Outsourcing the home: the role of identity in remote work arrangements

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OUTSOURCING THE HOME:
THE ROLE OF IDENTITY IN REMOTE WORK ARRANGEMENTS

by

Andrea Alarcon

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)

August 2022

Copyright 2022 Andrea Alarcon
ii

Acknowledgements
Scholarship is a team enterprise. Even though ethnographic work is a solitary process,
there are three crucial ways in which others come into play. First is the generosity of our research
participants. I hope this dissertation presents a fair interpretation of your life circumstances,
choices and goals. Secondly, it is no joke that we are standing on the shoulders of giants. These
past six years allowed me to read the work of so many amazing scholars, something of a luxury
that I appreciated more than anything else. I aim to contribute to work accrued by scholars of the
social sciences who have channeled their curiosity into work that questions, archives and hopes
to improve the human condition.

Lastly, the people who contributed to the actual work, or to the process of getting it done.
Most of my graduate student friends played some role or contribution to my work. From
recommendations of readings, to helping me untangle the knot of analysis that my tangent-prone
mind tends to create. Thanks particularly to the accountability group: Sophia (Jeeyun) Baik and
Donna (Do-Own) Kim for your patience with my wandering ways on that first grad school paper
we published. You are incredibly kind souls, and I am glad that all your hard work has paid off.
Soledad Altrudi, you are the academic sister that I am so lucky to have met. Not only are you one
of the brightest humans I know, your complete authenticity and your loyalty to yourself are an
inspiration. Thank you so much for being a rock during this marathon. Franny Corry, your
genuine kindness, joy and dedication always kept me afloat. I hope we continue to discuss ideas,
projects, and that we remember to not take ourselves too seriously. I can't wait to continue
reading and working with you! All of you other amazing friends I was lucky to make, you
directly helped with the process: Paulina Lanz, Rachel Moran, Valentina Cantori, Lauren Sowa,
iii

Sulafa Zidani, Brooklyne Gipson, Phillip Lobo, Rogelio Lopez, Brianna Ellerbe, Sangita
Shresthova, MC Foreⅰlle, Courtney Cox, Kate Miltner,TJ Billard and Matt Bui.
The Social Media Collective in Microsoft Research is the best academic environment I
have yet to be a part of. Nancy Baym, Tarleton Gillespie and Mary Gray have managed to create
a space where incredible scholars can share their time and feedback in such a generous and
constructive way. I am so grateful I got to spend that year with you since it showed me an aspect
of this life I would have been unlikely to find elsewhere, plus leading me to decide that this was
the direction I truly wanted to go in. Nancy, your introduction to techno solutionism and how
you approached your questions of the interpersonal guide me to this day. Thank you for your
generosity and kindness. Tarleton, the way you approach questions and problems is so
admirable: thank you for the term crowdsourcing logistics, it stands as a chapter title.
I must thank Mary especially for introducing me to the world of online labor, and for
patiently guiding me as a quals and dissertation committee member. So much wisdom came from
you! Particularly that of approaching my research with compassion for those I study, the
importance of nuance, and to follow my own analytical threads. Most importantly, thank you for
seeing potential in me before I saw it myself.
To the other great scholars I met through the SMC, thank you for showing me the
diversity and depth that interdisciplinary scholarship can have. Especially thanks to Kevin
Driscoll, Lana Swartz, Sarah Brayne, Nick Seaver, Stef Duguay, Shannon McGregor, Dan
Greene, Paul Dourish, Lilly Irani, Stacy Blasiola, Aleena Chia, David Nemer, Nina Medvedeva,
Benjamin Ale-Ebrahim, Karina Rider and Niall Docherty and Caroline Jack.
My advisor Henry Jenkins is exactly the type of scholar and mentor I hope to become.
You are steadfast and thorough in your analysis, work and community commitments. True to the
iv

Birmingham School of Cultural Studies ethos, you practice what you preach: that is elevating
underrepresented voices, and more importantly, allowing us to contribute from our own
positions. I hope to balance contributions to academia to that of the general public with the same
dedication that you do. Thank you so much for your steadfast guidance and support, inspiration
and wisdom.
Hector Amaya has an approach to scholarship that is a breath of fresh air. Instead of the
disciplinary boundaries and attachment to what exists, you were open-minded enough to
understand this dissertation in spite of its specificity. Thank you for your valuable input and
feedback, and for understanding and being indeed what Stuart Hall called a diasporic
intellectual.

I also wish to thank professors at Annenberg who had a strong role in my formation:
Mike Ananny, Ben Carrington, Christina Dunbar Hester, Paul Lichterman and those patient
professors I TA’ed for Cristina Visperas and Allison Trope.

To my research subjects, thank you for giving me a window into your world and I hope to
have done it justice. To the participants from the city of Medellin, thank you so much for
teaching me and welcoming me.

Lastly, thank you to my friends and family: Fabiola Sojet, thank you for teaching me to
believe in myself: I am so grateful to have inherited your grit, strength, confidence, and the joy
of maintaining a cozy and lovely home. My tiny apartment in LA, which is such a wonderful
home and workspace, allowed me to be able to write this. Ricardo Alarcon, thank you for your
curiosity! This family trait is what led me here, since it was much more than the title or
accomplishment but rather my never-ending desire to keep learning. Daniel Alarcon, thank you
v

for understanding me and teaching me the original zen. I don’t think I could have done this
without your wisdom and humor during my neurosis. Camila Pazos, who from afar is still my
family in the US: thank you for making me feel loved with care packages and the best “card
game” in the world. Essential oils and ground coffee… no one other than you would understand
the need I had for them to be able to get through this. Lina Valencia, Mari Casij, Majo Holguin,
Caro Pombo, Ana Mora, thank you for your lifelong friendship. I would not have the attachment
I have to Colombia without it, and you also remind me to look beyond the tiny world that work-
focused life can create. To those friends in LA who supported me and reminded me there is life
outside of academia, I am eternally grateful. Mel Sepsey, Daniella Orozco and Nick Frontera,
Molly Lopez, Tom and Rebecca Asvold, Zak Norman, and so many others who were there to
support me and even read drafts of very boring things you did not understand.

vi

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements vi
List of Figures vi
Abstract x
Introduction 1
Who are They? 8
Global Connections 14
The Present of Work: Always Already Precarious 20
The Reproductive Labor of the “Majority World” 25
Methodology 28
Intervention: Supply Chains and Identity 31
Chapter Summary 38
Conclusion 40
Chapter 1: Run 42
Location-Independent Workers 43
Outsmarting (or Outrunning) the Market 45
Location Arbitrage: Using Space to Gain Time 49
Part I: Rhythms 57
More Time for Work 63
You Can Run, but you Can’t Untether 65
Retirement is Now and… Never 67
Part II: Break Free From the Office 70
Working from paradise 79
Conclusion 84
Chapter 2: Medellin, The Comeback Kid 86
Brief history of Medellin 91
Sociotechnical Imaginaries 97
vii

Competing Cities 102
Competing Narratives 105
Modernity and Infrastructure 111
A Commitment to Innovation 114
“We can’t Cover the Sun With a Thumb”: the Present Past 118
Conclusion 126
Chapter 3: Tactics 128
Community, Network or Affinity Space? 130
Part I: Crowdsourcing Logistics 134
Mobilities, Destinations and Border Crossings 139
Part II: A Nascent Market 151
De Confianza 157
The Ideal Hostess 159
Leaning Into the Dollars 163
Conclusion 165
Chapter 4: Working Online 167
The Rise of Online (freelance) Work 169
Avoiding the “Race to the Bottom” 172
Online Work and the Varied Use of Platforms 180
Maintaining Home-Nation Networks 184
Identity As Niche 188
Ethnic Intermediators 191
Conclusion 196
Chapter 5: Informal Relationships 198
Mediating Tourism 206
A Guide or a Friend? 215
Platform intermediaries: informalizing or formalizing? 218
viii

When Assumed Identities Crash: a Market View 220
Conclusion 226
Conclusion: Outsourcing the home 228
References 233
Appendix A: Methods 243
Appendix B: Interview breakdown 256

ix

List of Figures
Figure 1.1 Crowdsourced map of El Poblado neighborhood in Medellin according to locatio
independent workers
13
Figure 1. 2 Google search result image from “Digital Nomad” term search, location
unspecified.
84
Figure 1. 3 White House conversation between characters Leo McGarry, Chief of Staff,
and Jed Barlett, president, about the futility of the “war on drugs” in Fictional TV Drama
The West Wing
110
Figure 1. 4 Cable car over the Medellin comunas 113
Figure 1.5 United States Department of State’s Bureau of Consular Affairs website’s
color-coded map
122
Figure 1.6 Google search results for Colombian women
209
Figure 1.7 Major Colombian newspaper website coverage of the “polemic” surrounding
the illustration of “girls from Medellin” illustration

