Author’s original preprint draft. Please cite the published version: Fabiola Mancinelli & Jennie Germann Molz (2023) Moving with and against the state: digital nomads and frictional mobility regimes, Mobilities, DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2023.2209825 Moving with and against the state: Digital nomads and frictional mobility regimes Corresponding author: Fabiola Mancinelli, Universitat de Barcelona. fabiolamancinelli@ub.edu. ORCID: 00000001-8142-614X Jennie Germann Molz, College of the Holy Cross. ORCID: 0000-0001-6858-8144 ABSTRACT The mobile lifestyle of digital nomads mingles remote work, international travel, and multilocal living in ways that both submit to and resist state-based mobility regimes. In this article, we examine this apparent paradox by asking how digital nomads move both with the state and against it. Employing the metaphor of ‘friction’, the analytical lens of ‘governmobility’ and ethnographic fieldwork with digital nomads, the article illustrates how nomads leverage state-imposed constraints into creative forms of ‘border artistry’ that allow them to achieve their lifestyle goals in the shadow of the state. At the same time, however, the article suggests that states are also border artists, an argument developed through an analysis of government’s recently established special visa programs. The findings suggest that mobility regimes do not merely determine who can or cannot move, enter, or stay, but rather exercise a kind of governmobility that encourages mobile individuals to discipline themselves according to desirable qualities such as self-sufficiency, consumer citizenship, and depoliticised mobility. In this sense, mobility regimes emerge as the mutual interface between digital nomads’ individual strategies to stay on the move and state’s institutional strategies to codify and commodify their legal status. KEYWORDS digital nomads; mobility regimes; friction; governmobility; neoliberal subjectivity; visa systems; lifestyle mobilities; citizenship Disclosure statement: The authors have no conflicting interests to report Acknowledgements: We wish to thank Caterina Borelli and Olga Hannonen for their generous comments on the early draft of the article. 1 Introduction Over the past several decades, advancements in internet connectivity, access to cheap travel, and new mobile arrangements of work have made the self-fashioning of ‘mobile lives’ (Elliott and Urry 2010) both desirable and possible. This is particularly evident in the rise of digital nomads, remote professionals who travel alone or with their families and engage in locationindependent work online while abroad or on the road. Digital nomads epitomize a kind of neoliberal subject who carves out individualistic exit strategies to cope with labor precarity, growing inequalities, and eroded welfare in affluent industrialised countries. For instance, they use the power of their passports to enjoy apparently seamless transnational travel and choose destinations where they can maximise the purchasing power of income earned in strong currency, tactics they frame as expressions of individual free choice. Through such strategies of self-conduct, digital nomads navigate economic and power structures to their advantage and create a good life for themselves. We argue, however, that if digital nomads can be understood as neoliberal subjects, they are not alone. Nation-states also adopt entrepreneurial and utility-maximizing policies, creating special visa programmes to attract a high-quality niche of consumers. State mobility policies divide mobile subjects into desired/undesirable migrants, establishing hierarchies based on national belonging, presumed productivity, and economic criteria. Codifying such categories through new visa programs, mobility regimes are not merely dictating who can move, enter, or stay for a while in a particular country, but rather exercising a kind of governmobility (Baerenholdt 2013) that encourages mobile individuals to govern and discipline themselves according to desirable qualities such as self-sufficiency, consumer citizenship, and depoliticised mobility. 2 Hence, this article further pushes the argument around neoliberal subjectivity by examining the interplay between digital nomads and mobility regimes. Digital nomads’ pursuit of unfettered global mobility and explicit rejection of statist ideologies rubs up against their submission to state-based immigration regulations. The result is that their mobile lives are characterized by friction, not by smooth or seamless mobility. Existing ethnographic research has emphasised this paradox of constrained freedom as a defining feature of nomadic lifestyles (Kannisto 2016; Thompson 2018, 2019; Cook 2022). In this article, we frame the paradox as nomads moving both with and against the state. In particular, we ask how this paradox plays out within the mobility regimes that make it more or less possible for these contemporary nomads to travel to their heart's content. We do so by looking at the connections between digital nomads’ lifestyle and the emergence of the so-called “digital nomads” visas. By simultaneously interrogating the strategies by which digital nomads attempt to become free, self-governing subjects alongside state-imposed constraints and how nation-states seek to anchor the movement of these relatively privileged mobile subjects, we hope to shed new light on how mobility regimes operate, not necessarily as a fixed apparatus of state control but as a frictional interface through which nomadic subjectivities and state power are co-constituted. We thus aim to offer a more complex and nuanced conceptualization of mobility regimes as an effect of individual and institutional interactions, rather than as pre-existing mechanisms or infrastructures. The article starts with a review of our theoretical framework, where we define the concepts of digital nomadism and mobility regimes and discuss the concepts of governmobility, ‘border artistry’, friction and discordant privilege that inform our analysis of digital nomads’ entanglements with the state. The next section presents our methods, which are based on longterm ethnographic observations and a variety of primary and secondary sources. The core of the article consists of two ethnographic sections that analyse the individual and institutional 3 strategies nomads and states, respectively, deploy to maximise friction to their own advantage. This then leads to a final discussion and concluding remarks. Theoretical Framework Digital Nomads and Mobile Lifestyles We enter into this theoretical debate through the mobile figure of the digital nomad. Digital nomadism is a category with fuzzy borders, however, recent efforts to pin down a definition describe digital nomads as untethered professionals who capitalize on advances in digital media and internet connectivity, free-lance and remote work arrangements, and geographic cost-ofliving disparities to live a fulfilling lifestyle of leisure, travel, and independence (Altringer 2015, Hannonen 2020, Ehn, et al. 2022). While digital nomadism has gained popularity, thanks in large part to its circulation as a social media narrative, it is important to note that this supposedly new trend belongs to a broader set of lifestyle mobilities that scholars have been tracing for the past several decades (Cohen, et al. 2015), including retirement migrants (Benson and O’Reilly 2016, 2017, Botterill 2016, Green 2015a,b), long-haul backpackers, neo-nomads, and global nomads (D’Andrea 2016, Kannisto 2016, Cohen, et al., 2015, Kalčić, 2013), flashpackers (Paris 2012, Germann Molz 2015), and location-independent and worldschooling families (Korpela 2014, Mancinelli 2018, Germann Molz 2021). These mobile lifestyle practices are heterogeneous, and there are certainly “significant differences in the lifestyles, identity, work, and blurrings between leisure and work of these subjects” (Green 2022, 2), but they share something in common: they are all part of a growing constituency of individuals who pursue the ‘good life’ under the banner of mobility and free choice. Indeed, a common analytical thread across much of this research describes the protagonists of these mobile lifestyles as neoliberal subjects who equate mobility with freedom, individual choice, and self-actualization (Korpela 2014, Åkerlund and Sandberg 2015, O’Reilly and Benson 2016, Benson and O’Reilly 2018). 