Part VI: Borderless Future

You’re reading an excerpt from Global Natives: The New Frontiers of Work, Travel, and Innovation, a guide to digital nomads and the work-from-anywhere movement, by Lauren Razavi. Purchase the book for instant digital access.

New Travel Markets and the Rise of Subscription Living

On the Eastern edge of Amsterdam’s inner-ring is an area known as “The Knowledge Mile.”* This “innovation cluster” launched as part of a city marketing campaign in 2015,* presumably the vision of a team familiar with the ideas of Richard Florida. When I visited two years later, the project was in full swing. Every other building in the area was either a trendy cafe, a startup office or part of a university. If a founder invited you to their product launch, the venue was likely to be on a tree-lined boulevard named Weesperstraat, the Knowledge Mile’s main artery.

My destination was about halfway down, next to the local WeWork. The entrance was set back from the street, a giant potted plant on each side of the automatic doors.

Stepping inside, four oversized letters glowed overhead: “ZOKU.” One wall had mailboxes, and the other a rambling manifesto of sorts, the kind advertising agencies charge startups a fortune to come up with. The doorway led to a small, shoebox-shaped room containing a wall plastered with event posters and two janky elevators—no reception desk in sight. It looked more like the entrance to a student housing complex than a hotel lobby. Was I in the right place?

On the top floor, I stepped out of the elevator into a plant-filled glass corridor. Greenhouse doors led to a series of rooftop gardens, each one with furniture in a different style. At the end of the corridor, double doors opened into a vibrant, oversized living room. There was Heineken on tap, a 3D printer, copies of Monocle magazine, and a cosmopolitan crowd of young professionals. Remote workers tapped away on their keyboards, guests chatted over coffees and cocktails, and tattooed chefs prepared meals in an open kitchen. The atmosphere reminded me of Hubud, the Balinese coworking space that was influential in the early nomad movement.

The building I found myself in, Zoku, was a collection of micro-apartments with the cookie cutter design of a hotel brand. Each unit squeezed a kitchenette, a four-person dining table, a private bathroom, and a superking bed—accessed using a retractable staircase—into the plot of a standard hotel room. There were hotel and lifestyle amenities on-site, too: a restaurant and bar, coworking areas, table tennis, punching bags, laundry, and rooftop gardens—shared, communal spaces to encourage interactions between guests.

Figure: The Zoku Loft XL. Source: Zoku.

Zoku, a Japanese word meaning “tribe,” “clan,” or “family,” was associated with the use of psychedelics by Japan’s hippies and punks in the sixties and seventies. Hans Meyer, the Dutch hotelier who founded the Zoku hotel brand, first heard the term while living as a digital nomad for a few months in 2009. Meyer, then 40, was in search of a new, more innovative direction for his career. As Tim Ferriss’s ideas went international, wafting around at dinner parties and in hotel bars, Meyer grew curious and decided to take a trip: a month each in Bali, Buenos Aires, and Washington, DC.

Meyer learned a lot during his travels as a nomad. Tourists head home when they check in for a flight, but moving through an airport is a different sensation for nomads: it marks the end of a trip and another one just beginning. Nomads return to cities again and again, getting to know the best neighborhoods, cafes, restaurants, and coworking spaces just as well as the locals do. Wherever they go, Meyer noted, this new generation of travelers spend more time than most in lonely, disconnected spaces like airport lounges and hotel business centers. He wondered: Could nomads be the target market for a new type of accommodation?

The accommodation experience often sets the tone for a trip and, if you have deadlines along the way, highlights the practical challenges of working and traveling at the same time. Meyer lived in apartments, hotels, and hostels, and did his best to maintain a regular work pattern as he moved around. He found the big-name hotels overly complicated—“five different TV remotes and too many light switches.” The serviced apartments came with ergonomic workspace and reliable wifi, but were usually bland, impersonal, and uninspiring.