212
Figure 1.8 Illustration titled “Sabores de la latina”(flavors of the latina) 214
Figure 1.9 Culturally specific meme about sexual tourism
221
Figure 1.10 A Facebook interaction when perceived flattened identities are questioned 223
x

Abstract

Media representations portray the “digital nomad” as a lifestyle with unprecedented
autonomy and freedom; as– what I call location-independent workers– they blur the line between
work and leisure by letting go of a permanent home and working from the beautiful locations
they travel to. However, the rising trend cannot be separated from the increased precariousness
of workers in the countries they stem from. By hiring contract workers and freelancers,
companies relieve themselves from the costs of providing paid leave, health insurance, paid sick
days and other rights traditionally afforded to employees. The pitch to the workforce is
increased“flexibility”: that is choosing hours and not having to be present at the office, appealing
to an ethos of independence and “being your own boss”. While flexibility helps to include those
who have been traditionally left out of the workforce– such as stay at home moms or students– it
also burdens workers with the costs previously listed, plus a workspace.
In this dissertation, I argue that location-independent workers lean on the flexibility of
remote, mobile, and freelance work to subsidize their independent work. They do this by
engaging in a practice known as arbitrage: when corporations choose to hire a workforce
elsewhere due to their specific competencies and the acceptance of low wages. These workers
exemplify the individuation of the same supply chain logics, as they continue to earn Global
North wages to be spent in Global South cost of living, what I call outsourcing the home. I argue
that the arrangement relies on, at an institutional and individual identity level, longstanding
global inequalities in terms of gender,ethnicity, class, race and nationality. Offline, the ease of
mobility across borders for those with “strong passports” and a relative higher status in
xi

destinations due to relative wealth and identity. Online by retaining their “Global North” wages
via networks and homophily, successfully avoiding the race to the bottom perennial in global,
online platforms.
A macro identity I focus on is that of the city of Medellin, Colombia, one of the main
hubs which they chose as the place to outsource their life to. The city’s popularity stems from
digital word-of-mouth recommendations, a growing community of location-independent
workers. It cannot be separated from the rise in tourism due to Colombia’s 2016 peace agreement
which dramatically increased tourism, but also the city’s institutional push to branding it as
innovative and a destination for meetings and health tourism. However, local tourism officials
are battling against the international representation and narratives of Medellin as a narco capital,
which also brings the unwanted narco and sex tourism. I argue that in the arrangement of
individualized, online labor supply chain, Medellin is becoming an ideal hostess; workers and
foreign companies choose it because its a “buen vividero” (good place to live) which parallels
with the often underpaid or free, feminized labor of cleaning, cooking, welcoming hospitality
and healthcare. While Medellin works toward a sociotechnical imaginary of innovation, it is
instead creating its niche in the supply chain as a hostess city for foreign workers.

1
Introduction

So, the favorite part would be just like the complete freedom…. the nonconformity of it
all. It's just like I'm not doing the regular nine to five literally I can do, and I was working
morning cause go and play football now…I get paid really, really well…. And so, while
all my friends in London work literally, in an office, I'm doing all of these, these different
things. So, it's just that, I guess the freedom and also the opportunity in the future to say,
"I'm bored of Colombia" (laughs) never, right? – (Jeremy, interview, Medellin, 2018).

From Jeremy’s quote I want to first focus on the term “freedom.” “Freedom” has often
come hand in hand with the promise of the “frontier” and discovery of new lands to escape
repressive or antiquated systems of the old ones. “Frontier” has been endemic to colonial
endeavors, and later to imperialistic, and now to capitalist ones. The extraction of natural
resources has always been the next “frontier” of global capitalism . In her books on
globalization, particularly Friction, Anna Tsing shows the on-the ground tensions happening in
one specific site of global encounter in Indonesia. In this sense it is less about the finding of
resources, than finding them in a place and circumstance not already bound by regulation. This
essential quality of capitalism, of finding an untapped resource or “innovative” way to enter the
existing markets has also been part of Silicon Valley’s mode of operation. However, that one
depends more on the “frontier” of the lack of regulation surrounding technological development,
and how, at their speed, regulators continue to lag.
2
The link I aim to make between these larger and macro logics of capital disruption is
how they are exemplified by individual workers like Jeremy. I hone into the city of Medellin,
Colombia, one of the rising hubs in the region. I refer to those from the city and region as
Paisas
1
. The dissertation centers on identity: of Medellin as a city, of location-independent
workers to position themselves high in the labor supply chain, and identity as it is negotiated
individually with each other and with the locals they encounter. For this reason, my own identity
plays a role on how I frame the project, but also on what data I had access to.
I identify with what Scholar Stuart Hall calls a “diasporic intellectual” (Hall, 1996): he
found his diaspora of black scholars and activists in England, but it was a diaspora of a diaspora:
Caribbean people were already a diaspora from Africa and all the other immigrant populations. I
left Colombia at the age of fourteen, in part because my mother got a decent job at a bank in
Florida, but also, as I learned much later, we had been threatened. The early 2000s was a
particularly violent time in Colombia, and my father, working in media, received threats to
kidnap us, the way most people in the media industry did at some point or another. Therefore he
allowed us to come; as divorced parents they agreed we would spend most of the year in the
U.S., but every summer and winter breaks back in Colombia with him. I have always remained
in love with my country, and in a way assimilated much less than many first-generation
immigrants who arrive during their formative years. One reason for that was the big Colombian
diaspora in Florida, which was my community in both high school and college. The other was
that my mother and brother returned years later once it was safer, and I decided to stay in college
at the University of Florida. The back and forth, double citizenship, and feelings of belonging
and not belonging that Hall describes as the “diasporic experience” (1996, p. 492) in both

