*In 2000, the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam expanded a 1995 essay into a book entitled Bowling Alone. In it he contended that post-WW II America had witnessed the decline of a number of social rituals, including bowling in leagues, that had helped tie society together. Suburban houses were built far apart, and many lacked functional porches, so neighbors no longer chatted during evening strolls; many drove everywhere they needed to go. Television, meanwhile, turned the household focus inward rather than outward. Technology, in short, had a lot to do with Putnam’s theory as to why American culture was becoming more fractured and individualistic. Facebook, arguably more destructive to community values and practices than either cars or television, was still 5 years off.
*Last April, Chloe Zhao and Frances McDormand took home 3 Oscars for Nomadland, their lightly fictionalized adaptation of the nonfiction bestselling book of the same name. Real people who live out of vans and work at temporary positions, often at Amazon warehouses, played themselves or close facsimiles thereof in the film, which clearly struck a nerve with audiences. I’ve read that Amazon managers seek out these workers, who have old-school work ethics, to help set the tone in the facilities where intense time-based performance metrics can be a shock to younger employees.
*On January 18 of this year, Airbnb founder Brian Chesky announced — via Twitter — that he was becoming a different kind of nomad. Beginning in Atlanta, he was going to live in Airbnb rentals for extended periods. He did this to draw attention to and understand the reality of what the service was seeing during Covid: millions of people can live where they want and work remotely. One concrete manifestation of this trend in that Airbnb now includes wifi performance as a listing detail. In this and other ways, in addition to seeking out places to escape to or stay while visiting family, travelers now assess rentals for their support for remote work. One can filter potential rentals for “dedicated workspace” details, for example.
Clearly something big is going on here. Let’s start with some questions:
What’s the difference between being a nomad, a pioneer, or a migrant? That is, all three kinds of people move, but the pattern and focus varies a lot. US westward expansion always had a complex relation to the frontier — and to its human inhabitants — embedded in the romanticism and optimism. Some migrant workers follow crop cycles: when the harvest is complete, move south to a longer growing season. Nomads at both low and high wage levels are something different.
What does the increase in the number of nomads mean for home? We’ve seen a version of this movie for decades as “snowbirds” winter in Florida and summer back north. There are many implications of this pattern. Year-round Florida residents are subject to the political force exerted by part-time retired northerners who seek out low taxes, for example. Civic services suffer as a result. On the Outer Banks of North Carolina, meanwhile, huge numbers of summertime weekly renters’ tax payments subsidize schools that locals would not be able to afford otherwise.
What does a fluid definition of “home” mean for politics more generally? If I can live anywhere and everywhere, where am I invested? Where might I serve as a volunteer if I’m in Park City this month, Vail next, and Portland in the spring? Who of the local population is being priced out of the house that I’m occupying? Where do they live instead? Having police officers and teachers live in the towns where they’re paid is a vaguely good idea that becomes hard to implement for many categories of jobs in low-growth towns that are being overrun, especially those at the edge of wild spaces.
In a focused and highly consequential aspect of politics, there are huge questions related to taxation attached to nomadic living. If I work for Google in San Francisco but live in the Lake Tahoe area, potentially in Nevada, for extended periods, what are the consequences for both municipalities of my distance from the physical location of my employer? San Francisco’s city services are already in crisis, and the tax base is in transition as it moves from payroll to revenues as its basis. Going forward, how much does a company’s payroll matter for the city of its physical facilities? Will Truckee or Reno see a windfall, not only of sales tax revenues, but potentially payroll taxes paid by people who live there part of the year while working hundreds or thousands of miles away? Bay Area businesses pay salaries substantially higher than what is normal for most towns: Mountain View’s $120k average salary is almost exactly double Reno’s $61,000. Do the nomadic destinations take a percentage of wages that few if any local employers could think about paying?
Is there a danger of a tragedy of the commons? If people who live temporarily (as opposed to vacation, I should emphasize) in desirable locations, will they tend to be good stewards of the place or will there be behaviors to take the good parts without doing the other stuff: supporting the United Way; supporting churches and similar safety nets; supporting schools and other year-round infrastructure for the waitstaff, lift operators, plow drivers, and other people who can become invisible?
