Alter-Nomad: Critique of Digital Nomadism

Digital nomadism is trendy. A digital nomad is an individual who can work anywhere. Such lifestyle brings many opportunities for personal growth: increased purchasing power, improved living conditions, better work/life balance… remote work is a privilege more and more people will access in the near future. Location-independence usually comes with time independence. Your schedule is flexible. It can be bent to accommodate your timezone, or to fit your most productive hours of the day. At a fundamental level, digital nomadism should be motivated by an attraction for more independence to feed personal growth. Not an end-goal, but a different way to exist. Seduced by vlogs and Instagram accounts depicting nomadism as the new Eldorado, many want to go remote. Unfortunately, the life of a digital nomad is not that simple to figure out.

The challenge of digital nomadism is not whether or not it’s accessible or inclusive, it’s sustainability. The inclusiveness of mobility-as-a-lifestyle will grow with digitalization. It’s only a matter of time. Sustainability, however, is an ongoing problematic we need to tackle now. Nomadism is mobility, and mobility has consequences at both individual and global levels.

When I look at digital nomadism as a movement, I do not see the heir of the nomadic spirit but regular travelers looking for some excitement. As we will see later on, this behavior is harmful to others and to themselves. I tend to be one of those digital nomads. yet we need to become better travelers if we want to make it a sustainable lifestyle.

Alter-nomadism consists in taking the best parts of historical nomadism and sedentism. I am aware I can be accused of idealizing historical nomadism. Those accusations of idealization don’t date from the New Age counter-culture. Whether it is in the “Persian Letters” by Montesquieu, “the Confessions” by Rousseau, “l’Ingénu” by Voltaire or in the “Supplement to Bougainville’s voyage” by Diderot, all considered the benefits of more “primitive” cultures. It wasn’t idealization in my opinion, but merely pointing toward possibilities offered by different societies. The nomadism of the first peoples can be more happy to live than the sedentary societies of Europe. I critique sedentism a lot in this book, but it doesn’t mean one lifestyle is better than the other.