1
This term, stemming from the Spanish apocope of Paisano (countryman) since it is how they
call themselves, and how the rest of the country identifies them.
3
nations both informs and guides my work. Those of us in this space have an innate sense of study
of the cultural with our everyday embodiments and comparisons we inevitably make. Hall
describes it:
….what Simmel talked about: the experience of being inside and outside, the “familiar
stranger.” We used to call that “alienation,” or deracination. But nowadays it’s come to
be the archetypal late-modern condition. Increasingly, it’s what everybody’s life is like.
So that’s how I think about the articulation of the postmodern and the postcolonial.
Postcoloniality, in a curious way, prepared one to live in a ‘postmodern’ or diasporic
relationship to identity. Paradigmatically, it’s a diasporic experience. Since migration has
turned out to be the world-historical event of late modernity, the classic postmodern
experience turns out to be the diasporic experience. (“The formation of a diasporic
intellectual,” 1996, p. 492)
The diaspora is defined by historical conjunctures of the personal and the structural. Hall
argues in his essays that in this sense the question of identity is slightly different from a
postmodernist “nomadic,” because “identity is not fixed, it’s always hybrid.” It is specific and
never loses that specificity: it can constitute a “positionality”: “So each of those identity-stories
is inscribed in the positions we take up and identity with, and we have to live this ensemble of
identity-positions in all its specificities.” (p. 504). In this sense, the subjects of my study and my
own identity intersect. Nonetheless the power embedded in the terms “immigrant” vs “expat” is a
subject of discussion for scholars of mobilities: I met foreigners who wished to become
residents, but not citizens, of Colombia. The specificity of each identity and its intersections with
race, ethnicity, nationality but also gender and class makes broad generalizations impossible in
4
the study of the cultural, yet we know that the structural is there, which is what I aim for in this
piece of work.
Hall calls this specificness and non-fixedness of race, nationality, and ethnicity the
“fateful Triangle” (Hall & Gates, 2017). In Colombia, the three of those are understood much
differently than in the U.S. My black maternal grandmother married my Ukrainian-Jewish
refugee grandfather. My brother and I are darker than our parents, who moved from the Pacific-
coast Cali to Bogota due to my father’s quick ascend in the world of media. They did something
that is much rarer in Colombia than in the United States, which is work their way up the socio-
economic ladder. My very white Colombian father had little trouble adapting, just smoothing out
his Cali accent over time; my mother, however, told me she always felt out of place with the
wives of important men, who were usually blond, thin, and spent their summers in Europe. She
created her own space by being the first in her family to go to college, with her chemical
engineering degree, and through her I was able to see how in Colombia, class whitens.
I had never thought of myself as part of a race because I am a product of miscegenation: a
mix so many times over tracing it is close to an impossibility. This is the case of about 85 percent
of Colombians; 10 percent identify as Afro-Colombian, and five as native Colombians (DANE).
However, even within those of us mixed, colorism is evident like in most Latin American
countries: one only needs to look at celebrity magazines or television programs to see light skin
Colombians over-represented, and darker skin, native or black Colombians almost invisible. In
school I always knew I had darker skin than my friends, but I was also taller than the whole
class, so to me it was just all part of being different. Moving to the US was the first time I was
asked what race I was, and until this day I cannot fully answer that question. My ethnic identity
5
as Latinx became clear since the moment I landed, but those of us part of it know the vast
variations in skin color– and shades– class, culture, and nationalities that it encompasses.
My curiosity began when I, with my newly minted U.S. passport as a naturalized citizen,
decided to go backpacking through Asia at 25. Doing this as a brown woman, alone, gave me
another interesting view of my positionality. For example, Thai locals assumed I was Indian and
would serve me vegetarian food without asking me. In Bali, the host of my guest house would
wink at me when I said I was South American and would ask “but part of you is Indonesian
right?” and refused to believe my story. He wasn’t alone: more than one local assumed I was
trying to pass myself off as foreign. Another experience of the racially mixed is exactly that:
people categorize you depending on context. In Bali I met another Colombian traveler, who
asked me how I could possibly be jumping from one country to the next with a Colombian
passport. He lived in Australia and getting his visa to Indonesia had taken weeks. I relayed that
with my US passport I was able to procure visas on arrival. Indeed, one of my main reasons for
wanting to be a US citizen was the ability to travel easily.
I began seeing many foreigners working online from Bali and learned about digital
nomads. I heard of the term while looking up information online, I did not see it nor heard it used
offline. While my first impression was, how can I do this? In a way that many of my
interviewees related feelings as well, although for me it was indeed fleeting. I also felt that hard-
to-describe uneasiness that surfaced during my travels as I entered mostly white backpacking
spaces. A sense of the space I was touching as both benefiting, but also being damaged, by my
presence. The contradiction stands as one of the main dichotomies of tourism, which I ended up
reading about for this project. The trip happened in 2012, before my masters, meaning much
before I had even considered an academic path. I was already, as Hall describes, aware of my
6
body transgressing lines and norms as an immigrant and as a very independent young woman.
The trip gave another axis for it; While I strictly adhered to religious or cultural expectations,
such as always wearing long pants despite the heat, and covering myself when appropriate, it
was the tourist mold I didn’t fit. More than once I was purposefully ignored in different
establishments, particularly in the Muslim islands of Indonesia. I was semi adopted by an
Argentinian family so I could get served at a restaurant. I assumed locals assumed I was a sex
worker, because they may not have had any other context in which to understand a single,
brown woman in her twenties traveling alone. A white woman alone is another crazy Westerner:
what was I?
I remained in the listservs and groups of digital nomads, eventually witnessing how
Medellin in my native Colombia kept popping up as an ideal destination. I did my pre-study in
2018: while I travel around the country a lot, I had only been to Medellin once as a child. My
identity and positionality matter in my study for several reasons. First, to people from Medellin,
it is obvious I am not from there only by looking at me. While the city has immigrants from other
parts of the country, they are never considered “fully paisas.” The department of Antioquia is the
whitest in the country. How this is attached to the narrative of self-sufficiency and
exceptionalism (i.e., they are the “hardworking people” of the nation, is a longer analysis for a
future project) but it is evident when walking into spaces like RutaN, which aim to look Silicon
Valley-esque. To foreign nationals, however, it is not so clear that I am not from there, and I had
more than one of the men I interviewed drastically change their demeanor after meeting me
offline and hearing my American accent. I was able to easily move around the city: I sound like
I’m from Bogota when I speak Spanish. But even this often elicited that friendly rivalry from the
7
locals I met and interviewed, as in yes, we understand why you would want to study our city
instead of yours.
An important part of what both Hall and Fanon focus on is the lived experience of
identity and how the structural cannot be separated from the personal and psychological. I follow
Stuart Hall’s critique of the purely class-focused analytic of capitalism, as well as the feminist
critique since it invisibilizes the non-value-producing work that is reproductive labor. What is it
that makes a destination “good” to work from? The characteristics of course differ from general
tourism. Cartagena with its walled city on the ocean is the country’s main tourist attraction.
Outdoor lovers tend to head to Barichara, the Amazon jungle, or even rock climbing in Suesca in
the department of Cundinamarca. The rise of tourism to the country intersects, and many argue is
due to, the historical juncture of the Colombian peace agreement in 2016, which removed the
country from the “blacklists” of international tourism. Travel agencies and insurance companies
in the marketing and coverage of a destination usually adhere to the U.S State Department’s
advisories.
The dissertation shows how identity is created and recreated in specific moments of
encounters between “guests” and “hosts,” whether mediated in traditional media, social media,
or face-to-face. In this project I negotiate my identity as a researcher, as a Colombian native, as
an American scholar, but also as a Colombian who empathizes with local cultural desire to
change the international narrative about their nation. The tension evidenced itself in my
discussion of the country’s identity in the international imaginary as the narco nation: like one of
my interviewees said, I cannot “cover the sun with a thumb.” That is, there is no discussing the
country nor Medellin without this, even if I want to help the city move past it. I had to learn to
conceal my anger when one of my interviewees offered me cocaine, since I had never seen it
8
before. My Colombian experience has only involved it in its consequences, that is, in the
violence that it produces. Not wishing to focus on the narco narratives is not a failure to deal
with reality, it is rather reflective of my perspective, which has a much broader scope and
hopefully allows for nuance and insight into the causes and consequences of that reality. When I
first arrived in the U.S., whenever someone said to me “ah Colombia, cocaine!” I was quick to
anger, even getting into an altercation with a geography teacher in the ninth grade. The reasons
for the annoyance many Colombians display at this are manifold: first, it is of course,
simplification and overdetermination of a national identity. The second is that it is not a joking
matter: All Colombians abroad have these stories, but many of us are also abroad because we
have a large number of displaced people within, and from our country, and while much of this
was the political conflict, as I explain in chapter 2, for about 50 years or so it has had something
to do with narcotrafficking.
This leads to the third reason for the quick offense: the lack of awareness by drug users of
the harm, violence, and death that their illegal substance of choice creates. If they are not
unaware but rather apathetic, then why bring it up? The abstract “war-on-drugs” rarely allows
Americans or Europeans to note that while their governments spend money fighting it, the sum
roughly equals that which their citizens spend on purchasing it. They are financing both sides of
the conflict, and non-involved Colombians, which are a substantial majority, are left in the
middle. Many farmers are forced to grow coca either by violent threats or economic ones, much
of the youth of Medellin’s lives predetermined by the introduction of guns into the comunas. It is
the lack of linking their own culpability to death elsewhere that strikes the nerve of Colombians
when foreigners ask for or reference cocaine, rather than embarrassment or bruised ego. While
that one interviewee offered me the drug, the rest, likely aware of this nerve, and given my
9
identity, were vague about, or denied drug use as a reason to come. In fact, this separated them
from the many tourists they had met that they wanted nothing to do with. In my analysis I take
them at their word, after all, I have had many friends visit me and the country, and it is indeed
incredibly beautiful and worth seeing. I take them at their word because assuming concealment
from my interviewees falls into the same trap of over-determination that occurs between
“tourists” and “locals” (as explained in chapter 5).
Who are they?
Through the dissertation I argue that location-independent workers are using the same
logics of global capital to improve their relative position in transnational supply chains. They do
this by finding a “new” way of living that blurs the normative and legislative lines between
leisure and work, home and abroad, and business and tourist visas, legal and illegal consumption.
Analytically, they are blurring lines that as scholars we are keen and aware of their cultural
meanings and their political consequences, such as productive from reproductive labor, formal
and informal work, and professional and personal relationships. It is not necessarily the
discovery of something new, but rather a way of moving through existing structures that
confounds some of the old.
The “global” becomes apparent both in the online, productive realm, and the offline,
reproductive one, as the location-independence leads them to meet the “majority world” when
venturing into both. This happens two ways: first, as work becomes more fissured and more
workers move into freelance and independent work, the more it resembles informality (discussed
further ahead). This means that the online-only on-demand economy may be replacing full-time
employment in the developed nations of their clients, but it is entering the always-existing and
prevalent informality of the rest of the world’s workers. Online labor platforms bring the
10
precarity rising in industrialized economies directly to meet the informality in poorer ones.
Secondly, by moving their offline, physical bodies across borders, via the regulatory gray areas
surrounding remote work, they are “disrupting” existing regulations that are based on
jurisdictions of the nation state. The “frontier” lies on the lack of classificatory status to define
what they are doing.
I found Jeremy in a group that uses the term “digital nomad,” which, according to MBO
partners 10.9 million Americans in 2020 described themselves as, up from 7.3 million in 2019.
They define it as people who work remotely and tend to travel from place to place. Like with
independent workers at large, “digital nomads” defy a single definition in terms of age, income
level, sex, profession, or motivation. According to MBO, while, by and large, it’s a young, male
population, 31% are female and more than half (54%) are older than 38. It is particularly popular
among Baby Boomers, as many are delaying retirement or choosing to “unretire” into
independent work. They work full- and part-time. While 38% earn less than $10,000 annually,
one in six (about 790,000) earn $75,000 or more each year.
Although I found most of my participants via online groups that utilize the term “Digital
Nomad” in their title, they rarely use it to identify themselves, and almost never offline. They
would say it reluctantly to me like “I don’t consider myself a digital nomad because…. Although
I guess it could apply since….” The reasons for this vary, but a main one is the not seeing
themselves as “nomadic” enough, or “working” enough for one who was mostly traveling while
working on his entrepreneurial venture. The blurriness of the term makes the studies like the
MBO studies, approximations. The numbers are part of the attempt to capture it as a research
category if it is, like Müller (2016) says, a “buzzword”. While most of my interviewees did
spend only a couple of months in Medellin as they traveled through Colombia or Latin America,
11
others had fewer specific plans of movement. For example, a couple of my interviewees had
decided to stay in Medellin “for now,” particularly through COVID19, and while still on tourist
visas, they did not have the desire of moving to a different country at the end of it. Jeremy for
example, spent some of his time in London, and the rest in Medellin, even while taking an
occasional trip. Some had already been there years after marrying a local but continued working
remotely for clients in their native countries to where they plan to return eventually. One arrived
in Colombia and started his own non-alcoholic beverage business but started working for an
Australian company online when lockdown shut down his clients’ clubs.
A second reason to avoid the term was to distance themselves from the popular
understanding and trendiness of the “cultural avatar” discussed by Bozzi. They mentioned the
bad connotations and associations of self-indulgence and a “tech bro vibe” as one of my female
interviewees put it. Because of this, I will refer to my interviewees as location-independent
workers since I want to look at the phenomenon on a wider scale. It also follows Burawoy’s
(1998) call to highlight the subjects’ self-description, meaning and use of terms instead of
imposing my own. In this dissertation I argue that the term Digital Nomad, while also in its use
now a “buzzword” or “research category” Müller (2016), as a meta-tactic. Rather than attempt a
taxonomy or definitions for categorization, I build on what anthropologist Michael Jackson,
2012) calls the “pragmatic efficacy” of beliefs: [rather] “than in the epistemological veracity of
the beliefs they espouse” (p.35). That is, rather than focusing on the relevance, meaning,
existence, parameters of belonging or cultural construction of the term, I focus on its pragmatic
use by the workers themselves. It even reflects my own pragmatic efficacy, given that in their
variation in work, nationality, ages, and legal status, I found them all through the usage of the
term.
12
I base the analysis on thirty-five interviews with location-independent workers since
2018. While the literature on the on-demand economy tends to separate “high skilled” from “low
skilled” online labor, this differentiation can become problematic given that all skill levels are
involved in both. While scholarship on online crowd work, such as that often done by workers on
Amazon Mechanical Turk shows the use of the platform both by people supplementing their
income and those who use it as a main source of income, my interviewees classified themselves
mostly as freelancers, independent contractors or by their specific trade, and did not engage in
smaller-task work, rather project or client-based word. I also interviewed fifteen service
providers, Colombian and Venezuelan, who intersect with them in several ways, including
service providers such as rental agents, to government officials in the Medellin tourism sector.
(See Appendix B for breakdown of interviewees). In this sense, what I aim to do with this
dissertation is look at the various levels of work at play in one case of remote work by “Global
North”
2
individuals “Global South” destinations as temporary homes. I choose these categories
because I thought they mostly encompassed the group, yet of course there are exceptions in the
demographics and nationalities. However, they did all speak English fluently. While my
dissertation appeared as something niche, the questions became more forcibly relevant due to the
pandemic.
The logic behind the location-independent workers became more evident in what turned
out to be an almost natural experiment of my argument: the COVID19 pandemic and the rise of
working from home. For example, it brought up questions such as: If their workers can work
from anywhere, why are companies paying their employees such high salaries to live in the Bay