Speaking of Amazon, what’s the future of local retail in nomad-heavy locales? Will the delivery orders magically appear on the doorstep, to the detriment of store owners who have to buy in smaller quantities, pay high rents, and hire from a thin labor pool? Or can those retailers reinvent themselves to target a third population: locals, vacationers, and now the nomads, both high- and low-income versions?
Besides Airbnb and Amazon, who else is poised to capitalize on this trend? Local real estate agents will see more out-of-town buyers, I’m guessing, and prices are being further bid up in already-expensive towns (hello Jackson Hole). The service industries related to intermediate-term rentals such as cleaning services, household maintenance and repair, and meal delivery, could do well, but likely on a town-by-town basis: it’s hard to see a big roll-up for this kind of thing outside of the land grab we’re getting in the latter category. At the macro scale, how will private equity and venture capital fund new business models -- for housing, for transportation, for education, for retail -- that aim to catch this growing wave?
From the manager’s standpoint, what does it mean to be a boss if you may never meet your teammates in person? There’s been an explicit or implied return-to-the-office date at most companies for most of Covid, but we are now seeing signs that remote work will be permanent at many tech companies that cannot afford to lose the numbers of key workers who would defect if forced to reverse their remote ways. What happens next? Will I invest less in mentoring, in networking, in career development for my team if I only see them over Zoom? I hope the red herring of “laziness” has been put to rest after the last two years: everyone I know, and every study I’ve read, suggests employers are getting more hours of productive work out of remote workers than they did out of on-site employees. This isn’t to suggest that there aren’t costs to remote work: problem-solving, crisis management, certain kinds of innovation, and some kinds of teaching/training thrive in live settings. But the gain in lost commuting time, plus the lack of distractions, plus the difficulty in separating work and life when the office is the dining room table means that for many, at-home work is longer and often more stressful (child care only begins a long list of issues) than in-office work. Given these costs, how can and should managers respond?
A key barrier to nomadic location is having kids in school. Given the challenges to something as rudimentary as the common core curriculum, I can’t foresee plug-and-play school districts nationwide. Instead, parents who move schools will see children who are taught long division three times and geometry not at all, or the equivalent. Will nomads meaningfully increase the number of kids who are home-schooled, wherever “home” might be this month? Given the polarization around masking and vaccination, as well as the logistical challenges faced by work-at-home parents of Zoom-schooled children, I would wager homeschooling is already on the rise, some of it semi-involuntary. For colleges, what constitutes proof of in-state tuition status, particularly as California (with its flagship system of higher ed) sees people moving out?
Returning to the bowling question, what happens to the bonds of community as they are weakened by the pandemic, by disinformation, by burdens borne unequally? Will Nomadland’s Linda or Bob, or high-earning tech workers, donate blood, referee youth soccer, or teach Sunday school? Zoom, Slack, and Teams facilitate remote work, but they’re less effective at community-building tasks that so far don’t lend themselves to satisfying remote performance. What constitutes critical mass? That is, how many 25-39 year-olds need to move out of a zip code, a school district, or a volunteer fire company, before the costs emerge? How many peak earners (45-54 years old) can leave an area before mentorship, the tax base, or local restaurants suffer?
How will status signaling work? What are the hard (taxes) and soft (pecking-order) implications for those workers left behind, whether white- or blue-collar? What are the cues that replace parking spots, vehicles, office locations, ties and other apparel, and even haircuts as indicators of relative importance or rank? Will we see the emergence of virtual goods, much as in online games, that announce our priorities and value to our screen-mates? Might those be tied to our location? Does the Epic multi-resort ski pass come with virtual bling to tell my co-workers my status?
That’s a whole lot of implications, reaching far beyond bowling leagues and television-watching to include schools, roads and commuting, housing, taxation, politics, and career development. We don’t even have current, clear language to describe all of these emerging behaviors or policy questions, much less experience enough to reach well-founded conclusions. As with so many other implications of our technology, our demographics, and now our pandemic, the world suddenly looks very different than it did only two short years ago.
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