Digital Nomad 2.0: The European grand tour

There was always one person you knew who had managed to actually do this digital nomad thing. They were probably a designer, a little eccentric perhaps but admirable in their commitment to making an ‘alternative’ lifestyle work, because that’s what it always was — alternative, like the people who quit the city and go and run a farm in the countryside.

These brave souls were always envied, standard fodder for Sunday magazines, because they seem to have somehow transcended modern living — keeping everything functioning but bringing back age-old aspirations that seemed incompatible with modern life: adventure, nature, a slower pace. It’s deeply appealing to many — waking up with the bright dawn looking over your own rolling fields of farmland in Devon, who wouldn’t want that?

But the intrigue in part was also there because it was rare, and it was rare because it was very hard to actually make it work. Its telling how much of the coverage of these lifestyles are focussed around the question of ‘how’. If you wanted to be a real digital nomad, you had to be a freelancer basically, which entailed building out your own client base and reputation over many years, with enough depth in your network to cope if one or two clients didn’t need you anymore. This played to slightly older people who’d had time to build out these career ‘assets’; but of course as you get older your appetite for dropping everything and winging it to Goa drops — or at least it does on the aggregate population level as people settle down.

Covid, as with so many things, has flung these patterns right up in the air. The big change is that you can be a digital nomad and be employed at a blue chip tech company — Facebook, Twitter, Stripe, Spotify, Microsoft have all announced permanent remote work policies — or perhaps at a high-growth tech start-up like Hopin, which has been 100% remote from day one.

This completely changes the equation — you have a regular pay cheque secured and yet you are untethered from location all of a sudden. What happens now? We’ve seen flows of migration across the USA away from Silicon Valley and towards more liveable climes like Austin, Miami and Seattle, but the more interesting angle is European digital nomadism. If you are twenty-something, working for Netflix in Amsterdam, why would you not spend a few months working from Berlin? Or London, Paris or Copenhagen? These great European cities are now accessible for you to try out for a few months, who would’t be tempted?

This could unleash a new wave of intra-European tech worker digital nomadism, where it becomes commonplace to spend maybe a year or two hopping around various great cities for a couple of months at a time. A 21st century version of the Grand Tour, popular with upper-class European men in the 17th and 18th centuries. There is even a ‘self-advertising’ viral dynamic — you log onto a team zoom call one morning and see your co-worker with salty hair fresh from surfing in the Lisbon bay. Now you are tempted. It could catch, the thought is unavoidable — why am I not doing that?

There are a couple of ways this could manifest commercially. One would be the emergence of co-living/co-working institutions across the great cities of Europe; like a Soho House for living. Imagine paying a fixed monthly membership fee, say €1,500, which would give you access to live and work from a network of beautifully designed, trendy co-work / live spaces dotted all over Europe. You can live in Vienna for a couple of weeks, go to Edinburgh for a month, down to Madrid as the weather gets colder. You don’t need to think about internet, or bills, or any of that, and you would meet new people at each place you went to, the local staff could help you discover the secrets of your new host city quickly.

It would be an incredible lifestyle — and perhaps the fastest way to get to know a new city properly, you don’t need to worry about finding a job or a flat, and you can lean on the knowledge of everybody else in the community. One wonders what the tech companies would make of all this — it is unlikely this was their intention when they launched remote work policies, designed in a time of shelter-in-place. How happy would Facebook or Microsoft be if you were working all day in a co-working space alongside employees from other tech companies? Is that secure from a data protection point of view? What about how important insider company know-how? That is definitely an issue that has the potential to hobble such a model.

An alternative model would make more sense for people who already owned or had long leases on apartments — perhaps a marginally older clientele. This would be a peer-to-peer house swap platform, specifically designed for people with city-centre apartments in Europe working in the tech industry. Models like this have existed for a long time in other contexts, like holiday home house swaps, and there is no reason it couldn’t work here to.

You would list your apartment in Rome, for a specified amount of time, and seek a match on the platform who wanted to do the opposite. You’d broker a deal through the platform and you’d be away, spend 3 months living in each others’ apartments and the deal comes to an end. This doesn’t have quite the romance of the co-living model, the spontaneity, the thrill of ‘where shall we go next week?’, but it is more pragmatic. Many European cities have rent controls meaning people wait years to get apartments, they are not going to want to give that up easily; likewise for people who own an apartment. But secondly it would just be much cheaper than a co-working arrangement, there’s no need to support the building and running of these fancy co-living spaces in prime locations. You basically just keep paying the rent and bills on your apartment, making it cost neutral (now you really are struggling for reasons not to do it!).

There are snags that could scupper all this — tax arrangements for people just flitting all over Europe is one; the attitude of the big tech companies is another. But the direction of travel is there, we will come out of covid, buoyant with pent-up energy to explore and live fuller lives, Brexit will iron itself out, and this age old impulse to experience new places could be given a very modern twist by taking to its logical extreme the network of internet cables now criss-crossing every inch of the continent.