2
The reproduction of the categorical distinctions, like “center” and “periphery” “developed” and “developing”
“north” and “south” replicate epistemic privilege. However, I take on Julian Go’s approach of from feminist post-
positivist standpoint theory, which recognizes situatedness of knowledge, but shifts from essential identity towards a
relational one.
13
Area? It went the other way around: if they must work from home and cannot enjoy the life
there, why would New Yorkers stay in cramped apartments? If companies don’t have to pay for
headquarters, where does the labor of sociality go to? Who maintains spaces of work, who is
supporting it? Is income tax dependent on where workers are, or where companies are? What
happens to the service industry existing in these expensive cities? This dissertation aims to
interrogate a case of global encounter. It aims to answer the questions: what are the motivations
behind this individual choice? What is the labor hidden behind this trans-national work
arrangement? What are the political, material, and cultural intersections that make Medellin a
destination? How are identities on the ground created, mediated and re-produced?
Figure 1.1
Crowdsourced map of El Poblado neighborhood in Medellin according to location-
independent workers
14

Note. Nomadlist.com. [Screenshot]. Retrieved: February 1st, 2019.
My research makes an empirical contribution to the field of global communication, by
exploring how global narratives of place, as well as global connectivity function within existing
cultural paradigms. It does this via an ethnographic approach to the questions of global
communication. For this I focus on how the internet serves as a way of accessing work at a
global level, but also as a way of sharing information about movement at the local one. It also
shows how several types of “guests” interact with the local depending on their socio-political
origin. Lastly it contributes to the theory-building surrounding the role of identity in labor, how
it is reproduced, particularly as the way to rearrange supply value chains, with whiteness as an
unsinkable safety net, and the city of Medellin as an ideal hostess. Instead of focusing online on
15
the mobility aspect of the internet, I show the importance and intersection with the static, cultural
and material.
Global Connections
In modernity, transatlantic cables of the internet are more prevalent and centered around
the material and social centers of capital (Starosielski, 2015). Although not formal empires, what
we think of as “center” in the West remains mostly attached to the historical centers of power
due to economic dependency and postcolonial hegemonic order. Scholars such as (Castells,
1999, 2009) and (Appadurai, 2001) describe the instances of non-national dependent connections
facilitated by and facilitating globalization. In his trilogy The Network Society, Castells shows
how financial, social, and infrastructural networks maintain connections and flows of the
cosmopolitan elite. He coined the concept of “space of flows” , an abstract conceptualization of
the constant movement and interaction of space and time. They are “the material arrangements
that allow for simultaneity of social practices without territorial contiguity. It is not only
electronic space, but also all the material infrastructural arrangements that allow for it.” Arjun
Appadurai popularized the terms “scape”: ethnoscapes, technoscapes, mediascapes, ideoscapes
and financescapes. He emphasizes the chaotic nature of these flows and argues that they
supersede standard geographical thinking in social-cultural analysis.
I found the places that relate to location-independent work more akin to what (Foucault &
Miskowiec, 1986) called “heterotopias” in their book Of Other Spaces(1986). It harks back to
the utopian dreams attached to technology but attaching it to existing places a type of utopia that
does happen to exist. He mentions gardens, brothels, motel rooms, cemeteries, libraries and
museums, all of which are “outside of all places” .While Foucault originally used the term for
places that took in people in “crisis” such as a hospital, or mental institution, he also says that
16
they are being replaced by “what we might call heterotopias of deviation: those in which
individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed.”
(1986, p.5) Lastly, heterotopias “function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute
break with their traditional time” (1986, p.6) The space that location-independent workers have
managed to find depends on the “time” meaning that it is not yet formal or regulated.
Nonetheless, while the analysis in this dissertation crosses what could fall under these
descriptions of in-between, or unbounded places, this project takes an ethnographic approach that
grounds the social and material constructions of these socio technical arrangements. It follows
scholar Greg Downey’s approach, who in his piece (Downey, 2001) argues that abstract terms
can lead to invisibilizing the human labor required in the creation and maintenance of the
international connections. The abstraction, both in academic analysis, but also in the normative,
individual view of the massive scale, leads to the taken-for-grantedness of infrastructure (Star,
1999). Zooming in can also reveal the sociotechnical path dependencies. Internet infrastructure,
for example, was created via the path dependence on phone lines, which followed telegraph
lines. They developed to coordinate action and logistics of trains that crossed the United States.
This link, communication scholar James Carey (2008) argues, is how communication and
transportation have always been linked. In his chapter on the Telegraph, Carey argues that the
technology aided in the expansion and maintenance of Empire, by allowing a remote center to
manage and therefore have control over a remote territory.
In this sense, location-independent work can easily erase or obscure the role of the
location itself that allows for the work to happen. First, where an individual can travel also
depends on existing infrastructural and social realities. For example, Avianca, Colombia’s
airline, was the second airline in the world. This was in great part because the central location of
17
Bogota, perched 2600 meters in the Cundiboyacense plateau meant driving down the winding
mountains and across jungles. Most of my life, traveling from Bogota to Miami was cheaper and
easier than traveling from Bogota to the coast. American airlines could keep operational costs
lower and therefore had many more lines and availability between the countries. This has
changed radically since, and now flights to Colombia are one of the cheapest destinations from
the United States. Historically, Colombia is one of the last political allies that the United States
government has in the region.
Transportation and communication have always been connected. As explained by Carey,
the original form, letters, depended on literal material movement of communication. The idea of
the “frontier,” which is the motivating narrative behind all imperialist and colonial projects,
depended on what rule of law existed yonder and how those who got there first would be able to
reap the benefits of the natural resources not yet claimed. Technology as the way to do so is also
well established within Science and Technology Studies study at the dilemma of technological
determinism (M. R. Smith & Marx, 1994). Technological determinist stories in the popular
imagination posit the machine or invention as the catalyst for a specific change or a historical
“progress.”

Unlike other, more abstract forces to which historians often assign determinative power
(for example, socio economic, political, cultural, and ideological formations), the
thingness or tangibility of mechanical devices-their accessibility via sense perception-
helps to create a sense of causal efficacy made visible p. (xi)
In the same volume M.L. Smith describes Currier & Ives lithograph “Across the Continent:
Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way”, which depicts the East settlers moving into the
18
West with a railroad, town construction etc, while on the other side of the tracks are the Native
Americans who reside in darkness and will soon see the infrastructural progress coming through
the territory. “The image combines frontier mythology with state-of-the-art technology” p.42.
Technology to progress, without much contextualization of who is deciding this progress, what
the consequences may be, and whether it is helping in keeping or reproducing existing social
inequalities is rarely explored when the technology is being created. This dissertation shows
how individual hopes of “freedom” come together with collective hopes of “progress” from the
city of Medellin, Colombia.
While, as I will explain in chapter 2, Medellin’s history in the country is that of
entrepreneurship and innovation. It led to the nation’ industrialization via the textile industry. I
chose Medellin for several reasons. First, my positionality would aid me in understanding the
nuances that often escape us in scholarship of homogenization, speed, and the global. As a born-
and-raised Colombian, I grew up in Bogota, often hearing about, even if not visiting, Medellin.
The two cities have the type of friendly competition often occurring between the two biggest
urban centers within nations. While Bogota is the default center of the country, and one fourth of
Colombia’s population lives there, it is often mocked by the rest of the country for being cold,
rainy, with unbearable traffic and lacking public transportation. I always heard of Medellin as
beautiful, I knew its people as proud, white, and conservative. When I moved to the U.S in 2001
after my family was threatened, I suddenly was thrust into a diaspora of Colombians from all
over the country which I would not have met in Bogota. Paisas are easy to spot: Their sing-songy
accent translates over to English. Some girls I had biology class with would sell candy and
Colombian bathing suits in class and would joke about their paisa hustling.
19
The dreams of individual agency in relationship to labor manifested through the myth of
the “electronic cottage.” It assumed that much productive activity would take place from inside
the home (Forester, 1988). The dream of working from home came hand in hand with the
development of the internet. The myth can be broken via two levels of analysis: first, how
invisibility of work has historically led to invisibility of workers. There are many reasons why
working from home, although available since the inception of the internet for many office