4 Michel Foucault outlines neoliberal subjectivity as a dispositif that incentivises the reconfiguration of self-conduct along the lines of rational utility-maximisation (Christiaens 2020). Thus, under neoliberal governmentality, individuals become ‘entrepreneurs of themselves’ who rationally ‘calculate the costs and benefits of each choice they make’ (Christiaens 2020: 2). The choice to become a digital nomad, or to undertake other forms of lifestyle mobility in pursuit of the ‘good life,’ represents precisely the kind of self-reliant and entrepreneurial approach to lifestyle design that make them a desirable niche of travellers for receiving states. Mobility regimes and the art of governmobility According to Glick Schiller and Salazar (2013), regimes of mobility refer to the regulatory and surveillance systems – both at the scale of individual states and at the international level – that control, allow, or prohibit mobility within and across borders. Mobility regimes comprise material infrastructures, administrative institutions, and social and cultural imaginaries that privilege some movements and propel some bodies while prohibiting others from moving or moving with ease. The authors point out that through mobility regimes, ‘states attempt to maintain their authority, not only over mobilities but also over their meaning’ by casting some forms of movement as valuable or glamorous while stigmatising and criminalising others (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013, 195; Gössling and Cohen 2015). Let's consider the question of meaning that Glick Schiller and Salazar raise. We see that lifestyle nomads assert tremendous effort – and with a reasonable degree of success – to frame their mobility as a valiant choice (Mancinelli 2018, Germann Molz 2021). But what looks like an utterly personal decision to live on the move is constrained and enabled by the state and its subsidiary institutions, namely passport and visa-issuing agencies, border and immigration control, currency exchange and banking systems, tax bureaux, health care, pension or social 5 security systems, and in some cases, school systems, education regulations, and child protection services. We argue, however, that while mobility regimes can exert significant authority in determining who moves and who does not, they are not simply fixed or top-down filtering mechanisms, unwavering in their application of laws, meanings, and consequences. For example, the state may respond to the same legal infraction of overstaying a visa by detaining or deporting migrants it deems to be unwelcome while designing altogether new immigration policies for those deemed to be desirable (Khosravi 2007; Gill, et al. 2022). From our perspective, mobile individuals and mobility regimes mutually constitute one another, a power relation that can be better understood by engaging Bærenholdt’s (2013) concept of governmobility. Drawing on Foucault’s notions of biopolitics and governmentality, Bærenholdt introduces the concept of governmobility to think about how states not only control who moves and who doesn't but also govern through mobility. As Bærenholdt argues, ‘mobility may be governed, but it is first and foremost a way of governing, a political technology’ (2013, 20). Rather than seeing the state as a controlling authority, Bærenholdt’s concept of governmobility frames it as a set of institutionalised mobility practices ‘whereby the population governs itself’ through ‘moral self-conduct and a common economy’ (2013, 25). Governmobility is thus the ‘art of government,’ to use Foucault’s (2010) terminology, applied to and through the regulation, surveillance, and self-discipline of people’s embodied mobilities. This art of governmobility is especially evident in performances of ‘border artistry.’ We encounter the concept of border artistry in Päivi Kannisto’s (2016) ethnography of global nomads where she describes how long-term travellers in her study negotiated power with state regimes. Their ‘homeless, stateless, and footloose’ (225) status put them at odds with state-based systems of employment, taxation, insurance, social services, and banking in ways 6 that constrained their aspirations for unfettered mobility. However, from the perspective of the nomads, mobility regimes did not represent a set of rules to be followed, but rather invited clever, and not always entirely legal, bypass manoeuvres. In response to these requirements, Kannisto explains, global nomads engaged various strategies to exploit systemic loopholes, such as creating fake physical addresses or lying about the purpose of their visit to border officers (229). Kannisto calls global nomads ‘opportunists’, because they use these discrepant power strategies, alternately asserting claims to freedom while holding tight to their state-issued passports and any other benefit the state extended them. Following Beck (2007, 697-698), she describes such strategies as ‘examples of “border artistry” by which people deal with, transcend, ignore, overcome, use and build borders’ (Kannisto 2016, 230). We discovered similar strategies in our own research as well. To borrow an insight from Cook (2022, 306), ‘digital nomads view the bonds between citizens and states as unnecessary annoyances; restrictions to be negotiated, hacked, or broken.’ These restrictions produce friction in their mobile lifestyles, yet friction is part of the same mobility regimes that make nomads’ travels and lifestyles possible. The way digital nomads leverage such frictions reveals the interconnectedness between neoliberal subjectivity and its governance. From our perspective, and as we will argue below, governmobility and related tactics of self-governance are forms of ‘border artistry’ practiced both by the state and by digital nomads in order to turn the friction of mobility regimes into an advantage. By recasting society and the state in terms of mobilities and populations rather than geographically bounded territories, the concepts of mobility regimes and the art of governmobility ask us to reconsider the grounds for – and possibilities of – citizenship. In particular, these concepts emphasise that mobility is a resource that is not equally available to everyone, however rather than asking who moves and who doesn’t, we ask how such movements pivot between freedom and friction. 