“Hostels, though, had a traveler’s culture and were less like liminal or transient spaces,” he told me. “I’d jump out of my bunk bed to grab a coffee, then still be there at a big family table hours later, happily chatting with strangers about new places.” But the hostels came with downsides, too, like shared bathrooms and doors that didn’t lock properly. The blurred lines between public and private were an interesting space for experimentation, but hostels didn’t always get the balance right. What these spaces really thrived on, though, was connecting people. And that was something Meyer thrived on, too.

Back in Amsterdam, Meyer met with his friend Rob Wagemans, a darling of the Dutch creative scene and the architect who would later design Zoku. Over a series of dinners, Meyer and Wagemans came up with an idea for a hotel that would cater to a then-tiny minority of global travelers: remote workers. Their hotel would be a “home/office hybrid,” with space-saving “loft” apartments, a coworking space instead of a lobby, and a community manager to make introductions between locals and visitors. At this hotel, people would split their time between private micro-apartments and public social spaces, complete with those communal, family-style tables Meyer loved during his hostel stays.

When Zoku Amsterdam opened in June 2016, its press release declared “the end of the hotel room as we know it.”** The awards rolled in, and Zoku climbed the ranks of TripAdvisor and Google Maps, quickly becoming a selfie hotspot for influencers and socialites. Meyer spent the next few years making plans for an international expansion. The first hotel’s success led him to believe there was plenty of demand—after all, he’d never even employed a marketing manager in Amsterdam. Zoku was riding on the rare success of a “build it and they will come” mentality.

When I met with Meyer in December 2019, he was full of optimism about Zoku’s future. After years of negotiations with investors, city planners, and building owners, his team was getting ready to announce two new European openings. His ultimate goal was to put a hotel in every creative capital, from Seville to San Francisco to Singapore, and it seemed Zoku could be the vehicle to do just that.

Then, as COVID-19 ravaged the world, the travel landscape was radically and permanently altered. In 2020, the global tourism industry saw a 74% year-on-year drop in visitor arrivals.* The business travel industry supported one in seven jobs worldwide in 2019, with annual revenues of $1.4 trillion, and business trips accounted for as much as 75% of revenue on some international flights. By 2021, though, business travel had seen a $710 billion year-on-year loss.* The sector is unlikely to bounce back, at least at the same scale. Once an expense line has disappeared from the company budget for a year or two—like travel for face-to-face meetings—it becomes more difficult to justify reinstating it.

Tourism and business travel involve many other sectors, including accommodation and hospitality, all of which were forced to think laterally in response to the pandemic. Suddenly, everyone who could work remotely was doing so and governments were even launching dedicated nomad visas. In a matter of months, work from anywhere went from a niche lifestyle movement to the travel industry’s hottest new target market. Guest categories were merging into a new one, and it was the one Meyer had spent years tailoring his brand for.

Amidst the chaos of the early pandemic, and with digital nomads in mind, Meyer decided to test a new business model at Zoku: subscription living. Instead of marketing overnight stays, his hotel launched a flexible monthly subscription for remote workers. Zoku’s subscription grants access to their buildings in three different cities: Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Vienna. Long-term, the idea is that guests will take out an annual contract and stay under the Zoku brand as they move between cities.

Living permanently in a hotel may sound liminal and boring on the surface, but the familiarity of branded spaces is among their biggest selling points. Wherever you are, things are identical by design: the plates and pans in your kitchen, the height of the bathroom mirror, the position of power outlets. This consistency smoothes out the creases of borderless living, providing travelers with a “home” environment across different locations.

The subscription concept removes key points of stress and friction from nomadic living—no more wondering about whether the place will look like the pictures, fretting over wifi speeds, or trying to figure out where you’ll work from. Like many travelers, I buy into the aspiration of “going local,” but when travel is your lifestyle, knowing you won’t be tripped up by the fundamentals is key to being able to get your work done efficiently, freeing you up to relax and explore a place in your downtime.