workers, did not pick up in practice. One of them is around the politics of visibility. The white
collar ends the norms surrounding control, surveillance and sociality of workers remained strong
in offices.
Scholars of gender in the workplace have noted that those employees who pick
“telework” as an option are informally placed in what is called the “mommy track” given it is
usually new mothers who opt for it. They found correlation between workers who have more
facetime with managers and career advancement: unrelated to quality or how productive they
are, their presence is interpreted as greater commitment, and they are therefore more likely to get
promoted. The subject of visibility and invisibility of labor is present in both studies of
technology, and studies of global capitalism: the alienated worker, the far-away factory worker.
The remote worker is simply the most recent, visible iteration. The more extreme version of this
occurrence is what Gray, and Suri called “Ghost Work,” which is all the work that has been
broken into tasks, projects, or temporary work, invisibilizing workers themselves. While they
interviewed Mechanical Turk workers in India, they showed how taking on tasks in the on-
demand economy allows for a non-hiring of workers but rather provides a type of electronic
piece work. COVID served as an event that required working from home, suddenly bringing the
20
questions of outsourced workers as more relevant to many information workers in the countries
that usually do the outsourcing.
This leads to the second analytical point, which is the blurring of the lines created by
capital and named by Marx between productive and reproductive labor. The role of reproductive
labor in the study of globalization is often neglected, even though capital has always depended
on it. Amidst the “chaos” of the global, however, are always places. Scholar Arturo Escobar
(Escobar, 2001) claims that “Culture sits in places”, meaning this link is not gone despite the
global encroaching. I would argue that “life sits in places” as well. What it does explain,
however , is that the lack of attachment or commitment to place is endemic to capital despite its
reliance on it. This is well explained by Katz in her paper “Vagabond capitalism and the
necessity of Social Reproduction,” it is this continuous lack of commitment to place that
continues with the exploitation of capital. At its most basic, Katz explains:
it hinges upon the biological reproduction of the labor force, both generationally and
daily, through the acquisition and distribution of the means of existence, including food,
shelter, clothing, and health care. According to Marxist theory, social reproduction is
much more than this; it also encompasses the reproduction of the labor force at a certain
(and fluid) level of differentiation and expertise (Katz, 2001) p.711)
Social reproduction is secured through a shifting constellation of sources encompassed within the
broad categories of the state, the household, capital, and civil society (Katz p. 711).
It “always takes place somewhere, and the environments for its enactment are integral to its
outcomes.” It is exemplified in the tension between government and capital: in its micro version,
it is the household work often done for free, generally by women. In its macro version, it is
schools, hospitals, and government agencies that are also, often, staffed by women. “In other
21
words, a politics focused on social reproduction reconnects culture, environment, and political
economy in opposition to capitalist globalization across a wide and differentiated terrain” (Katz,
p. 719). Katz cites Frances Fox Piven (1999) who states that capitalists and the capitalist state
“have retreated from commitments to the social wage because they could”. Katz emphasizes that
there has been little effective resistance to the mobility of capitalist production and the neoliberal
practices it fosters.
The way this circles back to my analysis, is that location-independent workers are
engaging this “because they can.” Regulation and taxation are based on physical grounding.
What these location-independent workers are doing falls in line with the practices of companies
who outsource their service work, or startups that are “disrupting” by avoiding existing
regulation by falling under old classifications of work, like Uber and Airbnb calling themselves
technology companies rather than transportation or hospitality, they are technically “tourists” in
the countries where they work from. The constantly mobile appearance of this work tends to
obscure the fact that space and their relationship to it does not disappear.
The Present of Work: Always Already Precarious
In this dissertation I argue that these workers are “a case of” how capital always must be
running, so it is, by its definition, precarious. In this section I want to show how the “precarity”
of the “Global North” meets the “informality” of the “Global South.” The term precarity is used
in both political and academic contexts in richer economies. Most recently, it has been invoked
to describe the rise of on-demand economy platforms. Much scholarship on the rise of Uber,
TaskRabbit and other on-demand economy platforms has focused on the precarity embedded in
the design of these sociotechnical systems, particularly in relationship to worker’s rights
obtained due to 19th and 20th century labor movements in the U.S. and in Europe.
22
I follow anthropologist Kathleen Millar’s (2017)’s breakdown of the terms “precarity”
and “informality” as they have been normalized. First, she questions and breaks down the use of
the term “precarious” between analytical and political purposes. Focusing on the analytical, she
traces the origin of its use as attached to wages to Bourdieu’s (1998)) use of précarité in a
critique on the rise of temporary worker, part‐time, and casualized employment in France in the
late 1990s. He was referencing a concept from his early work, which examined the experience of
unemployed and underemployed workers in Algeria in the 1960s: Travail et Travailleurs en
Algérie (Bourdieu et al., 1963) This cycle of the word demonstrates this argument, meaning his
description of a developing country was what he was now seeing in France. He later said that
that earliest work was the most relevant analysis for contemporary scholarship of work.
From this perspective the term refers to precarious work, —characterized by job
insecurity, temporary or part‐time employment, a lack of social benefits, and low wages. Arne
Kalleberg (2009, 2) defines precarious work as “employment that is uncertain, unpredictable,
and risky from the point of view of the worker.”” (Millar, 2017, p. 3). This is also what often
defines entrepreneurship, and creating one’s own business then, much riskier than accepting a
salary in an existing, successful one. An example of this was studied by Gina Neff, Silicon Alley
workers in New York City left their “cushy” jobs to join this risky workforce, since it took them
from workers to potential business owners since equity is often part of the payment for startup
hires but could have benefits and pension packages. Hodgson (1998) writes that: “the distinction
in practice between employment and self-employment all the more difficult to uphold” (p.39). In
the most recent modern era, particularly with that rise of temporary worker, part time, contract
and outsourced work that was at that point beginning to emerge. While having a full-time job is
less precarious than those, Hodgson argues the employment contract to be “a convenient fiction,
23
couched in the individualistic categories of modern contract law, which in fact masks the social
and co-operative character of all productive activity.” (p.133) What Millar argues then, is that
waged labor is precarious: having to depend on an income, whose provenance is always bound to
change, means that work under capital is always precarious. Full time jobs, benefits, unions, and
other protections are ways of minimizing something that is inherent in the system that they live
in.
The way this is linked to the current study is the Decline of the Middle class (Rifkin,
2004)) in the US and the West. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 52 % of
today’s employers sponsor workplace benefits of any kind. (Gray, Suri, 2014, xxiii). What I
found among my interviewees was that the sacrifice of leaving home was not too great, because
they were mostly already living relatively precariously as contractors or freelancers. They are not
losing benefits nor vacation days. The conclusion is, if already taking on the risks of
entrepreneurs, why not actually be one? The two sides of the same coin when the argument for
contract workers, and more recently, the on-demand economy, surface. On the one side is the
“flexibility” of working hours, not having to respond to a boss, and power over their schedule.
This is almost flowing, or responding day-to-day, to the ebbs and flows inherent in capital as it
intersects with life. The other end is the “precarity” of lacking insurance, retirement, paid leave
or sick leave, and the unpaid time spent finding new work. The flexibility means that this
provisional work is “always available” as a backup, a way of earning supplemental income, in
summary, as a one of those responses to the unpredictability of the labor market. Describing the
online on-demand economy, Gray & Suri found on their study of on-demand platforms, this new
way of working is:
A world in which steady work and salaries are being replaced by a chaotic string of small
24
projects and micropayments, and human bosses are being replaced by automated
processes that are programmed to oversee a far-flung workforce of anonymous
independent contractors. (Gray, xxvii)
What this is doing, however, is bringing the increased precarity of the “Global North”
into contact with the always already precarious “Global South” via the internet. As many Global
South scholars have noted, and Millar emphasizes, the prevalence of the term “precarity, ” either
as a description of this fissurization of labor, or as a political strategy, simply does not apply to
most of the world. As explained by Neilson & Rossiter, Fordism has been a historical and
geographical exception: most of the world has not known, now or in its history, the security of a
9-5 job with benefits and paid leave (Neilson & Rossiter, 2008). “Precarity appears new and
exceptional only from the perspective of Western Europe and other highly industrialized
countries” (Millar, 2017, p. 6). Millar also brings in the description of precarity by bell hooks,
who although not using the word, argues that life is precarious, although of course, more to some
than others and there is where inequalities are.

