Digital nomadism and the challenge to social citizenship

Abstract

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.