Subscription living is the logical next step for accommodation brands seeking to serve the nomad market. What appeals to remote workers is not just staying and working from somewhere new and exciting, but the convenience of accommodation, workspace, and community all in one place. The price points of the subscription programs vary, but are generally comparable with renting private Airbnb apartments by the month. Zoku’s initial offering costs $3,000 to $5,000 for 30 days, with discounts for bookings of multiple months. Hostel brand Selina now offers coliving subscriptions for stays across the US, Latin America, and Europe, at a monthly cost of $1,140 to $3,300 for private en suite rooms. If prices reduce further, this kind of accommodation could come to replace more traditional housing options for locals as well as nomads. And those categories—local and nomad—will become harder to distinguish as flexibility becomes the norm.

As laptops, tablets and smartphones proliferate worldwide, digital subscriptions are becoming increasingly popular. The 2010s saw the rise of global subscription giants like Netflix for movies, Spotify for music, Harry’s for razors, and HelloFresh for meal kits. These companies operate across many cities, providing cross-border lifestyle and convenience services for a global middle class of knowledge workers. International coworking brands like WeWork and Spaces and the private members’ club Soho House, which IPO’d at a valuation of $2.8 billion in 2021,* have already succeeded in selling people on the idea of paying to access exclusive physical spaces.

There are already other Zoku-like brands offering long-term stays: Figment in Singapore, Urby in the U.S., and Sonder across 35 cities in 10 countries. In the years ahead, I expect to see more branded spaces, each with its own unique flavor and selling points. It may soon be completely normal to pay a global brand subscription for flexible accommodation across various cities instead of rent to a single landlord for a long-term, fixed address.

Future nomads might boast about the features of their favorite brand: the Swedish design aesthetic, the oversized American furnishings, or the chopsticks and rice cooker in a Japanese-run property. The brand you choose may not be that of your home country, but one that provides the aesthetic and accommodations you prefer. The companies hope your subscription will become part of your identity, like an iPhone or an American Express Platinum Card.

Accommodation companies are actively promoting the nomad lifestyle to ensure its viability. In 2021, Airbnb ran a competition for 12 people to “live anywhere” in their properties, for free, for a year.* Meanwhile, the company’s CEO, Brian Chesky, is living exclusively in Airbnb properties for 12 months in a personal bid to showcase the nomad dream.* As more people travel in this way, as digital nomads, infrastructure is emerging to serve them as a political and economic class. SafetyWing, the company I work for, has set out to build a global social safety net: travel medical insurance, remote doctors, and borderless pensions. The special projects department I run is on a mission to create an opt-in internet country, Plumia, conceived as a digital citizenship platform. Our long-term goal is to deliver access to a new global passport, along with other products and services that solve some of the problems laid out in this book, as a membership.

The convenience of subscription living opens the door for more people to experiment with nomadic travel. Some guests will be only semi-nomadic travelers with mortgages, offices, and employees to return to, and consider themselves to have a “home” and “home country.” Still, they are part of a new and fast-growing market of digital nomads.

The less friction there is, the more convinced managers will be to allow their teams to work from anywhere, and subscription living may soon have direct applications in business contexts too. Most remote companies organize retreats or gatherings a few times each year. As teams grow, booking out hotels and resorts becomes expensive, creating the incentives for businesses to own or lease real estate beyond traditional offices. Technology companies once created branded campuses, complete with gyms, cinemas, and sushi restaurants. Now, they may create their own branded buildings instead, and offer subscription living to their employees. Company-managed properties where staff meet, stay, and work together could look a lot like Zoku.

Subscription living represents a new global standard—for accommodation, remote work, and the expectations for connection and adventure that nomads and all kinds of travelers want. Many locals want these things too. We’re watching a global aesthetic and a set of global values achieve wider reach and become part of our identities. Now, people are starting to wonder: will everywhere soon look like anywhere?

