Drifting States: Inside the Cultivated Chaos of Digital Nomadism

A new Slack message sent from an apartment in Split, answered from a sunlit café in Oaxaca, discussed over a late dinner in Chiang Mai. The reply pings through muted time zones, flitting like a migrating bird. This is not business as usual, but something quieter, looser, yet no less insistent: the rhythm of the digital nomad.

In a world increasingly defined by fragmentation, the digital nomad embodies both the escape and the entanglement. Their movement across borders, three new locales a year, at minimum, is less holiday than choreography. A dance not just of bodies but of bandwidth, bureaucracies and belonging. They’re the protagonists of a peculiar new era, where identity is as fluid as the VPNs that cloak their IP addresses. And like all archetypes, the truth is murkier, and more fascinating, than the myth.

Dave Cook has spent years gently unpicking the embroidery of this lifestyle. A cultural anthropologist with a PhD from UCL and a Visiting Fellowship at Chiang Mai University, Cook has followed nomads through airport lounges and co-living spaces, through Slack channels and silent retreats. His research doesn’t read like the breathless travel blog of a burnt-out banker gone rogue. Instead, it hums with nuance, asking not just where people go, but what they’re leaving behind, and what they hope to become.

“I’m interested in how people navigate work and life boundaries,” Cook says, “but also in how this lifestyle reshapes personhood, even citizenship.”

To some, the term “digital nomad” evokes a stereotype: a single man with a MacBook in Bali, sipping a turmeric latte while optimising SEO. But Cook’s work quickly deconstructs this. The digital nomad is not a singular figure. They are freelancers, remote employees, start-up founders, tech consultants, NGO workers. Some drift indefinitely, others cycle between familiar hubs like Lisbon, Tbilisi, and Medellín like migratory animals with curated Instagrams.

What unites them is autonomy over location and frequency of movement. But what differentiates them, Cook finds, is their relationship to infrastructure, visible and invisible. Some have strong passports and sturdy safety nets. Others navigate expired visas, frozen bank accounts, or internet blackouts with quiet anxiety. One African nomad he interviewed recalled being blocked from entering Europe post-pandemic: “The embassies said it was closed for Africans,” he told Cook. “Recently, the US Embassy said they didn’t have any appointments until 2024.”

This isn’t quite the utopia often painted in think pieces. There’s a darker undercurrent to the dream. The freedom to roam, it turns out, isn’t evenly distributed.

Still, for many, the appeal is magnetic. By 2035, Cook notes, there may be as many as one billion digital nomads. A number that, while speculative, hints at something profound: a global longing not just for mobility, but for reinvention. The pandemic acted as a crucible, boiling down what we want from work, and where we’re willing to be to get it. For some, that means a corner office. For others, it means a hammock and a hotspot.

Cook is careful not to romanticise. “There’s a freedom trap,” he warns, citing research that shows how digital nomads often recreate the same workaholic structures they fled. Without the architecture of the office, boundaries collapse. Days elongate. Evenings blur. In trying to escape the office, some rebuild it, only now it lives in their backpacks.

There’s also the question of community. Many nomads find themselves tethered to places not by culture, but by Wi-Fi speed and visa conditions. Chiang Mai, for instance, became a hub not for its temples or street food (though those help), but for its reliable internet and low cost of living. The result is a kind of “placeless place,” a city transformed into a soft-focus backdrop for remote calls and productivity sprints.

Yet within these transitory bubbles, new forms of belonging emerge. Cook observed how nomads form temporary kinships: yoga classes at dawn, coworking brunches at noon, language exchanges over craft beer. It’s not deep community, perhaps, but it is functional, even nourishing. Friendships formed in one city often resume in another, months later, like characters reappearing in a novel.

Underlying all of this is a tension: between sovereignty and fluidity, between the state and the self. As more countries roll out remote-work visas (Croatia, Estonia, Barbados, to name a few) the old assumptions about citizenship begin to fray. If your income is remote, your taxes move with you. If your community is digital, your home can be modular. For governments, this poses both a challenge and an opportunity. For individuals, it’s something more existential.

Cook’s research touches on this, too. “Some nomads begin to question the very concept of the nation-state,” he notes. “There’s a growing appetite for supranational identity, being a global citizen not just in theory, but in practice.”

It’s a seductive notion. But it also sidesteps some hard truths: privilege, access, the quiet hierarchies of passports and currencies. The dream of a borderless life, Cook suggests, often rests on very bordered realities.

And yet, the digital nomad isn’t going away. If anything, they’re multiplying, quietly reshaping our expectations around work, identity and place. Not with bombast, but with gentle persistence, the low hum of a laptop in a faraway café, the flicker of a Slack notification from another time zone.

Perhaps the true power of this movement lies not in its ability to escape, but to reimagine. Not to reject structure, but to rebuild it on gentler terms. As Cook writes in one of his essays: “The future of work isn’t just remote, it’s relational.”

In the end, maybe that’s the point. Not freedom in the abstract, but the freedom to choose what we hold close, and what we let go of. The freedom to stay. The freedom to move. The freedom to log off.