We dream of a world where movement is a right, not a privilege, and a vehicle for justice, reciprocity, and regeneration.
We recognize that mobility—who gets to move, under what circumstances, and at what cost—is shaped by histories of colonialism, economic inequality, and systemic privilege.
We aim to theorize and practice a form of privileged movement (be it as a traveler, a digital nomad, or otherwise) that is mutualistic: not only non-extractive, but also actively contributing to the places inhabited in ways that are a net benefit to them.
Our vision of a preferable future
Pluriversality & decolonization
The exclusive claim to power and knowledge by Western imperialist nations is replaced by local alternatives which forge their own counter-hegemonic, non-imperialist futures, of which there is not one single homogeneous future, but rather a pluriverse, "a world where many worlds fit" (as per the Zapatistas own decolonial political vision), containing diverse cosmologies, epistemologies, and ontologies, all coexisting harmoniously.
The right to mobility
Access to movement, migration, and the ability to live and work freely are no longer privileges, but basic human rights, accessible to all. Nation state borders are not barriers to opportunity, and the rights to roam, rest, and shape one’s own future are considered fundamental aspects of dignity and autonomy for every individual, irrespective of where they come from or what they have.
Transformative mobility
Travel and migration are no longer tools of extraction and profit, but become transformative practices of cultural exchange, solidarity, and the redistribution of power. This form of mobility respects local ecologies, economies, and histories.
Liberated labor
Labor is redefined as a creative, collaborative, and life-affirming practice, no longer reduced to mere survival or the extraction of human effort for profit. It is integrated into the life we want to live—not just a means to an end but a way of connecting to our communities, passions, and ecosystems.
Ecological justice
The natural world is no longer treated as an endless resource to be exploited, but as a living, sacred entity that requires care, regeneration, and respect. The impact of our movement and work respects the Earth and its ecosystems.
Mutualistic movement
Digital nomadism and other variations of long-term travel are often portrayed as unbridled forms of freedom. But freedom without accountability is just another form of extraction. We do not believe in an individualistic vision of movement that seeks to optimize for cost-savings and self-gain without considering the impact on local communities.
Parasitism, in ecology, refers to a relationship in which one species benefits at the expense of another.
Mutualism, another ecological concept, describes an interaction between two or more species where each experiences a net benefit.
What would it look like to actually benefit the places you go?
We don’t claim to have the answers—we’re committed to listening, learning, and being shaped by those whose lands we move through. But some initial ideas:
Support local economies
Money moves power. Spending at locally-owned businesses keeps that power rooted in the community. Supporting local ownership means investing in the resilience and self-determination of the communities you're in. It’s about aligning your everyday choices with the futures locals are trying to build, and ensuring your presence strengthens existing ecosystems instead of displacing them.
Am I spending my money in ways that support extraction, or regeneration?
How does my comfort here rely on someone else’s labor, silence, or invisibility?
Is my “remote work lifestyle” pricing others out of their own city?
How might this space be different if it centered local joy instead of foreign comfort?
What colonial echoes exist in how I speak, spend, or expect?
Build relationships beyond the nomad bubble
Many digital nomads exist in parallel to the communities they inhabit, interacting primarily with other nomads. Learning the local language, engaging in cultural exchange, and participating in community projects fosters a more respectful posture towards local people and culture.
When was the last time I had a conversation that wasn’t a transaction?
Do I listen with curiosity rather than assumption?
Am I open to being changed by the relationships I form here?
Advocate for mobility justice
While some people can move freely, others are forcibly displaced due to war, climate change, and economic instability. Advocacy for mobility justice means supporting policies that extend movement rights to all people, not just the privileged few. It also means using our platforms to elevate the voices of those who do not have the same freedom to roam, such as asylum seekers, refugees, people from sanctioned countries, and the subaltern.
If someone from this place wanted to live and work in my home country, could they?
Travel slowly, thoughtfully, and with intention
Slowing down our travels not only minimizes environmental impact but allows us to deeply understand and respect the places we inhabit. Rather than consuming destinations, we integrate into them, engaging knowledge-sharing and forming real relationships.
Would I still come here if I couldn’t take photos or post about it?
If this place wasn’t “cheap,” would I still value it the same?
Is the community adapting to my needs, or am I adapting to theirs?
What am I taking for granted that someone else had to fight for?
Am I participating in reciprocity, or just consuming hospitality?
Who had to leave so I could arrive?
Is my lifestyle possible because someone else’s isn’t?
Do I treat local culture as a living system or as backdrop for my personal growth?
Am I being hosted by this place, or am I occupying it?
Measure your impact, not just your experience
Every visit leaves a mark—seen or unseen. The meals you eat, the places you stay, the ways you move through space all ripple outward. This is about presence with consequence. Mutualistic movement means making those ripples nourishing. Rather than merely focusing on what you can take from an environment, it's about focusing on what you can add that, in the perspective of locals from there, would enrich their experience.
Would my presence be welcomed by the community if they had a say?
If I left tomorrow, what would I leave behind, beyond money?
If every traveler behaved like me, what would this place look like in 10 years?
Am I showing up in ways that align with the futures locals are envisioning?
On the intentionality of "ethical" movement
The intentionality of “traveling ethically” demands some inquiry. Living in a way that is “good” shouldn’t ultimately just be a means for digital nomads to pat themselves on the back. A more apt portrait of reality is that many of the suggestions written above are good for digital nomads (as a group of people that others can form a perspective on), elevating a more responsible form of nomadism. Whether or not they are actually beneficial to locals remains less answerable than whether “trying to be ethical” does something for globe-trotting professionals.