7 Friction and Discordant Privilege We borrow the notion of friction to explain the dialectic that governs global nomads’ mobilities. The metaphor of friction gained traction amid the ‘mobilities turn’ in the social sciences as a counterweight to the celebratory backdrop of unimpeded global flows as journeys of self-actualisation. Such tales, Anna Tsing (2005) argues, fail to account for the frictions of contingent articulations between mobility and power. For Tsing, the friction metaphor pictures those ‘sticky materialities’ that slow down the movement of people and goods, but indicates also a place of social interaction, where conflicting encounters can produce new arrangements of power. Echoing the idea that friction results from ‘arrangements of power’, Cresswell (2014) draws our attention to those moments when mobile people, things and ideas are slowed down and stopped, but also propelled, by friction (108). For example, he describes the difference between trying to run on ice with smooth-soled shoes, which results in slipping, versus rubbersoled shoes, where friction makes it possible to move on the ice. ‘In other words,’ he writes, ‘friction hinders and enables mobilities’ (Cresswell 2014, 113). Like mobility, friction is unequally distributed and double-edged: some groups are more likely to experience it than others, and some groups are better able to leverage it than others. For the latter, friction can be used to resist certain kinds of mobility or claim back agency against the impediments of a limiting structure. In our research, friction highlights the pinch points and sticky encounters that disrupt movement, while illuminating at the same time the unexpected strategies of resistance and tension that constantly reshape the contingent articulations between mobility and power in mobile lives. Friction also shows the work of governmobility: it illuminates how the alleged freedom of lifestyle nomads constantly rubs against mundane impediments, bureaucratic obstacles and everyday barriers, yet, at the same, it reveals the creative strategies nomads use to deal with 8 these imposed limiting structures. Through the metaphor of friction, we can see that mobility regimes are not top-down forms of control, but rather complex assemblages of infrastructures, laws and policies, and discursive framings and meanings that leave room for a two-way dynamic of negotiation. Through their self-governance strategies, nomads assert the dialectic nature of their position towards mobility regimes. Rather than merely being passive subjects of state norms, they live in constant friction with them, whether they respect them, reject them, or bend them towards their lifestyle goals, depending on their relative privilege and various forms of capital. To understand the shifting position nomads occupy vis-à-vis the state's power, we must consider how their mobility situates them at the nexus of privilege and precarity. The nomads we interviewed in our ethnographic research arguably enjoyed extensive privileges. They were predominantly, though not exclusively, white, relatively well-educated professionals who were resourced in various forms of economic, cultural and social capital, as well as network and mobility capital. They travelled on passports issued by geopolitically powerful countries in the Global North, namely the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Because they selfdefined as professional and middle-class individuals, we understood their ‘mobile aspirations’ (Robertson, Cheng and Yeoh 2018) and taste for tourism, adventure, and self-actualisation as increasingly normative expressions of their class habitus (O’Reilly 2014). However, a closer look at their motivations for going mobile suggests that shifting socioeconomic conditions may have severely narrowed their options (Hannonen 2022, Thompson 2021). Studies on retirement migrants (Bell 2017b, Botterill 2016, Green 2014, 2015a, 2015b; Stones, et al. 2018), highly mobile expatriate and freelance workers (Amit 2007), and lifestyle migrant families (Korpela 2020) have illustrated how a relatively privileged status abroad often hides financial insecurity, employment and visa obligations, or housing insecurity. As Botterill explains, ‘lifestyle 9 migrants remain in a fragile and de-rooted state hovering above citizenship without key economic and political rights and “no safety net”’ (2016, 10). Despite the structural privileges that allow digital nomads to travel globally, precarity emerged as equally constitutive of their experiences (Germann Molz 2021, Mancinelli 2020). Not only is precarity a feature of freelance work and of life on the move, it can also be considered as the trigger to search for a better life. The job market instability and the erosion of social welfare in affluent countries have made digital nomadism a coping strategy as much as a lifestyle choice. For this reason, we suggest that digital nomads may experience a ‘discordant’ (Botterill 2016) status, where the mobility enabled through their middle-class identities, resources and aspirations acquires a different meaning as they move through different geographic areas, social contexts, and mobility regimes (Robertson and Roberts 2022). Even when their ‘white capital’ (Lundström 2014) travels well, their deliberate choice to question ‘the fixed coordinates that form the basis for everyday life in societies’ (Kannisto 2016, 221) can produce precarity. If that could be read as an act of radical rebellion, or even as ‘a declaration of independence from the status quo’ (Germann Molz 2021), it remains an ambiguous one, as it reveals the contradictory relationship between nomads and the state. As such, digital nomads’ discordant privilege shapes, and is reshaped by, the multiple and often contradictory performances of ‘border artistry’ as mobile individuals manage their practical logistics and everyday frictions in the context of mobility regimes. Methods To develop the arguments in this article, we draw on two separate data sets that offer insights into these layers of governmobility: 1) qualitative data generated previously through our respective ethnographic fieldwork with digital nomads and location-independent travellers; and 2) a database of official policies regarding temporary resident and travel visas, also known as ‘digital nomad visas,’ published on government websites. The geographical scope of the 10 ethnographic and policy data we consider here is neither global nor specifically regional, but rather maps onto emerging geographies of “North-South lifestyle mobility flows” (Green, 2022, p. 15). Mobile Virtual Ethnography Since 2015, both authors have conducted separate but complementary ethnographic projects with digital nomads who were travelling solo or with their families. We refer to our respondents here as digital nomads although in practice these travellers often occupied multiple mobile lifestyle categories or shifted between categories. For example, parents of worldschooling families were often also working as digital nomads to fund their families’ traveling lifestyles. To immerse ourselves in the lives of research participants who are continuously on the move across geographical and virtual spaces, we combined ethnographic fieldwork and netnographic methods (Kozinets 2020, Mancinelli 2018, 2020) in an approach Germann Molz (2012, 2021) calls ‘mobile virtual ethnography’. In our fieldwork, we each engaged with our respondents and their mobile communities online and in person, following them via their blogs, websites, and social media platforms as well as travelling and meeting up with them in destinations in Argentina, Australia, Singapore, Spain, Thailand, and the United States. In online and in-person interactions, we were transparent about our role as ethnographers, but it was also our status as parents, as well as our identities as white, middle-class professionals with resources to travel, that helped facilitate our access to these respondents. The data generated through this ethnographic fieldwork included content from a combined total of more than 60 travel blogs and 7 social media groups dedicated to digital nomads and location-independent families, TED talks, podcasts and webinars published online by