Funnily enough, predictions that come true tend to be more memorable than those that don’t. In 1964, the science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke spelt out a vision for the future in a broadcast for the BBC’s Horizon programme. Clarke said he could see that “it will be possible . . . perhaps only 50 years from now, for a man to conduct his business from Tahiti or Bali just as well as he could from London”.
In September, Indonesia obliged. Its province of Bali entered into a collaboration with Airbnb’s Live and Work Anywhere campaign and the government adapted its visitor visas to allow remote work for six months, with no local income tax due.
Digital nomads were welcome. The epithet “citizen of nowhere” was meant to be an insult but they are now sought-after. Sunny climes in Southern Europe, the Caribbean, the beached fringes of Asia send rival siren calls to them, fluttering their new digital nomad visas for attention. (Them? Maybe they are us too — the grounded who’ve forgotten we don’t have to live like this.)
The proposition is simple: you, your laptop, your Northern European or US pay cheque, the lightest of loads for the journey and the promise of beaches, cafés, fast internet and beautiful new people. Who would want to be a citizen of somewhere, treading the same streets each day, the burdens of your home nation on your shoulders, when this awaits you?
In recent years, it was the super-rich who had an easy ticket into European countries through golden visas, though their reputation has been tarnished by Russian bling. But the digital nomad is conceptually cleaner — young, free and full of idealism and potential.
Portugal boomed off the back of the D7 visa, introduced in 2007 for passive-income earners. It is introducing a new digital nomad visa for non-EU citizens, as is Spain, traditionally a little more sceptical of the outsider. Croatia, Greece and Malta all have them up and running. Malaysia wants you too, particularly if you work in IT and digital content creation. Bermuda’s scheme has a chirpy slogan, “Work from Bermuda”.
Of course not everything works out that way. Some have suggested that Indonesia might be a perfect place to hide out if you’re running a crypto scam — it doesn’t extradite to the US. After the FTX collapse, how’s the Bahamas’ reputation doing?
Clarke had foreseen the possibilities of freedom, but perhaps not that it would be women as much as men doing business from abroad, nor the further social changes of the past 50 years. Dress codes have evolved so you don’t have to wear a collar and tie; we don’t start families until later in life; and mortgages in richer countries are beyond the reach of average salaries. Portugal’s new visa scheme asks for a salary of €2,800 a month. That would pay the rent in London but maybe one would like to eat too.
Nor will Clarke have spotted the power of envy, of an upstart start-up generation showing off on Zoom to the worn-down office workers left behind. The draw of Bali is as much about being “elsewhere” as “nowhere”.
Though that “elsewhere” also has reason to be suspicious. Residents complain that the nomads force up rents and fragment communities and, in some cases, behave disrespectfully (the bars near the temples of Bali have turned into an all-night party zone).
The locals will also know that outsiders have been given an advantage: digital nomads are playing a game of arbitrage. Their wages are predicated on the original place of work and, in some cases, gain a favourable tax status. The citizen of somewhere cannot do that. Too much has been invested, the roots go too deep to just up and move.
There’s long been suspicion between the two sides. Early nomads — the Scythians, the Huns — were considered barbarians by settlers, who had walled themselves into a place and installed systems: first irrigation, then taxes.
Pastoral nomads were beholden to little other than the flight of birds, the appetites of sheep and the curvature of the earth. The modern ones map on to the course of the undersea internet cables. Nomadlist, a website for travellers, ranks destinations by broadband speed. Lisbon and Canggu in Bali are at the top, while Mexico City and Timișoara, Romania — where tech is booming — make the top 10.
But key to this surge in visa offers is the exchange. The modern nomads arrive with caravans loaded with skills and knowledge. They leaven the local economies with their overseas money and make peripheral places important.
Still, intrinsic to the deal is what is on offer to them. You can, as Clarke predicted, do business from anywhere but that’s not the point: the digital nomad is trading those things for the experience of real life again, somewhere interesting, somewhere new — the one thing they cannot get from sitting on a laptop.
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