Based on his study of productive activities in Ghana, Hart (1973) coined the term
“formal sector” as consisting of regulated economic activities and the “informal sector” of all
those lying beyond the scope of regulation. He stated that he had with this cheated ethnography,
because defining the realm of productive activities that happen within that which he labeled
“informal” allowed economists and many scholars to always be defining it as what it is not. The
separation buckets all sorts of activities under informality: from street vendors to unpaid
domestic work, subsistence labor, sex work, criminal activity to artists, undeclared income for
formal services such as cash payments to doctors. The separation leaves the unmarked category
25
of the formal under “the economy” as its own formalized system; the informal is simply that
which “lacks'' formality. As J.K. Gibson-Graham (2006) has argued, the problem is not only that
the economy has become naturalized by the failure to deconstruct this concept, but that this has
attributed to the (capitalist) economy an internal coherence and totalizing force.
Precarity and informality intersect in a few ways. First, entrepreneurship and
“independent” work often start in informality. A 2008 UN Habitat report estimated that 85
percent of all new employment worldwide occurs outside formal relations of production (UN
Habitat 2008). Informal labor is bracketed from formal labor via market definitions: work that is
not regulated, taxed, recorded or acknowledged by official entities, whether waged or unwaged.
While in developed economies it appears more marginal, it occupies at least half of economic
activity in developing ones. It also intersects with the on-demand economy in that by being
outside traditional definitions of labor and capital, informal work is precarious because it does
not count with the legally mandated protections.