respondents, and transcripts from a total of 37 in-depth qualitative interviews (in person and 11 via video) and 21 semi-structured interviews with respondents who were identified using snowballing and virtual snowballing techniques (Baltar and Brunet 2012). The majority of our research participants identified the United States as their primary country of origin, with others coming from Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Philippines, United Kingdom, and South Africa. Although we compiled our research samples separately, the demographic profiles of our respondents were strikingly similar. As described earlier, most respondents in our studies were white, middle-class, mid-career professionals ranging in age from their twenties to fifties. The make-up of our samples parallels what scholars have found in other studies of lifestyle migration, which is that lifestyle nomads tend to be an overwhelmingly, though not exclusively, white, educated, and affluent population with passports from countries in North America and Western Europe. The age range of our respondents trends slightly younger than in studies of retired migrants (Green 2015b, Botterill 2016) but slightly older than recent studies of digital nomads (Altringer 2015, Reichenberger 2018, Thompson 2018). For the purposes of this study, we examined the data from our mobile ethnographies spanning from 2014 to the COVID-19 pandemic to understand how digital nomads reconcile their claims of free-floating autonomy with state-based regulations that dictate border crossings, entries and exits, and length of stays. While this analysis enabled us to see how digital nomads make sense of their lifestyle choices against the backdrop of state controls, we needed to turn to another source of data to understand this interface from the perspective of the state. Policy Analysis Our second data set examines the policies and protocols issued by governments to attract digital nomads. In 2021 and 2022, we compiled a database of information from 27 countries’ official 12 immigration websites related to the temporary residence and travel visas they offered. The 27 countries in our sample were selected based on advice circulating among digital nomads’ blogs and social media forums about the best places to work remotely. We conducted a preliminary qualitative and comparative analysis on this database to identify relevant and recurring themes across the sample. INSERT TABLE 1a and 1b. Country table For each of the countries in the database, we collected details about the visa eligibility and required documentation, possibilities for extension or renewal, regulations regarding children’s schooling, information about bringing pets, and allowable forms of work and sources of foreign income. We also documented the online presentation of the policy, noting whether the website included images, references to tourism attractions, or welcome letters from local ministers and officials in addition to legal requirements and application forms. Organising the data according to these categories allowed us to make country-by-country comparisons, an exercise that highlighted key patterns but also revealed telling aesthetic differences in appeals to potential visitors. We then conducted a qualitative and inductive analysis of the ethnographic and policy data with the aim of understanding the connections between neoliberal subjectivity and mobility governance. We looked at the individual self-governance strategies depicted in the ethnographic data and how they become institutionalised through regulatory state policies that aim to attract and anchor digital nomads’ mobilities. In the following sections, we highlight the themes that emerged, beginning with the constraints that travellers faced from an individual perspective, next describing the visa programs and policy language responding to these lifestyle 13 mobilities, and finally discussing the ways in which these strategies of ‘border artistry’ intertwine in the mutual production of mobility regimes and mobile individuals. Leveraging friction: How digital nomads skirt the law Despite their repeated claims to autonomy, the nomads in our ethnographic studies found that their freedom to move – or to stay in a place – required them to submit to bureaucratic protocols and state-imposed regulations. They needed to adhere to tax obligations, health insurance systems, compulsory schooling laws or laws limiting single parents from taking children abroad, and remote working conditions like finding internet connectivity or straddling time zone differences, not to mention recent pandemic-induced travel restrictions. Perhaps most importantly, they had to secure the proper visas. As much as digital nomads emphasise being untethered global citizens, ‘celebrating their “ethos of freedom” is not sufficient for them to escape the prevalent socio-political order, even though some digital nomads view their experience in such terms’ (Mancinelli 2020, 419). Instead of challenging mobility regimes, global nomads fuel their transnational agency with self-governing strategies that adapt opportunistically to the conditions created by neoliberal governance (Thompson 2019, Mancinelli 2020, Kannisto 2016, Cook 2022). These adaptive techniques include multiple and sometimes paradoxical strategies like claiming citizenship to the world rather than the nation, holding multiple passports, doing ‘visa runs’ to side-step immigration laws, avoiding or minimizing tax obligations, and practicing geographic arbitrage. The COVID-19 travel lockdowns and quarantine protocols added another layer of bureaucratic regulations for nomads to navigate on a country-by-country basis, which they did in diverse and creative ways (Ehn, et al. 2022). The forms of border artistry we detail in this section, show us how nomads make sense of the ongoing collision between freedom and friction. Here, we draw on data from our mobile 14 and virtual ethnographies to illustrate nomads’ discursive strategies of self-narration, exploitation of bureaucratic loopholes, and practices of self-governance to continue moving within, if not against, mobility regimes. A good passport. Or two. Visas and passports were a popular topic in blogs, interviews and social media forums, where nomads reiterated their philosophical rejection of national allegiances while, at the same time, discussing advice on navigating the arcane world of visa applications and obtaining multiple passports. This tension between claims to freedom and bureaucratic friction is evident in the following comment from Simona, a writer from the United Kingdom who was traveling with her school-aged son: Visas give me huge angst when I don’t know whether we’re going to be able to go to the next place or stay in the current place, but most of the time the sense of freedom triumphs. [blog post] This comment begs the question: How does freedom triumph? How do nomads reassert personal agency in the face of regulatory obstacles that threaten to block their movement or slow them down? The answer lies in a combination of discursive and bureaucratic tactics. One example of a discursive tactic is the way nomads frame their subjection to government regulations through the lens of gratitude, namely gratitude for their ‘strong’ passports from the United States, Canada, or the European Union, which are welcomed at most borders and made visa applications smoother. Bella, a nomad from the United States who traveled with her partner and their twin children, reflected on her blog: We were lucky to travel on American passports on our RTW [round-the-world] journey. We were able to get visas or, more usually, visa-free entry to