THE NEW TRAJECTORIES of LABOR and the MAKING of the DIGITAL NOMAD a Dissertation Presented by Jeff Sternbe
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URBAN PROSPECTING: THE NEW TRAJECTORIES OF LABOR AND THE MAKING OF THE DIGITAL NOMAD A Dissertation Presented By Jeff Sternberg to The Department of Sociology & Anthropology In partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In field of Sociology Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts April 2021 1 URBAN PROSPECTING: THE NEW TRAJECTORIES OF LABOR AND THE MAKING OF THE DIGITAL NOMAD A Dissertation Presented By Jeff Sternberg ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology in the College of Social Science & Humanities of Northeastern University April 2021 2 Dissertation Abstract This dissertation applies an urban political-economy framework to look at the growing mobile and laboring population of digital nomads who are attempting to pursue their futures and access the city amidst an increasingly global and uneven geographic distribution of jobs located in inaccessible cities, a situation I refer to as the new urban crisis. I approach Digital Nomads as a new in-formation unit of production introduced by changes in the nature of work as well as by corresponding changes in the urban social structures of social reproduction brought about by the transition to post-industrialism and the flexible regime of capital accumulation. Digital Nomads are a heterogenous population, a field of class fragments brought together by their shared and plural experiences of the new urban crisis. It is in the way that these diverse actors respond to this crisis that they begin to form themselves as a coherent figure and subject, or rather a number of classes-in-formation obscured under the moniker of the Digital Nomad. Mobility is a key tool this population utilizes in response to this crisis, connecting to cities in new ways through practices such as co-living and remote work. Digital Nomads approach these practices from different positions, coming across one another in shared spaces in the cities they invest their mobility in while learning from one another the different ends these practices can be put to. These collisions shape and direct their future mobility and its underlying logics, acting as the sites where digital nomads and their successors are being made. As the outcomes of this mobility will impact cities and systems of global production for decades to come, it is vital to understand the processes by which this mobility is directed, to understand how the lifeworld of labor and the digital nomad makes mobility to certain places over others possible, posing the question: When you can live anywhere, where do you choose to live? This dissertation sets out to unpack the subjective processes by which digital nomads invest their mobility, a practice I will refer to as Urban Prospecting. Urban Prospecting is both the objective collection of these movements and the open-ended sets of subjective logics guiding these pursuits. Urban Prospecting logics are used to evaluate places as potential sites for future investments of mobility, these evaluations weighing how each place makes certain life outcomes related to the self and employment possible. 3 In order to get at both the logics and outcomes of urban prospecting, I utilized a mixed methods approach which included network analysis and multi-sited ethnography to unpack how digital nomads interpret their position within the global urban landscape and how these interpretations guide where they invested their mobility. Building a social network model of digital nomad mobility logged on the social networking platform Nomadlist between more than 700 cities around the globe, my research demonstrated that digital nomads engage in two broad circuits of mobility: (1) mobility to the global city, and (2) mobility away from the global city to new offbeat and off-the-map locations. I then conducted multi-sited ethnography at the PodShare co-living space in the Global City of Los Angeles and the Ghoomakad co-living space in the Offbeat city of Dharamsala, India in order to look at the types of digital nomads and urban prospecting logics underlying each circuit of mobility. In each city, I elaborated a place-based typology of the type of digital nomads I met based on how they balanced the terms of urban prospecting that guided them to each location. In the former case, I looked at how and why this population is still attaching itself to global cities in crisis and their attendant labor and social reproductive markets. In the latter case, I investigated the emergence of new work destinations that have been enabled by the introduction of remote work that allows digital nomads to decouple from global cities and head to offbeat locales and remote getaways in Southeast Asia and the Global South that offer tourist infrastructures, nice weather and low costs of living. I end by considering the implications this labor mobility poses for the future of work, urbanization and capital accumulation in general. 4 Acknowledgements This project wouldn’t have been possible without the guidance, advise and support of many different individuals who I cannot all name here. I would first like to thank my committee: Liza Weinstein, Laura Nelson, Nina Sylvanus and Tim Cresswell. Liza, you have been my rock since coming to Northeastern and taught the first and best class I attended here. You nurtured me both as a student and budding scholar, guiding this project from the shred of an idea it was to the finished project before us. I could not thank you enough for allowing me to write the dissertation I wanted to, seeing what I wanted to do, and helping me get there, all while remaining congeal, compassionate but most importantly constructively critical. Laura, your arrival at Northeastern shifted my trajectory through the program and beyond, immersing me in the world of computational social science and rigorous theory guided empirical research. You taught me to how to operationalize concepts through methods and research, and how to put projects together and keep them going. You encouraged me to push myself to tackle new methods and uncharted territory while also qualifying my arguments and findings by highlighting and discussing their limitations, to be ambitious but humble, and to take what I receive and pay it forward. Nina and Tim, your comments on the dissertation challenged me and pushed in ways I was not ready form that forced me to confront and deal with different short-comings or blind-spots in my argument while also pushing me to justify and qualify my arguments harder, ultimately making the dissertation stronger. Our back and forth throughout the proposal and defense processes were enlivening and invigorating and I thank you for trudging through a long and in need of many edits dissertation with care and deep engagement. 5 I would like to thank my dissertation writing group or, as I like to think of them, my shadow committee: Taylor Braswell, Ezgi Deniz Rasit, Sam Maron, Vivek Mishra, Camille Peterson and Mike Shields. You all read draft after draft of each chapter of the dissertation and labored through the 80-page rough drafts I would send. Your comments made each draft better and actively made me a better writer. I literally could not have done it without you. I would also like to thank a few people who served as early influencers on this project: Len Albright, Jeff Juris, Ben Schmidt, Cameron Blevins and Val Moghadem. You all saw this project in bits and pieces at various stages, helping me shape and build the nuggets that would become the full project. Len, without you I would never have been able to ask a convincing research question; I would have been stuck looking at gaps in the literature instead of looking for an interesting story. Jeff, I wish I got to know you better, but your reading and engagement with the LA chapter of this project and our conversations about Italian Workerism and Marxist Autonomia breathed life into me and made me believe that I could make this dissertation about large broad questions concerning the future of labor and capital. Ben and Cameron, without both of you I would not have either been exposed to the digital humanities nor constructed the network model that acts a one of the largest components of this project. I have been enriched by your expertise and the new disciplinary boundaries you exposed me to. I would like to thank my Cohort & Fellow Sociology Grad Students with a special shout out to Baran Karsak and Alex Alden, my rocks from early on. There are too many of you to thank individually but I would not have made it throughout the program without your support, advice, 6 enthusiasm and expertise. Your input and support was often just as valuable if not more so than that of the faculty. I would like to thank my Union Folks: Tim LaRock, Ashley Houston, Andrew Summerfield, Ben Pitta and all my other fellow grad student union organizers with the UAW who enriched my lst 3 years of my graduate student program, showing me that together as workers we could contest, challenge, and actively make the university a better place. Without you all, I honestly don’t know if I would have finished the PhD and I certainly would not be moving in the direction I am today without engaging in struggle with the rest of you. Last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank my family, both my wife and Son Tash & Misha, our cat Sigmund, and my mom, dad, brother and sister. Tash, you let me leave you multiple summers in row for months on end to go do crazy things, interview digital nomads, and itch my yearning for co-living.