want to make an honest living, learn by doing, solve real problems, and create things of value. Levels’s interest was in bootstrapping, not dropshipping, and as he put it in his book, MAKE (2018), “Having some positive influence on people’s lives is a lot more interesting to me than more revenue.”* The rising nomad movement wasn’t just about profit and pleasure as Ferriss’s marketing suggested—it symbolized a new understanding of what was possible in a globalized world. Rather than waiting for the fruits of globalization to trickle down to individuals, nomads went ahead and globalized themselves, embracing the popular mantra: “Ask forgiveness, not permission.”
Depending on who you ask, nomads represent everything that’s right about globalization or everything that’s wrong with it. For generations, people from high-passport power countries have traveled to low-passport power countries, tempted by the weather, low living costs, and the opportunity to experience new cultures. At its most optimistic, the nomad movement could be viewed as a chance to build bridges between emerging and established economies. But since nomads mostly hold the powerful passports of former empires, some say they are following in the footsteps of their predecessors to travel, adventure, exploit, and even colonize, with little concern about their impact on host communities.
In the past, colonialism usually involved people moving to a new territory while retaining political allegiances with their home country.* The term “neocolonialism” refers to a strong country or its settlers’ domination of a weaker country and its people, and more specifically, “the survival of the colonial system in spite of formal recognition of political independence in emerging countries.”** Notably, this can be without any direct government or political control, so may refer to a group of people living in a place and participating in a parallel economy and social circle.
Digital nomadism works best for those in a position of privilege who can already afford to buffer its risks. So, what does it mean if knowledge workers from wealthy countries work remotely in poorer countries, and climb a few rungs up the class ladder compared with the local population? Enjoying the fruits of an “exotic” setting while taking advantage of global inequalities like cheap labor, currency discrepancies, and low property prices raises questions about the structures the nomad lifestyle is built on and supporting.
Trade, capital, knowledge, and communication all flow freely across borders, yet humans themselves still face restrictions. While a person’s rights are still determined by their passport, the old systems of wealth, power, and status will persist in the world. The legacy infrastructure governing mobility and taxes has not caught up with the way people are living. Instead, we’re stuck with a global system optimized for inequality, and which privileges and restricts people based on their birthplace, heritage, physical location, skin color, and native language. Can we really rely on trickle-down equality to achieve more equitable outcomes?
The United Nations Headquarters in New York is a notoriously difficult place to get into. There are official tours covering a few of the building’s rooms, but to get any closer to the action, you have to be invited. Luckily, I had an in.
In 2018, a friend in the UN press and communications department, the writer and activist John Dennehy, got in touch while I was staying in Manhattan. One of the perks of working at the UN—along with the possibility of being granted a diplomatic passport—is being able to bring guests in for drinks at the bar.