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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how digital nomads address the social challenges of hypermobility by consuming commodified communities in coworking and coliving spaces, showing how mobility and neoliberal market logics reshape belonging into a modular, on-demand resource.

Paper long abstract

Note: This presentation draws on a paper that has already been published.

Mobilising portable technologies and global internet connectivity, digital nomads decouple work from place, rejecting the sedentary norm of living in a single location in favour of continuous geographic mobility. However, while often celebrated as emancipatory, the itinerant lifestyle also exposes nomads to social isolation, prompting many to seek community in coworking and coliving spaces. These digital-nomad-centred enterprises market vibrant social environments as central selling points, placing belonging behind paywalls and offering connection as a privatised, commodified service. Drawing on 14 months of multi-sited fieldwork and interviews with participants from a dozen countries, the paper ethnographically examines how digital nomads manage the social challenges of hypermobility through the consumption of commodified communities, utilising the communal affordances of coworking and coliving spaces to balance mobility with belonging under constrained temporalities. Embedded in neoliberal logics, such practices reveal how digital nomads approach community through market rationalities, treating it as a service to be purchased and consumed in pursuit of optimising their transnational social lives. In sum, the paper highlights how digital nomadism sits at the intersection of mobility, consumerism and neoliberal ideology, where ‘community’ becomes modular—temporary, interchangeable and available on demand—while generating new forms of mobile belonging.