everywhere we wanted. [blog post] 15 Nomads stress, however, that their gratitude for their passports should not be misunderstood as conveying a sense of belonging or national identity. They see their passports as mere devices to navigate mobility regimes and facilitate a cosmopolitan lifestyle. The following interview response from Yvonne, a digital nomad entrepreneur from the United States, illustrates this tension as well: I am grateful for my passport, which allows me to go whenever I want to go. But I do not buy the patriotic discourse for which I come from the best place in the world. I do not want to be isolated in one spot or one culture. I feel like the world is my home, I am a world citizen, and I am much happier elsewhere than in the US. [interview extract] For these nomads, holding a strong passport is ‘less a marker of one’s national identity and more a promise of free and unfettered global mobility’ (Germann Molz 2021, 167). This is how nomads justify another tactic: carrying multiple passports. In this case, rather than resisting the state, nomads double down on their bureaucratic ties to the state by obtaining a second (or third) passport. The possibility of applying for a second passport, whether through ancestry, marriage, or residency, is another frequent topic in the social media forums. Nomads debate which additional passport(s) would be most desirable for minimizing tax obligations, capitalizing on employment opportunities, and maximizing freedom to travel. In one such discussion in an online form, a member commented: ‘I want a travel document, [I do] not [want] to pledge fealty to some government that I will likely disagree with often.’ [discussion forum post] In fact, national loyalties barely enter the conversation at all; more passports merely mean more freedom to pursue their cosmopolitan lifestyles. In this sense, nomads justify their adherence to the state’s requirement to acquire travel documents and to display them in systems of border surveillance by emphasizing their passport’s symbolic meaning as one of freedom (for which they are grateful) rather than subjection or allegiance to a particular nation (which they summarily reject). 16 Doing the visa run Another strategy digital nomads use to move both with and against the state is the ‘visa run.’ Like other lifestyle travellers described in the literature, digital nomads usually enter countries on temporary tourist visas which must be renewed through repeated border crossings. For example, non-European Union citizens describe doing the “Schengen shuffle” by crossing in and out of EU countries to maximize the time allowed by their Schengen visas, nomads living in Thailand might have to cross the border every few weeks to reset their Thai tourist visas, and European families living in Goa will periodically leave and re-enter India before their visas expire (Cook 2022; Korpela 2020). Visa running exposes the ambiguity of categorising digital nomads as tourists or migrants. While doing visa runs to extend tourist visas is common practice, the fact that digital nomads perform them while working remotely or homeschooling their children stretches the definition of a ‘tourist’, and nomads are aware that they are skating close to the edge of visa laws. One respondent in an online conversation stated: You can live for a few months (or longer) at a time in many countries on a tourist visa. You're not supposed to work, but nobody really cares if you work remotely for a foreign company since you're bringing in revenue and not affecting local jobs. Just avoid the words ‘job’ and ‘work’ when you're crossing the border, and nobody will ever know, in most cases. [discussion forum post] As this extract suggests, digital nomads take advantage of slack in the system, avoiding certain language so as not to raise suspicion. At the same time, however, visa runs can make nomads vulnerable to being detained, denied, or deported, and every once in a while, a cautionary tale 17 to this effect will circulate on social media forums (Mancinelli 2020, 430). Despite these risks and the questionable legality of this strategy, nomads, like other lifestyle migrants, talk about doing the visa run – including stretching the truth about the purpose of their visit – as a normal part of the mobile lifestyle (Green 2015a, Benson & O’Reilly 2018, Korpela 2020). Incorporating visa runs, both physically and narratively, into their mobile lives is one way nomads leverage the friction of visa requirements as part of their freedom. While navigating visa regulations, digital nomads might knowingly ‘skirt’ the law to sidestep the obstacles that mobility regimes impose upon them. As Green argues, such cross-border tactics allows us to recognise how ‘migrants incorporate, yet also exceed the sense in which these visa regimes condition and control the movement of bodies across national borders’ (Green 2015a, 761). Some nomads write about following state regulations not as a restriction on their freedoms, but rather as an opportunity to perform a kind of governmobility that grants them entry as tourists, consumers or even investors. In all these cases, the frictions posed by the mobility regime – in the form of state surveillance and controls – were seen as beneficial to travellers privileged enough to qualify for strong passports. Geographic arbitrage and taxation Much of the recent scholarship on the rise of digital nomadism points to another common strategy, that of geographic arbitrage, or ‘geoarbitrage’ (Mancinelli 2020, Thompson 2019, Green 2020). Popularized by lifestyle guru Tim Ferriss (2007), geoarbitrage entails earning income in a strong currency, often through remote work for companies based in the Global North, while living comfortably in a low-cost-of-living destination, usually in the Global South. Lifestyle migrants from the US or the UK can stretch modest retirement incomes earned in hard currencies to ‘live like kings’ in places like Ecuador or Thailand (Botterill 2016; Hayes 2014). 18 For digital nomads, another benefit of geoarbitrage is the possibility of manipulating one’s exposure to tax obligations. As digital nomads can perform their work from any location, often for a remote employer outside the country of visit, their fiscal obligations gambol in a grey area as far as taxation policy goes. Nation-states’ tax systems are conceived for sedentary populations, but digital nomads, as serially mobile subjects, may transit over multiple tax jurisdictions systems during a tax year, living and earning income that might be taxable in different places, depending on the nomad’s passport country. For example, U.S. citizens are taxed on worldwide income, regardless of where they are living while earning, whereas most other countries may be allowed to offset taxable income earned abroad. As one nomad commented in an online thread about taxation: ‘Legally there is no such thing as a digital nomad. That is just a term for a lifestyle. You are either a tourist or a resident.’ [discussion forum post] Nevertheless, the nomads in our studies resisted being labelled in this way, angling instead to occupy an in-between space, especially in regard to tax repercussions. As another online forum user stated: ‘Taxes do not become an issue until you reside somewhere for 180 days’ [discussion forum post], suggesting that they can side-step their obligations if they do not stay in any country long enough to register. A cottage industry of services to help nomads facilitate such bureaucratic bypass manoeuvres has emerged. In a forum for digital nomads, a member announced a newly founded business, whose motto was ‘Go where you are treated best!’ [discussion forum post]. Aimed at US citizens, the service promised to ‘help successful entrepreneurs and investors legally reduce their tax bill, create a plan B, and grow their wealth globally’. Among the services advertised were various forms of economic citizenship and residency permits. And in a series of webinars on the different so-called ‘digital nomad’ visas, the organizer commented that the intention was ‘to shop for countries’, meaning to find the countries with most advantages and ease to do business, in the attempt to ‘build the dream life’. 19 Whereas Ferriss (2007) promoted geoarbitrage as a creative life hack, scholars have criticized it as yet another example of how already privileged travellers are able to leverage global inequalities in their favour (Hayes 2014, Koh 2021). If global nomads are ‘opportunists’, as Kannisto (2016) argues, then they are in the company of Aihwa Ong’s (1999) ‘flexible citizens’, whom Ong describes as strategic in their choices about where to establish their businesses, plant their families, invest their assets, and hold their passports. There are echoes of flexible citizenship in twenty-first-century nomads’ approach to the world as a menu of citizen services. For example, in a recent post on a forum for traveling families, one participant wrote: I’m not sure where else to ask. We’re searching for a new country to settle after our travel adventure. We have three girls. Where is the place with most freedoms? Medical, educational, economical, etc. [discussion forum post] The nomads in our studies are not necessarily as wealthy as the subjects in Ong’s study, which means they have to find other strategies beyond money to move around mobility regimes. They do this by leaning on knowledge circulated through digital networks, where. they share information to identify destinations with low cost of living or lax homeschooling laws and advise one another on how to extend visas in certain regions or pay less taxes. As these challenges suggest, pursuing freedom through mobility requires nomads to engage in complex ways with the mobility regimes that both enable and limit their movement. Digital nomads’ lifestyles pivot on this tension between angst and freedom, and they become ‘border artists’ (Beck 2007) who deploy reflexive bypass manoeuvres to leverage institutional friction to their individual advantage. In turn, this provides insights into their capacities to act as neoliberal subjects. Nomads may worry and complain about visa applications and restrictions, but by and large they complete the self-documentation, present themselves for surveillance by customs 20 and immigration agents, and comport themselves as grateful and compliant subjects who are entitled to travel easily across borders. Rather than directly resisting bureaucratic requirements or border controls, nomads ‘skirt’ them (by doing visa runs to extend short-term tourist visas rather than applying for long-term resident visas), submit to them (by obtaining and displaying passports), and even internalise these requirements as a necessary trade-off for the freedom they desire. Nomads also work within the system by fitting themselves to the ‘globally accepted categories of race and class’ that position them closer to the category of tourist than that of migrant along the spectrum of mobile people (Sebro and Hallbauer 2021, 186), and by taking advantage of the benefits that follow. Lately, those benefits have been expanding, as evidenced by the relatively recent emergence of new ‘digital nomad’ visa policies in some countries. These policies suggest that it isn’t just nomads who are practising border artistry against the fixed backdrop of the state: States are also ‘border artists’. Capitalizing on friction: States as border artists In the wake of the pandemic, several countries have started promoting special visa programmes to reactivate their battered tourism economies and place themselves on the digital nomad map. Such programs show how nation-states are willing to meet nomads where they are, negotiating new possibilities to anchor their mobility and attract them as a new typology of resident consumers. In doing so, states are also ‘border artists’ governing through mobility, as they intentionally play with the creation of new categories of desirable travellers to whom they can grant special rights while gaining economic benefits. Such initiatives to implement ad hoc immigration frameworks for appealing to a supposedly attractive niche of consumers are not new. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, countries such as the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand pioneered specific programmes to attract international retirees (see Mancinelli 2022). In the post-pandemic context, many countries, namely in the Caribbean, South America and 21 Europe, have started promoting special ‘digital nomad’ visas or temporary residence permits (and see Sánchez-Vergara, et al. 2023). Like citizenship by investment or ‘golden visas,’ these programs follow economic imperatives and dissuade applicants who do not meet specific financial requirements. Unlike tourist visas, which typically entitle visitors to a maximum stay of 60 to 90 days, special digital nomad visas allow applicants an extended legal stay in the country ranging from a minimum period of 3 months to up to 2 years. The ideal newcomer as self-sufficient Our review revealed that, although access to such programmes has a wide range of fees and involves different degrees of paperwork, the vast majority of them share three requirements: 1) the presumption of financial self-sufficiency, demonstrated through a declaration of minimum income, a letter of employment or proof of ownership of a business; 2) evidence of health insurance; and 3) a clean criminal background record. Such requirements allow us to see the emergence of an ideal type of incomer. The notion of self-sufficiency draws a clear line between relatively affluent, and thus welcome, migrants and other categories of mobile people, such as labour migrants, asylum seekers or refugees. At the same time, the visa fee and income requirements demarcate further distinctions (see Table 1), asking us to critically consider the income requirements in relation to local residents’ minimum wages. Some visas are free or very low-cost. In these cases, one could ask what governments gain by attracting new residents. Unlike tourists, people with special visas pay the local VAT and they will spend money on day-to-day services in addition to tourism activities, thus contributing to the recovery of the tourism sector after the pandemic. An immigration specialist in a promotional video about the Brazil visa comments: Digital nomads will contribute to the local economy in many ways: by renting an apartment, by using local services such as gyms, hairdressers, and public and private transportation. As the local 22 employer must be abroad, it does not jeopardise the local workforce. The digital nomad visa does not only benefit the individual. It can also be a tool for ‘talent retention’ [Youtube video]. The prospective applicants include students learning remotely or nomads travelling with families and pets. From the country’s viewpoint, families, applying for what is often referred to as a ‘bundle visa’, could perhaps be considered more desirable incomers than single digital nomads due to their heightened needs of services and provisions. The websites of Antigua & Barbuda, Seychelles and Dominica all offer links to private schools, while Anguilla’s official website informs about the possibilities of homeschooling. A fuzzy distinction between tourism and migration The preliminary