Neonomad
= refers, very generally, to people who take their work with them [1]
URL = http://neo-nomad.net/
Description
Collated by Thomas Jankowski:
"The way it has been used thus far refers, very generally, to people who take their work with them. In America, this usually applies to the vast amount of web 2.0 startup execs and other self-employed tech workers roaming around in the Bay area. They are sometimes referred to as the Starbucks society, since that is the preferred meeting place of the neo-nomads.
Bill Thompson: "the neo-nomad mentality ... is the pattern of working life that defines a nomad, with no office, colleagues who are largely engaged with online and often a number of overlapping projects to be juggled and managed at the same time”.
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6467395.stm)
Yasmine Abbas: "“digitally geared people on the move”. TJ: That’s even better in a way, since the focus has been shifted to the interface, the design, and the socio-cultural aspects of this novelty."
([2])
Discussion
Cruising along the virtual landscape while admiring the physical landscapes outside is becoming a unified and realistic experience.
Thomas Jankowski:
"What I would like to see is a further expansion of this definition that would focus on the mobility of a true nomad. Bedouins never felt at ease staying in one place for too long… neither do some of the neo-nomads. To be able to travel extensively and work while on the road would be ideal, but that is still difficult to accomplish these days. Wi-fi access is becoming almost common-place in the U.S. and Canada, but even in West Europe it is at best spotty, especially outside of the major commercial centres. The fact that there’s a multitude of incompatible wi-fi providers and oftentimes one needs to subscribe to a number of various services does not help. I once paid over $100 in one day for just under four hours of Internet use at four different airports. Traveling with more than one laptop because of proprietary security concerns or machine-assigned VPN accounts has also reduced my mobility at times.
Nonetheless, this too is starting to change. WiMax sounds promising as an alternative to other forms of broadband; so does the recently investigated idea of direct satellite access without having to route the signal through terrestrial stations. For now, GPRS and 3G networks offer ‘anytime/anywhere’ access in quite impressive remote places.
Finally, the ways to bypass the shortcomings of traditional security practices (without limiting their effectiveness), are starting to increase as well. Virtualization, using VMWare or Microsoft Virtual PC, is probably the easiest way of accomplishing this step. Almost any setup, be it a laptop, a desktop, or even a server, can be packaged into a virtual image and then redeployed on a machine of one’s choice without disrupting the host system. In effect, my protected company laptop can be made to run “inside” of my own laptop. Advanced IT skills are not required for this, nor is a high-end laptop. My $700 light Acer, with a memory upgrade to 2GB and a slightly faster hard drive can handle 3-4 virtual machines running on top of my usual interface.
Couple all of the above with user-provided wi-fi access points, a will to see some of this world, and some motivation, and the neo-nomads’ playground increases exponentially."
([3])
Interview
Eric Hunting, interviewed by Jim Dobson:
* "Who are the new nomads? Are they influenced by the pandemic or economy?
“Increasingly, many are economic in basis, with roots in trends that began with the 2008 crash, the runaway gentrification in many cities in the world, the rise of the gig economy, and more generally the rise of a ‘precariat’; a social class chronically suffering from economic uncertainty with the loss of traditional job security and benefits, collapsing retirement assets, and social service safety nets. This is particularly the case in the US and also relates to the rise in popularity of the Tiny House. While there are similarities to the situation of the previously typical economic migrants coming from poorer nations, this is a largely domestic population recently ejected from middle-class status, and children of the middle-class denied the same Post-War ‘middle-class deal’ their parents enjoyed.”
“But, until recently, the trend in neo-nomadism was more typically motivated by what is called Existential Nomadism, a desire for authenticity in life through the experience of a perpetual foreigner, stranger, or traveler, freely sampling the cultures and lifestyles in different places. This was enabled by emerging telecommunications technology as well as Internet-based business services, which facilitated remote work and even entrepreneurship as well as a lean lifestyle, though it has tended to still be limited to creatives and software engineers. Recently, we have seen the emergence of co-work and co-habitation accommodations tailored to this community. One of the key influences of this trend was a series of ’Technomads’ who were computer and communications enthusiasts experimenting with the bleeding edge of mobile telecommunications technology even before the advent of the Internet. Most famous of these was Steven K. Roberts, who, in the 1980s, gained notoriety for his creation of the Winnebiko, a solar-powered recumbent bicycle equipped with solar power, early personal computers, and a vast array of communications gear. He inspired many cycling nomads and has since gone on to further push the edge in this technology with various other vehicles.”
