Remote Work + Doomsday Prep = New Waves of Homesteaders

2023 is the year that digitally transformative trends converge and enter the publics field of vision. These concepts will become political battlegrounds as they begin to reshape how we live, work, form relationships, and govern ourselves.

Last week, we saw this when Portugal decided to end its Golden Visa program because of real estate price inflation. This week, we see it again in a Vanity Fair article on how a new wave of location-independent people are relocating for ideological reasons. And we see trend convergence causing the downstream impacts of remote work within cities to become even more visible.

Lots of change is bubbling up to the surface of society.

Digital Nomadism + Doomerism = A New Cohort of Location-Independent People

Inside the New Right’s Next Frontier: The American West | Vanity Fair -

Digital nomadism, location-independence, and the tech-enabled exit aren’t always about people leaving behind their home country. In fact, there’s an expanding demographic of remote workers that are choosing to move to less populated areas of their home country and opt for a more self-sufficient and secluded lifestyle.

This Vanity Fair story emphasizes how "right-wing" people are choosing to relocate to rural areas because they fear the collapse of society. The author of the story frames a lot these topics with a left vs right political perspective and comes just shy of capturing the fact that many of these transformative trends transcend traditional political structures.

Setting that aside, it’s a story that does a good job of covering some of the more meaningful ways the US is evolving in a post-Covid, remote work world. The reporting and storytelling are strong and there many interesting tidbits to extract when you take a step back and look at it from a lens of remote work, self-sovereignty, and the emerging class divide between location-independent and location dependent people.

When you take these migration trends and expand them across ideological lines, you'll get a better understanding that location-independence means many different things to many different people. In this instance, it means that location-independence doesn’t have to come into conflict with a sense of nationalism. It doesn’t require a globalist mentality. And in growing numbers, location-independent people find themselves aligning with a wide variety of ideological communities and belief systems and they’re relocating to immerse themselves within these communities.

The big point of this story to focus on is not this most recent crazy thing that conservatives are doing but instead focus on how location independence impacts the formation and makeup of communities within nation states.

In this instance, location independence ultimately means that conservative communities are becoming more conservative and liberal communities more liberal. As more people embrace remote work and reprioritize the things they want and need from the communities they live in, they’re choosing to relocate to ideologically aligned communities.

A trend that is likely to have interesting consequences over the long haul.

A final point to pay attention to. This story tells an interesting tale of how the inflow of location-independent people are reshaping the cultural and economic landscape of the places they relocate to. How are rural communities handling the inflows of location-independent people? How is it changing the economic landscape? And how is it altering the culture? This is the core of the digital transformation and is intimately connected to last week’s story on Portugal’s Golden Visa program.

A Few Stories On Remote Work Showcasing How Trends Collide

WFH or Resign? Three-in-Four Londoners Would Quit Instead Full-Time Office Work - Bloomberg

Nearly 75% of Londoners would rather quit and would insist on significant pay raise if forced to return to the office full time.

That’s double the actual 35% rate of hybrid work as of now.

Lockdowns are over. WFH isn’t. Why?

“Data from the UK’s Office for National Statistics, while not directly comparable, suggests a similar picture: between 30 and 40 per cent of workers say they’ve worked from home “in the past seven days”, and there is little sign of that number falling.”

Connecting the dots here, 75% of Londoners want hybrid work but at the moment, only 35% or so have that arrangement.

So, what’s the point here? The actual demand for hybrid jobs will likely reorient how companies compete for talent moving forward. If 75% of the market insists on higher pay or hybrid work, it will cause a meaningful increase in hybrid contracts and lead to massive downstream effects caused by that changing work structure.

It’ll be hard to ignore the tectonic shift in city structure that’s coming if these numbers are accurate.

Case in point:

Office Landlord Defaults Are Escalating as Lenders Brace for More Distress - WSJ (archive.is)

Large office landlords are starting to default on their loans as permanent remote work (including hybrid models) have caused a significant change in the real estate markets.

“the pain from foreclosures is likely to ripple through the financial system. About $1.2 trillion of debt was backed by office buildings at the end of the third quarter last year, according to Trepp.”

What will that mean for cities?

Adding one more trend and layer of complexity to the situation, part time work for mid and late career executives is a macro trend on the rise that results from a combination of economic hardships and remote work.

Your Next Career Move: Part-Time Executive - WSJ (archive.is)

“Fractional Executives” operating what I call the quarter time job is becoming increasingly common.

The bottom line: later stage professionals are willing and likely to accept roles that require less time commitments and enable flexible lifestyles.

I’m not going to share details on what the roles are and how they work (you can read the article for the story with examples). The point I’ll draw your attention to though is how this trend will blend with the other stories in this section.

ie: Remote work is a sticky trend, the lifestyles that result from it are increasingly attractive to a variety of professions, workers are willing to fight for these benefits, and the converging consequences are that less people are in offices on a consistent basis. If more elements of the workforce find remote work desirable and worth fighting for at the low, mid, and executive levels of an organization, that means it will continue to gain traction and incentivize more changes to the structures of society.

I cover these stories on a consistent basis because as they continue to appear, they converge and act as force multipliers on similar trends. The net result is a rapidly reshaping society that provides more freedom for individual lifestyle design.

Rapid Fire

• Dubai Accelerates Positioning as Remote Working Hub - Why are some countries aggressively pursuing remote workers? Because it stimulates the economy. “The remote working focus comes as the United Arab Emirates looks to boost tourism’s contribution to the national gross domestic product to $122 billion a year by 2031.”

• Best States for Remote Work: Yelp Employees Leave New York for Florida, Texas - Bloomberg - Not much of a surprise but, “Workers who never have to go back to an office are leaving high-cost cities like New York and San Francisco for warm weather and low taxes in the Sun Belt.”

• A Federal Reserve Study on Inflation - Explains how Covid lead to a major shift in consumption and a reallocation of resources across the economy which helped exacerbate inflation.

• Rise of the Silicon Valley Small Business - by Anu Atluru (substack.com) - An interesting prediction on how Silicon Valley startups will operate more like small businesses moving forward. In short - they’ll stay small, lean, and attempt to bootstrap their way to profitability for as long as possible. The trends mentioned and reasons for this prediction are interesting and relevant to the digital transformation and the ideas behind how self-sovereignty is becoming more accessible via business on the internet.

Extras

Aside from being an interesting topic (the importance of earning capacity) this was the first really interesting long form thread I've seen on Twitter using long form tweet. ie: It's an essay published to Twitter.