Popular entrepreneurial literature praises the rise of digital nomads (DN) as a lifestyle of freedom, providing the flexibility to reconcile productivity with leisure travel. DNs’ mobility is tourism-induced, either because people return to live or reside temporarily in places they have previously visited as tourists or because their work practices are driven and influenced by tourism destinations' material landscape and infrastructure. As a way of living, digital nomadism blurs the boundary between consumption and production that has been traditionally used to differentiate leisure-oriented relocations (such as tourism and retirement migration) from labour migration. By questioning the usefulness of such a binary distinction between mobility and migration, this presentation asks whether digital nomads’ choice to relocate continually hinges more on a free choice or rather on a creative, albeit opportunistic way to harness unequal transnational power geometries to navigate the precarity of the labour market and the fading social welfare protections of developed countries. Based on ethnographic evidence on DNs’ mobility strategies, the study pays attention to the structural forces and mobility regimes that constrain and facilitate their movement, highlighting the relevance of geographic arbitrage as a way to take advantage of an income generated in higher-cost countries by scaling down day-to-day-expenses in countries with reduced costs of living. The analysis will specifically consider the contingent articulations between neoliberalism and postcoloniality and how they shape the imaginings and pursuits of DNs’ lifestyle and destination choices.
Mots clés : Digital Nomads|Geographic arbitrage|Neoliberalism|Postcoloniality|Lifestyle migrations
A103288MF