“Relating to this Existential Nomadism, as well as the Maker Movement, is the rise in so-called ‘social entrepreneurs’; young but somewhat accomplished people who have adopted a nomadic lifestyle and the leverage of Internet business services, open-source tech, and new independent production tech, to facilitate serial entrepreneurship as a form of social activism, particularly through micro-ventures in the developing world. Unfortunately, this has also been misappropriated by some children of the wealthy who like to think of themselves as nomadic entrepreneurs and have created a market for what is called ‘luxury co-working centers’ in exotic tourist locations… There has also been a long trend of RV nomadism as a model for retirement based on the appeal of a certain special traveling community of retirees, as exemplified by the Airstream Clubs. Such folk is often referred to as ’snowbirds,’ but this is less about merely dodging the worst of seasonal weather and more about rediscovering community and spreading out one’s retirement years in the periodic proximity of dispersed children who, themselves, lack such freedom of movement thanks to a lack of vacation time.”
“Still nascent but emerging is the trend in urban nomadism as a kind of activism. (which relates to the idea of social entrepreneurship) The term may have first been coined by designer/futurist Ken Isaacs, who, in the 1970s, suggested the future emergence of a seasonally nomadic youth culture based on the repurposing and adaptive reuse of the urban detritus in the wake of the slow collapse of Industrial Age. This was loosely related to his concept of ‘mobilism’; lean living combined with seasonal migration for the sake of lowering one’s fossil-fuel energy footprint. Urban Nomads were suggested to be seasonal migrants for similar reasons but focused on exploiting, like hunter-gatherers, urban areas with their anticipated wealth of abandoned architecture and industrial cast-offs. This was the inspiration for what came to be called Nomadic Furniture, as documented in the book series of that name by James Hennessey and Victor Papanek, inspiring the trend of ‘hippy furniture’ based on recycled industrial cast-offs.”
“The concept was later re-imagined by Futurists and SciFi writers Alex Steffan and Cory Doctorow when they introduced a concept called The Outquisition. Likewise anticipating the collapse of the Industrial Age and its infrastructures under the pressures of Global Warming impacts, they imagined a movement emerging from the ‘cloisters’ of eco-villages, communes, Hackerspaces, and Makerspaces to propagate the technologies of a Post-Industrial culture through intervention in urban areas left in crisis by infrastructure failure and the abandonment of corporate, financial, and state interests. (ie. Flint MI…) And so these nomadic bands of eco-tech McGuyvers would converge on these communities in crisis in the hopes of saving them through the introduction of local resilience technologies; solar and wind energy, the new digital production machines, urban farming, and hydroponics, alternative economics systems, etc. In the wake of the Occupy movement, a number of interventionist groups have emerged to engage in just this sort of intervention, some referring to themselves as Urban Nomads and informing the work of folks like Winfried Baumann. This has also been an influence for the currently emergent Solarpunk aesthetic movement, which seeks to cultivate progressive green futurism.”
* Do you envision more remote nomads or more urban connected nomads within a specific community?
“While there are a certain number of neo-nomads looking for isolated refuge in deep immersion with the wilderness (and exploiting policies for long-term stays in national parks), in most cases, there is a practical need for community and the networks of mutual aid and business networking that can potentially afford. However, this is no longer dependent on proximity in the Internet era, and the contemporary nomad tends to be much more virtually interconnected, members of quite vast online communities that are globally dispersed. There have been some efforts to create more physical nexuses of mutual aid with concepts like ‘Nomadbases’; non-profit, communally supported, alternatives to the co-working/co-habitation ‘hotels’ that are emerging today. A colleague Dante-Gabryell Monson, who has spent some time as a nomad, has worked in this area. Now that some businesspeople have woken up to the existence of a nomad market, we are likely to see more kinds of accommodations devised to suit and exploit that.”
More Information
The Neo-nomad blog from Yasmine Abbas at http://neo-nomad.net/