digital nomadology
From this NYT magazine piece by Kyle Chayka:
A surprising thing about Haid [the CEO of Roam, a hostel startup] is the range of leftist flourishes he adds to any discussion, referencing everything from radical economists and the British filmmaker Adam Curtis to Verso Books and the state of “late capitalism.” In his mouth, they seemed less a coherent politics than a business plan, a means of predicting and profiting from the incipient future. Traditional careers began disintegrating after the financial crisis, Haid theorized, and soon advances in A.I. and robotics will cause further disruption. “There is not necessarily work there for everyone,” he said. If jobs are no longer static or stable, then the notion of a permanent home must also be rethought. Nomadism, Haid argued, allows the discontented or disenfranchised to design new, sustainable lifestyles in the global marketplace. It’s a means of letting human capital find the path of least resistance, wherever it may be.
I was surprised A Thousand Plateauswasn’t mentioned, given that it is all about lines of flight and escapes from territoriality and that sort of thing and has 90 or so pages about literal nomads. This passage is also a perfect illustration of how strategies for escaping the “system” often end up recapitulating it. Digitality here doesn’t produce opportunities to live in new or alternative ways so much as it grids up and assimilates all possible space-time, eradicating the “outside” in which a nomadic way of life (set in opposition to the established order) could occur.
Digitization is a system of capture — a way of homogenizing experience and singularities into commensurate measures, into numbers — it’s just surprising how effectively it is sold as a kind of inherent freedom.