considerations about the ideal type of newcomer lead us to acknowledge an even fuzzier distinction between tourism and migration, observed at the level of management and communication of the various schemes. Our screening highlighted two broad typologies of countries offering such special visa programmes: 1) Countries whose economies were either strongly reliant on tourism1 or who aspire to boost an existing industry (including island-states in the Caribbean, some EU countries, like Croatia and Malta, and neighbouring ones, like Iceland or Georgia); and 2) countries whose economies do not depend heavily on tourism but who are willing to attract skilled long-term visitors, namely entrepreneurs, freelancers and business owners. Like neoliberal enterprises, nation-states compete to attract resident consumers and/or to enhance the country’s competitiveness. Mirroring these intentions, the management is done through national tourism authorities or public-qua-private tourism boards for most of the countries falling into the first typology, and by immigration departments in the second one. 23 The programmes managed by the tourism authorities have a welcoming, dedicated and easy-to-navigate web presence, often featuring stereotypical imagery of a white digital nomad working on a laptop on a tropical beach. The marketing language is typical of the ‘selling mode’ of tourism promotion, emphasising leisure-related values and highlighting the country’s amenities: its natural features, the safety aspects, the cuisine, the wide choice of accommodations, the sport and the leisure infrastructure. The programmes have specific names such as ‘One happy workation’ (Aruba), ‘Remotely from Georgia’ (Georgia) or ‘Work where you vacation’ (Belize) that blur the lines between living, working and playing. The hedonist or escapist references are often explicit, as in ‘Switch to a healthier, and more liberating lifestyle’ (Dominica), or, in the case of Anguilla, the concept of ‘Lose the crowd’ puts a focus on how much space people will have to enjoy freedom and openness. References to ‘paradise’ are widespread, especially among places that have historically been advertised as ‘3S’ (sea, sun, sand) destinations. The business aspect, however, is not absent. Much emphasis is placed on good connectivity and ever-present wi-fi, responding to the digital nomads’ motto: ‘Home is where the wi-fi is’. Cabo Verde also points out the convenient time zone ‘near target markets’ and showcases co-working and co-living arrangements. Mauritius uses a similar communication strategy, mentioning its ideal time zone for working remotely with Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Dubai emphasises ‘UAE’s safe and attractive business environment’. Host countries do not regard digital nomads just as passers-by, but also as potential investors. For instance, the page of requirements on the Anguilla website also links to instructions for registering a business, while Barbados’s Welcome Stamp website advertises their very competitive corporate tax in case applicants ultimately decide to start a business in the archipelago. When the special visas are managed by the national immigration departments, as for the countries of the second typology, the programmes often do not make specific reference to 24 digital nomads, but aim at a more generic target group: long-term visa (Iceland), D7 Visa program (Portugal), residencia temporal rentista (Costa Rica), freelancer visa (Czech), or white card (Hungary). The web presence of such schemes is reduced to one page of bureaucratic information regarding remote workers as one more category of temporary resident and features few details about lifestyle amenities. Consequently, the administrative process to request such permits is more challenging to navigate and, depending on the case, may require the use of an immigration lawyer or another kind of intermediary. The tension between tourism and migration does not apply exclusively to the way these visas are managed, but it became an explicit arena of conflict in the case of the Bahamas Extended Access Travel Stay (BEATS) program. This special visa scheme was initially launched by the Ministry of Tourism and offered the possibility to set up a home in the country for a maximum of twelve months with little more than an online application and a processing fee of 1,000 USD. In February 2022, however, the program was suspended by the Ministry of Immigration through a vague single-page flyer posted on social media. A commentator of one intermediary agency assisting digital nomads' relocations highlighted how this new world of visas navigates in ‘uncharted waters’ with ‘potential downfalls’2. The case of the Bahamas embodies the friction between conflicting regimes of mobility: it points out how digital nomads do not fit neatly in any political category, as they are confused between long-term tourists and temporary residents, but it also testifies to the sometimes frictional mobility regimes applied by host countries depending on whether a visitor is labelled in one or the other way. 25 Competing over low costs of living and taxation As if capitulating to digital nomads’ practices of geoarbitrage, many of these nation states overtly compete for nomads’ attention by offering low costs of living, favourable taxation regulations, and affordable lifestyle amenities. Belize's promotion openly states how: Compared to other destinations offering similar programs, the cost of doing business from Belize is relatively low. You'll find our accommodations, dining and general cost of living affordable, and the cost of applying to and enrolling in the Work Where You Vacation program is just 500 BZD. Through their special visas, governments themselves are indirectly encouraging a form of geographic arbitrage: as self-sufficient incomers, applicants draw their economic resources from somewhere else and their presence does not threaten local jobs. While existing scholarship has analysed this economic strategy in reference to individuals (Bell 2017a; Hayes 2014; Mancinelli 2020; Koh 2021; see also Germann Molz 2021), our contribution here is to reveal it as a governmental strategy, consistent with the dominant trends toward liberalisation and deregulation in the global economy (Ono 2015), which suggests nation-states themselves operate as neoliberal subjects, applying an economic rationale to their governmobility. Appealing especially to the libertarian sensibilities that many digital nomads express, countries also compete for digital nomads through personal income tax exemption, one of the perks in promoted by many countries we reviewed, like Antigua & Barbuda, Barbados, Costa Rica and Dubai. A direct response, it seems, to the necessities of this emerging typology of consumer/citizen. 