For us, ethics isn’t a brand. It’s not a badge or a content strategy. It’s a continuous process of asking hard questions, staying accountable, and remaining open to discomfort. In a time when “ethical” is often aestheticized, watered down, or used to mask extractive practices (the greenwashing of movement, for example), we’re committed to something slower, more relational, and rooted in genuine care.
On politics
Apoliticality is its own form of politics. It's very easy to be decidedly "non-political" (broader audience, less controversy potential, palatable/non-offending to the masses), but we think that this kind of neutrality (in era of warfare, an existential planetary crisis, and the casual erosion of democracy, where real life now seems even more absurd than satirical dystopian fantasies) is flat-out immoral.
We believe that mobility is a deeply political matter, and we stand by our responsibility to engage critically with its politics.
We seek to continuously reflect, listen, and refine our thinking. This is a living document, an evolving commitment to a form of movement that respects and nurtures, rather than consumes and extracts.
Other people in other places
I’d like to end with a sentiment a lecturer of mine left me with at the end of my design degree. It’s neither remarkable nor non-obvious, but something I carry with me precisely because it’s something I feel a need to continually remind myself of despite its unremarkableness and obviousness. He said that the often small-seeming decisions we make when designing a product or service can ripple out and affect other people in other places in ways we won’t always get to see.
We’d encourage any traveler to reflect on the same. The everyday choices you make, like what accommodation you stay in or where you work from or what you eat for dinner, will all affect other people in other places. From your viewpoint, you might not even see those people or ever know who they are. The impacts may occur behind a curtain, and the deliberate hiding of those impacts may be part of the value of the service.
Talk to local people from the places you go.
Ask questions.
“Who is missing?”
“How does this look to someone else?”
“Who has the keys?”
“What was here before?”
Appendix: quotes to provoke further thought
Leaving the West to evade higher tax and higher costs of living or finding yourself is called being an entrepreneur, or a digital nomad, it is the new lifestyle. Leaving the East to get better opportunities in the West is called immigration and seen as an invasion, stealing jobs, and so on.
The digital nomad orders a coffee. The brown man serves it. Neither can see it, but the waiter is serving coffee through the bars of a cage. The brown man is chained to the land. He has the passport of a shithole country and is universally acknowledged as scum.
A white person (or a person with a white passport) can go anywhere and be a digital nomad. You have no idea what a joke that is to someone black, brown or poor. Go anywhere? Without standing in line? Without proving that you're rich? Without having a return ticket? Without being rejected? Hahahahaha. Digital nomad my ass, we’re real nomads and best left to drown at sea.
[The brown man] is chained to the place where he was born. He cannot move. He cannot visit the white man’s land, not without proving that he has money and that he has ‘skills’ the white man wants. He can’t bounce from country to country, that’s a joke. Each country wants to know exactly when and how he’ll leave. By the time you fly to Paris on a whim, he’s still applying for the visa.
My son, that little fellow wandering shirtless through your cafe, has a brown passport. If we do nothing he will remain a slave to this land, begging and groveling for any freedom to move. My daughter, the one currently stuffing her face, has a white passport. She can be a digital nomad. She can set up a nice AirBnB, use local produce and give back to the community of slaves. The world is her oyster. To him, it's just a shell.
This is why all the rage, directed at a random white guy noodling with Wordpress on his laptop. I don't care about this dude, I hope he enjoys his coffee, I hope he gets paid. But I am enraged that my brown dudes and dudettes do not have the same freedom. Let us come to your countries. After colonialism, you at least owe us the WiFi password. Let our dumbass sons and daughters peacefully eat smoothie bowls on your shores, as yours do on ours.
I'm sick of digital nomads, I'm sick of tourism and I'm sick of skilled migration. It's all a very complicated dance around a simple injustice. Some people are free and other people are in chains.
Unattributed. I read this post a long while back. It has since been deleted, presumably by its author. I will therefore not attribute the author.
Yes, the [Thai] taxi driver personally benefits when I pay him a high fare and a tip on top. His family eats well that night. But after a year, when my digital nomad friends and I have been spending our money all around town, everything is a little pricier. Every year, he is able to afford a little less. Every year, provided my currency remains strong, I am able to afford a little more.
And while I can leave, he’ll always remain a taxi driver. I can enter his world, wield my economic influence, and then leave without seeing the consequences.
Programmes like nomad visas don’t erase borders—they just redraw them at the edges. Instead of birthplace, new barriers emerge: income, profession, remote work status. And those, too, are easier to clear when you start with the right passport. A strong nationality smooths the path, making it simpler to file paperwork, prove financial stability or secure long-term stays. The rules shift here and there, but the gate is still locked for most.
This is the contradiction at the heart of the nomad movement—the people least affected by borders are the ones who get to “reject” them.
“Are digital nomads ruining everything?"
This question, or some variation of it, comes up every time I do a press interview.
Nomads are easy targets. They sip matcha lattes, drift through coworking spaces like tourists of productivity, and flood Instagram with curated sunsets.
They’re highly visible; an identifiable villain.
Rising rents? Overtourism? Cultural erosion? Blame the nomads.
But that’s too easy. The bigger imprint isn’t left by the passersby—it’s left by the settlers. The digital immigrants who arrive, stay, enrol their kids in school, and push up housing markets. This reshapes entire neighbourhoods.
They’re not the villains either, though. In fact, movement isn’t the problem at all.
It’s the world’s failure to build systems that can keep up with modern migration.
People will keep moving—arriving, passing through, settling. The question is: What will we do to integrate them?
