![]() ![]() The concept of creating an internet country was dreamt up during a company hackathon. Our vision is to upload the nation state to the cloud.” To Razavi, membership of a nation state “offers incredibly poor value … The aspects that are really stuck in the past include citizenship, passports and tax. Having consigned the office to the trash, it makes sense that the nation state is the next institution that digital nomads want to recycle. “ Zoom towns” are another trend, with towns such as Augusta, Maine in the US offering financial sweeteners to attract remote workers. Countries such as Barbados, Estonia and Portugal started issuing remote work visas to encourage geographically flexible employees to relocate to their territories. Workplace norms toppled like dominos: the office, in-person meetings and the daily commute fell first. But the pandemic quickly proved remote work was possible for many more people. ![]() YOUTUBE BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM FULLYet now, the remote working revolution triggered by the pandemic has given this borderless lifestyle “project” a new impetus.īefore COVID struck, 12% of workers in the US worked remotely full time, and 5% in the UK. ![]() Pre-pandemic, the popular stereotype was of a carefree millennial who had escaped the daily grind to travel the world without hindrance, working on a laptop in some far-flung beach cafe with their only limitation being the quality of the wifi.Īs long ago as 2015, I was hearing recurring complaints from these nomads about the ideological and practical frictions that nation states pose – it just hadn’t organised itself into a movement yet.įor a while, COVID-19 appeared to put the brakes on the nomadic dream, as most were forced to head home to western countries and the safety net of healthcare systems. “We’re all enrolled into this automatic subscription based on the coincidence of our birthplace or our heritage, and that really doesn’t work in the 21st century.” Freedom for everyone?Īs an anthropologist, I have been chronicling the digital nomad lifestyle for the past seven years. Born in Britain to an Iranian immigrant, Razavi sees herself as untethered and borderless, and likens national citizenship and tax to a “subscription” that is very hard to cancel. Razavi is the executive director of Plumia, a self-proclaimed “moonshot mission” to build an internet country for digital nomads. “The nation state is outdated – it’s based on 19th-century thinking, and we aim to upend all of that,” Lauren Razavi tells me over Zoom from a bustling co-working space. In one case, a new “virtual” country is already in development. It is the latest in a flurry of utopian visions by self-styled digital visionaries, crypto believers and web 3.0 evangelists who are lining up to declare the death of the traditional concept of countries and nationhood. YOUTUBE BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM HOW TOIn June 2022 Balaji Srinivasan, former chief technology officer of the Coinbase cryptocurrency exchange, published an ebook entitled The Network State: How To Start a New Country. The people are spread around the world in clusters of varying size, but their hearts are in one place. ![]() A ‘network state’ is ideologically aligned but geographically decentralised. ![]()
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