Recently, we have seen the emergence of location-independent remote workers, or digital nomads, who are defined by both their untethered connection to a fixed global city office location and their frequent international lifestyle mobility. In this article, I explore the repercussions of digital nomad labor mobility on the current spatial organization of global capitalism, reading this emerging trend in labor mobility and employment within the framework of Saskia Sassen's global cities. Global cities are defined as the key nodal points where agglomeration economies of producer services firms that direct global production have sited and concentrated. Agglomeration economies are comprised of both firms and producer services labor, with cities acting as the attendant infrastructures that support both these specific types of capital and labor. With the continued development of communication and transportation technologies, even producer services labor has begun to be casualized and digitized, resulting in the remoting of these jobs. Those who embrace mobility and remote work to pursue stable livelihoods and a life outside of work, digital nomads, become the agglomeration economy unbundled, their mobility holding the potential to re-site elsewhere and shift the current global division of labor. To chart these new trajectories of digital nomad labor mobility, I created a social network graph collecting data from nomadlist.com, a social networking site for digital nomads where users chart their travel between cities, identifying what cities are being connected through their mobility. The network model covers 737 total cities around the world and reveals the emergence of two broad circuits of mobility becoming dominant amongst digital nomads: movement to the global city and away from it to offbeat cities. I conclude by hypothesizing the repercussions that the global distribution of this workforce holds for the global division of labor more broadly.
Mots clés : digital nomads|global cities|agglomeration economies|social networks|mobility
A105403SJ