Moving with and against the state: digital nomads and frictional mobility regimes

Abstract

The mobile lifestyle of digital nomads mingles remote work, international travel, and multi-local living in ways that both submit to and resist state-based mobility regimes. In this article, we examine this apparent paradox by asking how digital nomads move both with the state and against it. Employing the metaphor of ‘friction’, the analytical lens of ‘governmobility’ and ethnographic fieldwork with digital nomads, the article illustrates how nomads leverage state-imposed constraints into creative forms of ‘border artistry’ that allow them to achieve their lifestyle goals in the shadow of the state. At the same time, however, the article suggests that states are also border artists, an argument developed through an analysis of governments’ recently established special visa programs. The findings suggest that mobility regimes do not merely determine who can or cannot move, enter, or stay, but rather exercise a kind of governmobility that encourages mobile individuals to discipline themselves according to desirable qualities such as self-sufficiency, consumer citizenship, and depoliticised mobility. In this sense, mobility regimes emerge as the mutual interface between digital nomads’ individual strategies to stay on the move and states’ institutional strategies to codify and commodify their legal status.

Keywords:

• Digital nomads
• mobility regimes
• friction
• governmobility
• neoliberal subjectivity
• visa systems
• lifestyle mobilities
• citizenship

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Caterina Borelli and Olga Hannonen for their generous comments on the early draft of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 44% of countries in the world rely on the travel and tourism industry for more than 15% of their total share of employment (source: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/countries-reliant-tourism/).

2 https://www.relocate.world/articles/Bahamas-digital-nomad-visa-suspended.

3 It is worth mentioning, in this case, how, a little less than a decade ago, Estonia was considered attractive for its sparse population and silence (Kaaristo 2014), while now it is marketed for its networking opportunities.