Same, Same, But Different

An interest in the exotic has always underpinned tourism. Beginning in the 17th century, graduates of England’s elite Oxford and Cambridge universities embarked on grand tours of Europe. They’d trek through France and Italy to experience the “otherness” of foreign cultures, visit famous monuments, and eat unfamiliar, potentially toxic foods like pasta and focaccia bread. The strangeness of these places and the experiences they offered made the journey a key rite of passage for the English gentry. In the 1800s, as railways and steamships expanded travel, the availability and ambition of these grand tours increased alongside. Americans flocked to the museums and art galleries of the Old World, and Europeans vacationed further afield in the colonial outposts of Asia and Africa.

But as more people visited places that were previously only knowable from books, questions arose about the “authenticity” of their travel experiences. In E.M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India, published in 1924, the protagonist is perpetually disappointed to discover that life in the East was not too dissimilar to life back home in England. She laments afternoons of tea with scones and evenings of tedious networking drinks. Where was the real India?

Today, the desire to see the “real” culture will be familiar to anybody who has visited Egypt’s Pyramids—located opposite Pizza Hut’s Giza outlet—or tripped over the Starbucks coffee cups littering the Great Wall of China. Modern package holidays, luxury cruises, and all-inclusive resorts have dominated leisure travel for decades, streamlining the delivery of exotic experiences to be efficient, predictable, safe, photogenic, and profitable. The sights, trinkets, and stories may change, but the role of “tourist” remains largely the same whether you’re visiting Hagia Sophia in Istanbul or Chichen Itza in Mexico’s Yucatán region. Globalization can make everywhere start to feel the same.

For cities and countries keen to attract and accommodate nomads, the economic appeal can be a similarly homogenizing force. While tourism has led to thousands of McDonald’s and Starbucks outlets and Ramadas by Wyndham in every country on earth, the knowledge economy has its own globally recognizable aesthetic: exposed brick, tables made from reclaimed wood, and plants galore. Its venues are often set in converted warehouses and sell things like Gesha coffee beans from Ethiopia and Danish open sandwiches (which serious-looking men with mustaches will inform you are called smørrebrød). Other menu items may include Australian brunch dishes, Panko-fried Japanese chicken burgers, and American grilled cheese sandwiches. There’ll be either Oatly (from Sweden) or Minor Figures (from the UK) for the vegan lattes. No, they intentionally don’t sell any Coca-Cola products, and they think it’s weird that you asked.

Spaces like this can be found in cities as impoverished as Jaipur and as affluent as Singapore. Increasingly, there are recognizable spaces for “globals” in towns and cities everywhere. I’ve seen plenty of them on my travels: in Paris, Casablanca, Hanoi, Melbourne, Hong Kong, and many other towns and cities that most people couldn’t point to on a map. The city, language, and local customs out on the street may change, but there is a comforting consistency when seated at a cafe table or bar stool that could be anywhere—with so much to discover, familiar surroundings can help travelers feel grounded in faraway places. And the benefits of these global spaces go beyond individual comfort, they also facilitate crucial connections between and among travelers and locals.

Global spaces are like the offline version of internet meet-ups. They can bring people together based on shared interests, shared questions, shared values, shared projects, and shared dreams. The internet allows us to see other cities, cultures, aesthetics, ways of life from afar, and compels us to try them for ourselves. One way to do that is to travel; the other is for that idea to travel to you. For people living far away from big cities, global spaces facilitate membership in a global community, and connection to the world beyond the narrow boundaries of their homes.

But what about the local spaces, the ones that make a place stand out from the rest? Global spaces provide familiarity and comfort, but that’s not what nomads travel for. Like Forster, they go to experience the difference.

Increasingly, local spaces like street food stands and arts venues attract travelers from all over the world, and these also represent the new era of global culture. With increased global mobility, local cultures can have more of a global resonance. As we explored in Part V: Nomad Hubs, there are now fewer incentives for remote workers to live in major world cities, and compelling reasons for them to consider small towns, second-tier cities, and nomadic travel instead. But the appeal of a place has always been about more than just the job opportunities and office buildings. People go in search of the lifestyles and cultures they’ve encountered on TV and in movies, and increasingly, through the lens of their smartphones and laptop screens.

