Global Nomads and Extreme Mobilities by Päivi Kannisto

Author:Päivi Kannisto [Kannisto, Päivi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472454997
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2015-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

In or Out

Max (39) works in IT and has the ability to work from anywhere. Every six months to a year he picks a new city somewhere in the world he is interested in, gets an apartment and lives there. ‘I get a new bakery, a new place to do my laundry, and a new set of people to hang out’, he describes. A new place is not a big deal for him. There is almost zero interruption in his work, and his largest challenge is organising high-speed internet in the apartment.

Post-9/11 made Max change his lifestyle. He realised he no longer wanted to live in the United States. ‘What bothered me was the kind of police state that the US turned into. Suddenly they were wanting to search my bags in the subway, and every time you would get into an elevator, there would be a message to be afraid. I didn’t feel comfortable any more’.

Max had been successful in the things that Americans consider successful, but he found it a hollow victory. He started to look for something more interesting and came up with travelling and the challenge of languages. He was not a novice when he left. When he was 16, he hitch-hiked around the United States and met a friend in Hawaii who got him hooked on the idea of going abroad. One year later Max was in Europe hitch-hiking from town to town. He lived for a year in Bavaria, Germany, earning his living as a dishwasher, bartender, and waiter.

When Max returned to the US, he started studying philosophy but ended up getting hired by a dot.com company. He lived nine years in Manhattan, wrote some patents for speech recognition technology, played a lot of a computer game called Everquest, and had a couple of love affairs.

Max still likes big cities that have a lot of activity going on to keep him from getting bored. ‘I’ve pretty much got two options’, he says with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes, ‘either living in a place with a huge amount of activity, or go and try find myself in the East and discover my inner source of discomfort and dharma. In the short term, I think I’ll go for the urban solution’.

When travelling, Max has three motivations when choosing a place to stay: food, girls, and a liberal government. ‘I don’t have a great love for people who are telling me how to live, where to live, or what to live’, he explains.

Max considers himself one of the pioneers of digital nomadism. Not being a prisoner of geography, he represents the prototype of an entrepreneur that the information society admires. For nation-states, however, the likes of him are a threat. Having a portable occupation that allows them to earn money without licenses, permits, or a permanent place of business, they are beyond taxation and lawsuits. Even the idling global nomads fall into the same category, because governments consider them tourists who are just passing through.

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