While precarity and informality do not mean the same (i.e. freelancers in the U.S pay
taxes and are technically formal even if precarious, and the life of rural to urban migrants in
Mumbai’s slums or Brazil’s favelas are certainly precarious even if they found stable
employment) the terms shows the different meanings that they have had in the scholarship and
their socio economic contexts. The term has not been fully absent, but its use is mostly constant
in comparison in the dream to achieve this labor “stability” of industrialized nations. Millar
highlights how scholars working in the Global South approached it not as a fixed category or
object but as a “method of inquiry that asks how unstable work relates to fragile conditions of
life in particular times and places.” (Das & Randeria, 2015; Hewison & Kalleberg, 2012; Lee &
26
Kofman, 2012; Millar, 2014; Paret, 2016; Schierup & Jørgensen, 2016).” Bringing the terms
together also shows both as inherent in, supporting of, and inherent to capitalism, and although
experienced quite differently to those within it, it is: “The very condition of having to depend on
a wage to sustain one's life is what makes a worker precarious—not just the specific structures of
this or that job” (Barchiesi, 2012a; Denning, 2010 cited by Millar, 2017, p. 6)
The Reproductive Labor of the “Majority World”
Given the costs shifting to individuals, and as they function as companies, their costs, as
the only workers, are the ones that need to be reduced. This dissertation shows how home, or
rent, and food, as the main expenses of the worker, as the driving logic for choosing the city of
Medellin to work from. In economic terms, this is known as arbitrage: finding the best place for
a particular labor, and the cheapest. The “best” is more subjective, particularly when it comes to
the home. This is where the separation of work and life fully dissolves: i.e., many middle-class
workers have had access to poorer economies via vacation. Americans do not vacation in droves
to Mexico and the Caribbean necessarily because the beaches are better, they are just indeed
cheaper. The experience of the vacation depends on cheaper labor costs in the hospitality
industry.
Formal economies are what the global economic entities can quantify, legitimize,
legislate and tax. However, this leaves out a vast amount of productive activity, whether
economic or not, “invisible” or “intangible.” The creation of waged labor, industrialization, the
workday, and allotted vacation time is a relatively modern one (Lefebvre 2009; Thomas 1964;
Thompson 1967) . According to Raymond Williams “Keywords” the meaning of “Labor”
became narrowed from “the sense of any productive action to specifically paid employment or
work performed for someone else in exchange for a wage” (Williams, 2014) due to Adam Smith
27
and other economists. Feminist scholars, such as Collins (1990) have often taken this critical
approach to political economy, since equating “wage labor” to work is how homemakers are
often classified as “not working” in spite of the evident productive activities that take place in the
home.
On the other end is the informal waged labor rising to meet the needs of location-
independent workers. According to (Crick, 1992)(1992) the “informal” tourist sector is “that
arena beyond the effective control of the tourism authorities – street corners, unlicensed
guesthouses, cheap cafes, and so on” (p.136), and noted that “through the Third World, where a
tourism industry has developed, a similar ‘informal’ sphere has grown up around its margins” (p.
137). Mezzandri breaches the theorization of “social reproduction” of feminist Marxists, to
current arrangements of world labor. Social reproduction theory, as explained by Feminist
Marxists, makes the critique that “Marx is mostly silent about the circuits producing the most
extraordinary commodity of all under capitalism; namely, the worker” (Mezzadri, p.36). One of
the ways of looking at it, according to Mezzadri, is that it was not an omission, it was just not the
key concern of Marxist analysis, which was “only ever to be understood as working within the
realm of capitalist commodity production” p.37. What Mezzandri argues however, is that since
most of the world works in informality, the distinctions between “social reproduction” and
“production” are further blurred in the “majority world.” She explains how the “majority world”
works under the umbrella of informality, and therefore that separation of social reproduction and
production is much harder to make. To her, reproductive labor becomes value producing in a few
ways, one of which is “through their absorption of the systematic externalization of costs of
social reproduction.”
28
Across the greatly informal and informalized majority world, social reproductive realms
– the household, the village, the community – and activities – housework as well as other
forms of unpaid work generally (albeit not only) performed by women – are deployed as
a systematic subsidy to capital. p.38.
Social reproduction and care are not synonyms. Social reproduction is meant to be far broader,
encapsulating both the reproduction of life and of capitalist relations at once (Katz, “Vagabond
capitalism; Bakker ‘social reproduction’) p. 37 Katz reminds us of social reproduction is meant
to include civil society, the state, schools, hospitals, institutions and of most relevance to this
dissertation, media, and culture. State safety nets and 9-5 work has been increasingly dissolving
in Europe and the US. “Transactional costs” as well as the part of reproductive labor done by
companies, or the state is now more shouldered by the individual. For many independent,
freelance, or individual workers, the household and the worker are one and the same.
These individual workers are absorbing the costs to their household. For example, while
many households in the US now require two incomes, the social reproduction work is relegated
to the state via schools and day care, the labor of cleaning to migrant female workers, and
cooking to them or to migrant worker restaurant workers. (Pulpisher 1993; Rose 1993;
Hochschild 2000). The similar logic of global flows of separated productive and reproductive
labors are exemplified in the giant “remittances'' economy, where those same migrant workers
who care for the children in wealthier nation’s households send part of their income to support
their own families in their native countries, where either they pay someone else even less, or
costs are absorbed by the free care of family, villages and networks.
29
Methodology
For my dissertation I used Michael Burawoy’s extended case method.
3
I chose the
extended case method because of a few reasons. First, I had already used it during my sociology
methods class, and the study I conducted for that class was my first solo-authored paper. After
going through that process, I realized the specificity of the method helped when trying to untie
“affinity spaces,” given their porosity, openness, lack of explicit structure and lack of attachment
to a larger goal or institution. Secondly, in any critical project, there is the potential to fall into
binaries of the structural inequalities we know exist, and that have been named and established
by the different big theorists and many scholars since then. While we don’t exist outside of
discourse, I chose the extended case method because it focuses on the terms used by the
participants themselves as opposed to imposing mine on them. As Burawoy highlights this as a
virtue of the method, stating that it “is able to dig beneath the political binaries of colonizer and
colonized, white and black, metropolis and periphery, capital and labor to discover multiple
processes, interests, and identities.” (Burawoy, p. 6)
Instead of tracing back the practice of ethnography to its anthropological beginnings, I
here explain how I arrived to include online ethnography as part of my method. Hine (2017)
traced the genealogy in relation to the changes in the technology itself, Web 1.0, to the current
embedded state. Ethnography has traditionally used the researcher’s immersion within a “field
site” to understand the perspective and shared meanings of those who inhabit it. “The body of the
ethnographer is the research instrument, sensing the surroundings, recording impressions and
turning them into a theoretically informed, rich account of cultural practice.” In this case, it was
important for me to use the internet since “ethnographers of the Internet use the same