Does this mean people flock to the newest viral location, overwhelming the locals in order to post the same Instagram photo over and over again? Of course. But the internet also connects local places to the global stage and unlocks new forms of participation in the global economy. Social media spreads local slang, recipes, traditions, and other cultural quirks worldwide. The internet moves local cultures from the ground to the cloud, providing an international platform for them. A Mexican burrito stand or Singaporean cafe can attract visitors from afar and stay in touch with them after they’re gone. Local brands can sell products online to build their global presence, and leverage the content machine to educate far-flung readers about their neighborhood, region, or community. Critics lament a flattening of local culture, but the culture symbolized by nomads and made possible by the internet is one that elevates and celebrates difference.

What nomads want is both global spaces and local places, and to be part of an exchange between the local and the global. As nomads travel, they spread the culture they’ve experienced elsewhere, whether that’s in their countries of origin or the other places they’ve spent time. But they also spread their own culture, a culture that defines what it means to live a borderless life and still feel like you belong in the world. In the same way countries engage in cultural exchange to spread the customs and knowledge of a nation, a fast-emerging network of spaces is promoting the rituals and relationships of a global country.

An Era of Global Natives

In a 2016 speech, former British Prime Minister Theresa May made a bold declaration: “If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship is.”*

To a politician like May, countries are fixed and citizenship is absolute, so restricting people’s movements and rights based on their country of origin makes perfect sense. Only, countries aren’t actually like that. They disappear, appear, and fail, and the name and borders of the country you were born in can change during your lifetime. Citizenship can be bought, sold, renounced, and revoked, yet it’s still the coincidence of a person’s birthplace or heritage that determines their ability to move around the world; where they can go, when, how, and for how long. The benefits and restrictions that come with your citizenship, or citizenships, can shift too.

Technology and global trade have diluted the ties between nationals and strengthened the bonds between geographical strangers. As we’ve learned in this book, to be from and connected to just one place is becoming rarer, and people feel increasingly disconnected from the nation-states issuing their birth certificates and passports.

The early signals—like visas and tax breaks—suggest there will be more digital nomads in the years ahead, and there’s a lot at stake in how that future unfolds. Unless nomads have a voice in how global mobility is managed, there’s no guarantee our rights will be protected. The nomadic lifestyle could be outlawed before it’s possible for more people to experience it. We could see harsher border restrictions, raids on coworking spaces, work equipment confiscated at customs, and nomads regularly deported back to their country of origin. Or, nomads could be understood in the context of a much larger story of global mobility and human freedom.

Now that remote work is mainstream, a much broader spectrum of people will navigate decisions about their work and lives differently. I call them “global natives”—a generation of globalized people, raised in a globalized world, who are not “from” a single place. For us, travel is not a luxury. It’s what allows us to connect with our loved ones across borders, how we learn about ourselves and the world. Some communities celebrate their common nationality; global natives recognize our common humanity as well.

Figure: Taiye Selasi speaking at a TED Talk, 2015.*

The writer Taiye Selasi believes our identities today are based on a set of experiences rather than a single community in a single place.* Memories and connections, she says, are made across different geographies, in a wide variety of contexts, and for many different reasons. The 21st century is a time of multi-localism, when anybody can be a “local” of multiple places:

We are not nationals. We are locals. Some of us, multi-locals. Our relationship is not with a nation, but with our hometown, the city we went to university, the town square of our first kiss. Our experience is where we’re from.

In our globalized, interconnected, and multicultural world, people’s lack of mobility rights prevent them from living globally. Policymakers need to understand nomads as early adopters that signal a wider shift towards multi-localism. Increasingly, our sense of self privileges culture over country.