26 Capturing the potential of delocalised productivity: the case of Estonia As we have seen in the quote of the Brazilian immigration specialist, digital nomads' visas often intersect with ‘talent retention initiatives’ targeting business owners and start-ups. Exemplary, in this thread, is the case of Estonia, which draws our attention to the role of digitalisation as a tool to capture the potential of delocalised productivity and experiment with new forms of nation-building. Estonia offers two complementary programmes that can appeal to lifestyle nomads: a special visa and the e-residency. Although this latter is not explicitly devised for nomads, its genealogy allows us to understand ‘the changing rationality of the state under conditions of global capitalism and neoliberal governance’ (Tammpuu and Masso 2018). Estonia’s e-residency programme was launched in 2014 with the aim to create a ‘virtual state’ (Tammpuu and Masso 2018) by incorporating businesses and start-ups as new virtual citizens through the offer of innovative digital services for managing a business at distance. The idea of ‘virtual state’, however, challenges the notion of migration and national belonging as we know them, as the newly incorporated virtual citizens, selected through valuable assets such as entrepreneurial talents and capital, do not need to physically move to the country. Such an ‘alternative to physical immigration’ (Tammpuu and Masso 2018, 13) allows the state to capture the economic benefits of affiliating entrepreneurial talents and their network capital to a national project while simultaneously preserving the cultural integrity of the state. While welcoming to digital entrepreneurs, Estonia has not been equally open to other forms of immigration, especially during the refugee crisis (Tammpuu and Masso 2018). Along the same lines of nation branding, Estonia launched its own Digital Nomad Visa programme for remote workers in August 2020. The institutional website states that ‘digital nomads and remote workers have long faced ambiguity when working while they travel, often skirting the law by working while visiting a country with a tourist visa’ (emphasis added). As we can see, the language explicitly refers to digital nomads who, as neoliberal subjects, may 27 stand in a grey area of legality. So, instead of letting them skirt the law, the state meets them where they are, creating an ad hoc immigration framework to bring them within the law. Discussion As we have shown, border artistry does not necessarily mean that nomads actively resist or reject the state. Instead, it implies finding creative yet opportunistic adaptations (Kannisto 2016; Mancinelli 2020) to leverage friction within the mobility regime to maximise one’s own lifestyle goals. Such strategies provide insights into nomads’ disposition to act as neoliberal subjects. Our research has revealed that when they introduce regulations conceived to attract resident consumers or skilled entrepreneurs, nation-states are also neoliberal subjects practising border artistry. The economic rationale of their governmobility consists in constructing new categories of desirable aliens from whom they can draw economic benefits. In her study of similar ad hoc immigration schemes to attract Japanese retirees to Malaysia, Ono (2015) points out how such institutional policies understand privileged migrants as de-politicised subjects, treating them as consumers or investors whose mobility is a nonideological problem, just a personal choice. Likewise, for digital nomads, we argue that such forms of governmental neoliberal rationality tend to disguise the selective and exclusionary aspects – often racialised or classist – of the special visa programmes. Unless we examine such policies with a critical eye, we do not necessarily see how digital nomads’ smooth mobility is premised on the curtailed mobilities of others, namely people travelling on passports from developing countries or unable to qualify for visas (Verstraete 2001). Similar to the lifestyle migrants in Ono’s research, digital nomads are treated as ‘customers’ who ‘do not intend to have political entitlements, only flexible choices’ (Ono 2015, 3). Like neoliberal enterprises, states make themselves desirable in the eyes of nomads, 28 promoting favourable tax status, access to internet connectivity, workspaces, networks to enhance business opportunities and access to other lifestyle amenities. These unusual marketable assets create new images of paradise, and new geographies of work and play, changing the ways places are made attractive in the eyes of potential visitors (Sheller and Urry 2004)3. The ambiguity between tourism and migration is another place where friction traverses the relationship between nomads and the states. Framing an individual as a tourist or an immigrant unlocks different kinds of state resources and state approval. In order to make themselves desirable in the eyes of the state, nomads position themselves like tourists: selfsponsored consumers who will stay just long enough to enhance the country’s competitiveness or contribute to its economy, but not forever. Even so, their ‘opportunism’ and bypass manoeuvres trouble conventional conceptions of citizenship, recalling scholars’ attempts to understand new forms of ‘flexible’, ‘nomadic’ or ‘post-national’ citizenship (Ong 1999; Joseph 1999; Urry 2000). Following Botterill’s (2016) concept of ‘discordant mobilities’, we argue that digital nomads perform a kind of ‘discordant citizenship’, a precarious freedom strung between the mobility rights granted by their national citizenship and the layers of regulation that threaten to pin them down. From the point of view of the states, the mobility regimes we have analysed also disrupt the social contract between the individuals and the state (see Cook 2022). Rather than looking to implement a conventional notion of quid pro quo where citizens pay taxes and pledge loyalty to the state in return for protection and welfare, nation-states here strive to capture long-term de-politicised spending residents and professional talents, attracting them with lifestyle amenities rather than social welfare programmes. New practices and categories of mobile citizenship thus emerge at the interface between nomads and state-based mobility regimes. 29 Concluding remarks Throughout this analysis, we have used the metaphor of friction to move us beyond the im/mobile binary. We have argued that digital nomads navigate frictional mobility regimes by practicing ‘border artistry’ (Beck 2007), reflexive bypass manoeuvres of self-governance that allow them to achieve their lifestyle goals in the shadow of the state. Border surveillance, timelimited visas, and other bureaucratic hurdles create friction in mobility regimes, but whether this friction acts as catalyst or a snag depends on the nomads’ ability to frame their lifestyle aspirations in line with the state’s interests – and for the state to align its interests with nomads’ entrepreneurial and mobility aspirations. Our findings reveal that, despite their claim to freedom, nomads are not simply travelling with or against the state. As the concept of governmobility suggests, mobility regimes become the state’s art of governing and the nomads’ art of lifestyle. This article contributes to the theorization of mobility regimes, showing how they are embedded in and reproduce certain neoliberal ideologies, identities, and practices, sorting between self-reliant and abject travellers and capitalizing on human resources vis-à-vis geopolitical territories. Beyond mere top-down systems of control, mobility regimes are a stage for performing border artistry on both the side of the individuals and the institutions. They are frictional assemblages, where privilege, precarity and power differentials interplay to determine which movements are valuable or glamourous and which are stigmatised or blocked. Here, we have focused on the mutual constitution of digital nomads and mobility regimes, however local residents and places are also crucial actors in these unfolding social dramas. Although digital nomadism is a relatively new phenomenon, a vibrant literature is taking shape to deepen our understanding of the lived experiences and future implications of these practices. As this field develops, further research is needed to account for these local impacts. More research is also needed to explore how many people actually apply for and are granted visas through these programmes. 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