Digital Nomad

The phrase digital nomad first appeared as the title of a 1997 book by Tsugio Makimoto, a former executive at Hitachi's semiconductor division, and David Manners, an editor at the British trade journal Electronics Weekly.¹ The book predicted that advances in portable computing and telecommunications would allow people to work from anywhere, breaking the link between employment and a fixed location.

At the time of publication, Wi-Fi had not yet been standardized, smartphones did not exist, and fewer than two percent of the global population used the internet.

The concept remained largely theoretical for over a decade. What Makimoto and Manners described as a future possibility became a practical reality only after the convergence of broadband internet, cloud computing, and the smartphone revolution of the late 2000s.²

By 2023, an estimated 35 million people worldwide identified as digital nomads, according to research from MBO Partners.³ Countries including Portugal, Estonia, and Croatia had created dedicated digital nomad visas to attract remote workers and their spending.

35 million, Estimated number of people worldwide who identified as digital nomads by 2023.

The rise of the digital nomad forced legal and institutional systems to confront a category of worker they were not designed for. Tax residency rules, labor protections, and healthcare systems all assumed a fixed relationship between a worker and a jurisdiction.⁴ A person paying rent in Lisbon while employed by a company in San Francisco fit neatly into none of these frameworks.

Makimoto died in 2023 at the age of eighty-seven. The world he had predicted, in which location and labor were decoupled, had arrived roughly on schedule.⁵

Timeline

• 1997, Tsugio Makimoto and David Manners publish Digital Nomad, predicting location-independent work.
• 2007, The iPhone launches, accelerating the mobile infrastructure that digital nomadism requires.
• 2020, The pandemic normalizes remote work, pushing digital nomad numbers sharply upward.
• 2023, An estimated 35 million people worldwide identify as digital nomads.

Endnotes

1. Tsugio Makimoto and David Manners, Digital Nomad (Chichester: Wiley, 1997).
2. Dave Cook, "The Freedom Trap: Digital Nomads and the Use of Disciplining Practices to Manage Work/Leisure Boundaries," Information Technology and Tourism 22, no. 3 (2020).
3. MBO Partners, State of Independence in America report, 2023.
4. OECD, Tax Challenges Arising from the Digitalisation of the Economy (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2020).
5. "Tsugio Makimoto," obituary references, 2023.