Countries are stories, concepts, invented by people just like you and me. And we can invent new stories, concepts, and culture based on shared, global experiences. People will continue to travel, as they always have, to places with better opportunities, fewer threats, and more fun to be had. Yet as the world becomes more global and technologically advanced, not everyone gets to participate beyond one locality, and protecting free movement is often overlooked. That’s why our systems need to adapt. Governments and companies need to deliver new infrastructure to keep up with the pace of technology, its impact, and its potential.

Nomad visas begin to democratize global mobility from the ultra-wealthy to the mainstream, by prioritizing income and profession over country of origin. But unless we go further, these changes will only exacerbate the inequalities between the citizens of different countries. Global mobility can be a great equalizer, or the catalyst for new forms of exploitation. We need a global system that doesn’t only afford rights and privileges to the wealthy but instead champions human potential, by default and on principle.

The Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison said in a 1998 interview: “All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.”* At this moment in history, those born in the wrong place are the ones barred from entry.

Today’s nomads start from a position of relative wealth or passport privilege, but what about the rest? Right now, there are more refugees than there have been since World War II. Even without nomads, more people will move in the coming decades in response to war, economic instability, and climate change. Those burdened with refugee status have few rights and face many restrictions. International law only protects a person’s right to move within national borders, not between different countries. This is where things need to change, and the situation is becoming more urgent. Researchers predict there will be at least 1.2 billion new refugees as a result of natural disasters and weather events by 2050.* The UK and the US have already seen their first “climate refugees,” and some countries, like the Polynesian island of Tuvalu, will become completely uninhabitable within a matter of decades.*

Given the inevitable increases in migration already taking place, there’s no viable path forward if we abide by strict national boundaries and barriers to economic opportunity. Nationality and citizenship status usually have nothing to do with whether someone is the best person for the job. Reducing the barriers to remote work and learning from nomad practices present the most promising changes in favor of global equality that we could possibly make.

Currently, borders restrict a person’s ability to pick up their laptop and start over elsewhere. If a nation-state fails, its citizens have to wait years to be allowed to work in another country or engage with the global economy through the internet. A refugee who works as a graphic designer or web developer can’t log in to online platforms and keep working overseas like a digital nomad can, because the right to do so depends on the power of their passport.

We need to upgrade passports for the internet era, and use these and other tools to achieve a more equitable future. We need to update not only our technology, but the values driving the system. That’s the mission I’m working on in my job at SafetyWing, where we aim to launch a fully-functional nomad passport within 10 years, starting with the Nomad Border Pass, a new global mobility tool allowing nomads to live and work across many countries from one visa application. We need to protect global mobility as a universal human right, and design for true meritocracy at the global level.

As we build new solutions, we’re guided by the same principles I advocate for in this book:

• Mobility: protecting people’s right to move from place to place legitimately

• Participation: ensuring the ability to participate in society based on residency, not birthplace

• Integration: facilitating dialogue and interaction between locals and globals

These are the pillars we need to raise in an era of global natives, principles for a world of equal opportunity, equal access, and equal freedom. If we design with intention, we can use them to create new pathways for a broader demographic than nomads alone, improving outcomes for refugees and displaced people too.

The media theorist Marshall McLuhan once said that technology would turn the world into a global village.* He was right; the internet has delivered his vision. Now we need the systems to build and sustain our village: new, global institutions for the borderless, digital lives of the 21st century. The infrastructure we create for global natives must be more ambitious than what has come before. It must allow people living everywhere the freedom to live anywhere, and deliver an equality of opportunity across borders.

What we do in the 2020s, as remote work rises, will define our trajectory for the rest of the century. The opportunity we have now is to design a global system that supports instead of exploits. We can wield geography to further entrench inequalities, or we can bridge communities across the world using technology we already have. We can trap ourselves within arbitrary borders—or we can embrace the values of borderless living, which recognize the shared humanity no border can erase.

The choice is ours, and the journey has already begun.

Thank you for reading Global Natives! Please support the author: Follow Lauren Razavi on Twitter, subscribe to her newsletter, Counterflows, and join the Plumia community to hear more about the Nomad Border Pass.