As a subset of remote work, digital nomadism crosses jurisdictions and generates fears that it unfairly escapes regulation and taxation. Alongside other circuits of an emerging world society, it fails to fit neatly into the longstanding template of relatively self-contained nation-states. Most efforts to address this new phenomenon merely aim to tweak tax treaties and other rules, so as better to slot mobile individuals back into existing schemes of regulation and redistribution. But digital nomadism suggests a more fundamental need to rethink the entire modern framework of social citizenship. Social citizenship bundles together immobile populations, territorial sovereignty, and the state as the main clearinghouse of justice and solidarity. In mapping out an alternative, this article draws on resources in political thought dealing with a plurality of spheres of life. Unbundling the strictly territorial functions of the state from other functions of risk-sharing and solidarity would better correspond to the new and varied scales of cross-border living.
Policy Implications
- Digital nomads' rights and obligations should be unbundled so they are no longer based mainly on one or another national jurisdiction winning out.
- The costs of public order and public goods can be calibrated directly to physical presence through sales taxes and day counts.
- International agreements should expand portable membership in schemes of social protection, based on long-term choice by the nomadic so they neither fall through the cracks nor escape all obligations.
- Over time, room should grow for mutualist forms of social insurance to compete across borders in a common global space, detached from territory. Analogously to free trade and national treatment of investors, states should create the policy space for them to flourish.
- As the start of a grander experiment in moving redistribution and solidarity beyond the nation-state, revenue from digital nomads could be directed toward the neediest globally or to the neediest of transnational migrants. Some choice about where to direct individual contributions to civil society anywhere in the world could also better reflect cosmopolitan moral responsibility, in which commitments may pull in multiple directions at once.
Photo by Samer Daboul