3
See Appendix A for full methodological discussion
30
technologies as those that they study, taking part in online interactions and becoming immersed
in online spaces.” (Hine, p.134) The online aspect of the study was not only an additional, but
necessary part of this case, given the intermediation between the “hosts” and “guests” often
initiated in this way. It therefore aims to contribute to ethnographic studies of the internet, of
mobilities, and of culture embedded in both.
The problematics of studying blurred lines
First, I wish to explain that in studies of the global, or of not-yet determined populations
or narratives, what terms we use as descriptors and encapsulators become a bit slippery and
oftentimes problematic. Categories are both the subject of my study but also the method of my
study. I often struggled with the categorizations of identity used both by scholars, media and by
the people I met. These include “foreigner/local” “gringo/paisa” “nomad/tourist” “global
north/global south.”
Additionally, whether someone is a freelancer, an entrepreneur, a contractor, a full-time
remote worker, someone with “many income streams” all could mean the same thing or be
differentiated by the interlocutor. Labor-related categories of what constitutes work, a profession,
a professional identity or what gets counted is part of the confounding intrinsic to the discussion
of informality. The most prevalent, uniform, and consistent ones were nationalities, given their
standardization and the global understanding of the passport as the universal identification.
While many can identify with more than one nationality, it is the passport that in this case creates
the power relationships at play. Even with that, I often use the term “local service providers”
when I am also including Venezuelan immigrants. The reason is often the identity, and therefore
labor/wage in which they are placed. When I say local, I mean they earn the local wage: i.e.,
location dependent.
31
Those who are location-independent, like growing Silicon Valley companies, are
working in a legislative gray area, often what tech start-ups depend on to “disrupt” an industry,
meaning their life choices mimic the entrepreneurs risk-taking. They are also depending on the
same socio technical arrangements utilized by traditional outsourcing by companies. The
location-independent workers grappled with the awareness of this reality, while also being
resigned to it. This tension became clearer to me as I witnessed their discomfort with the label
Digital Nomad, yet they knew it was exactly their relatively privileged position in this
arrangement which allowed them to have the life they had designed. It also means that, as the
states where they are working from “catch up” and begin to regulate or formalize it, the term
becomes a specific designation: countries such as Estonia and Barbados already created Digital
Nomad visas. Designating oneself under it would mean to be disciplined by the explicit
arrangements as defined by the state.
Intervention: Supply Chains and Identity
What I aim to do with this dissertation is bring in the role of media and the online into
how transnational work and identities are produced and reproduced. The main structural
“strategies” that they depend on are their nationalities, whiteness, and the cultural meanings they
deploy. In this dissertation I use scholar Stuart Hall to think through what he calls “Sliding
signifiers” of race, ethnicity, and nationality. In “The Fateful Triangle Hall” talks about the
material and re-making of cultural processes that are always changing. He provides a lens to sum
up what is at stake politically when making the argument that “our lived experience of collective
belonging - as it is coded by race, ethnicity, and nation - is open to change because it is
constructed discursively.” (p.) By this, all three signifiers have different meanings in distinct
32
cultural contexts, they have been disputed and edited across time, their definitions, parameters,
solidification in law always a discursive battle.
This dissertation focuses on the role of diversity in transnational online labor. For this, I
use scholar Anna Tsing’s framework for seeing diversity as not only part of, but essential, to
supply chain mechanisms. For her paper “Supply Chains and the Human Condition” . Tsing
describes supply chain capitalism as “commodity chains based on subcontracting, outsourcing,
and allied arrangements in which the autonomy of component enterprises is legally established
even as the enterprises are disciplines within the chain as a whole” (p.148) She argues that
questions raised by supply chains are the key to deliberations on wealth and justice in these times
(p.149) While supply chains are not new, the ability to so quickly link across borders afforded by
the internet and mobile communications, as well as the excitement around entrepreneurship are.
When we think of large-scale outsourcing, the macro studies of class formation can obscure the
role of gender, race, and class within the chains. Given the regulatory gray area of online work,
the chain is not legally established but still depends on diversity to work.
Tsing argues that theories of the global and capitalism have tended to ignore gender, race,
and national status because “Diversity is considered particularistic, and ‘‘big’’ theory strives for
generalization” (Tsing, 2009, p. 151). The problem with the continuous use of class as the way to
homogenize the workforce struggle is its default erasure of the identities of workers, which have
their own organizing structures. Ethnography focuses on the specific, but the intersectional
questions within interpersonal enactments of capitalism quickly shed a light on the importance of
diversity within them.
This critique of the homogenization that often happens during Marxist analysis has been
the focus of many critical scholars. The theory made sense when it was created, based on the
33
plight of the industrial worker in what are now industrialized nations. Class relationships, due to
their attachment to capital, appear as culture-neutral, particularly once they move out of the
individual worker to a more general understanding. Many cultural anthropologists and economic
sociologists have shown how not only are culture and the economy never separate, but essential
to it. What Tsing argues is that supply chains depend on those very factors banished from the
economic analysis; this is what makes them profitable.
Supply chains draw upon and vitalize class niches and investment strategies formed
through the vicissitudes of gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexuality, age,
and citizenship status. We cannot ignore these so-called ‘‘cultural’’ factors in considering
the mobilization of labor. (p. 157)
This is further complicated by the specificities of identity and their performance “are by their
nature particularistic, drawing oppositions and lines of exclusion with others who might
otherwise have similar class interests. Someone’s solution may be another person’s problem.”
(p.157). Competition for labor and opportunities among minorities in the United States are an
example of that. She names “super exploitation” as exploitation that depends on noneconomic
factors such as nationality, legal status, gender, race, age, or language. She wants to differentiate
it from the Marxist “exploitation” analysis because it removes the type of negotiation that can
happen when only class is considered. For Tsing, Supply Chain capitalism encourages the
conflation of super exploitation and self-exploitation: workers make themselves fit into these
niches attached to identity, meaning the performance of non-economic features to gain advantage
in the economic one, therefore workers become “complicit with their own exploitation.” (p. 157)
A day laborer must perform brawn and availability; a prostitute must perform sexual
charm. These performances bring them contracts and make it difficult for them to
34
negotiate the wage outside niches for gender, sexuality, and race. Supply chain capitalism
brings this mechanism into its basic structure through chains of independent contracting.
Diversity, with all its promise and perils, enters the structure of supply chain capitalism
through this mechanism.
They also bring cultural specificities into the chain. This is often reflected not only across
borders but within them. For example, what she calls “immigrant entrepreneurs,” who recruit
other immigrants into specific job streams. In the United States, Latinas carry the expectation of
good nannies or house cleaners. Asian women are hired by droves for nail salons. Tsing focuses
on Jane Collin’s Threads Where South American women were hired because of the exemplary
sewing skills they learned at home: ‘‘This paradoxical framing of skill makes women’s
‘disadvantages’ in the labor market at least a temporary advantage,’’ she explains (2003, p. 176).
Management’s orientation requires workers to perform the conditions of their super exploitation:
new workers are expected to already know their jobs because they are women. An example of
this in Communication is Lisa Nakamura’s Navajo Circuits, where the ability to weave supposed
to be “innate” to this Native American community allowed for what she calls “insourcing”: given
that the reservation was exempt from minimum wage laws and this identity-based know-how
meant computing companies had cheap labor for their circuit making.
My dissertation topic raises the obvious concern of exploitation of workers in developing
economies. However, what I found is a constant reiteration of this “super exploitation,” meaning
my interviewees found themselves exhausted by their jobs in large cities of the “Global North,”
or in a state of constant entrepreneurship and precarity rising in their native countries, and
therefore lean into their identity as a way of fitting themselves within this global labor supply
chain.
35
Historically, the inception of the social constructs of race are a product of, but also the
justification for, colonialism (Fanon, 2008). European religion, language and culture define the
default human and what the “other” should aspire to. Given its parting point, it remained an
almost unnamed standard. As Richard Dyer (2008) says: "White power secures its dominance by
seeming not to be anything in particular" (p.40). The cultural contexts depend on the history of
physical, forceful colonialism, to the harder to fight-with, yet very present, global order of capital
and hegemony. Edward Said explains how in the times of colonialism, there was a tangible way
of resisting the former by pushing back against occupation. The legacy, however, is still a world
with those established hierarchies, plus “we now have in addition an international media
presence that insinuates itself, frequently at a level below conscious awareness, over a
fantastically wide range (Said, 2012, p.291).
The most relevant analysis of whiteness for this case, however, is Harris' argument of
whiteness as property (Harris, 1993). Although making a legal-historical analysis of the U.S., the
argument holds on whiteness as aspirational because its economic advantage was built into the
regulatory system of the United States. As whiteness is simultaneously an aspect of identity and
a property interest, it is something that can both be experienced and deployed as a resource.
Whiteness can move from being a passive characteristic as an aspect of identity to an active
entity that - like other types of property - is used to fulfill the will and to exercise power.
Leaving their wealthier nations, many of which are the dreamed-of destinations of immigrants
from poorer ones, allows these location-independent workers to carry that property that is always
with them. Due to the hegemony of media, the legacy of colonialism, and world racial
hierarchies, whiteness carries with it a relative wealth in non-white nations. In China, the “rent-a-
foreigner” case shows how the presence of whiteness is used to sell buildings and cities: the
36
cosmopolitan presence gives assumed value to a property. I first heard about this via David
Bornstein, a man I went to college with at the University of Florida, who filmed a documentary
on the topic. For the New York Times he wrote:
In provincial West China, I filmed specialty firms that collect groups of foreigners whom
they rent out to attend events. Clients can select from a menu of skin colors and
nationalities; whites are the most desirable and expensive. The most frequent customers
are real estate companies. They believe that filling their remote buildings with foreign
faces, even for a day, suggests that the area is “international,” a buzzword in provincial
areas that often translates to “buy”(Borenstein, 2015)

This is a very explicit case of whiteness as property, but it easily illustrates the point.
Even if they left everything behind, these remote workers carry their skin on them. This allows
for easy entry to anything, polite treatment by “locals”, but more importantly, a relative status
that they did not have in their native countries. However, as opposed to China, Colombia, like all
the Americas, is part of the history of European colonialism, native subjugation, and African
slave trade.
Economic indicators by the World Bank, IMF, and other multilaterals, re-create global
hierarchies that are then replicated in the media to categorize nations in an apparently objective
manner. With these categorizations, (Bhambra, 2014) asserts "inequalities are naturalized as the
condition of the world….Counter-posing the First World to the Third World...without reflecting
on how the Third World has been produced by the very same processes that have created the
First, is part of this process of naturalization" (p. 145) In this sense, nationality carries a specific
weight that adds to the intersectional mix of encounters between Europeans and Colombians, or
37
North and South Americans. For example, one of my black, American interviewees said she
preferred being in Colombia because no one stared at her nor specifically discriminated: that is,
given the number of Afro-Colombians in the city, she does not stand out in the way she does in
Asia, for example. However, the polite treatment she receives could also correlate to her
Americanness and her dollars: the media presence of the US is so ingrained that even if they
cannot speak English, locals can easily differentiate an African American from an Afro
Colombian or Caribbean person.

The power of whiteness that has come mostly from its lack of mention where its category
as default “Universal Man” previously discussed in terms of knowledge and the creation of the
“other”, in its anthropological objectivity, in its rationality and modernity, with the female, the
black, the Oriental, the native as its other to be studied, educated, cared for, and saved from
themselves. We can return to colonial times and older literature such as Stoler did with Foucault,
and even Hall did with Gramsci, to show how theoretical frameworks could be re-applied with
the increasingly visible categories of whiteness, but also to see how similar yet constantly
fluxing signifiers have moved from the colonial and modernity to capital and globalization.
None of my interviewees mentioned whiteness as part of the reason their lifestyle
worked, however other coded terms such as “foreignness,” “culture” “English-speaking”
“modern country” “provenance” are all proxies in approximation to Halls’ fateful triangle, where
nation, race, and ethnicity collapse and become the main differentiator of these location-
independent workers. It is the relative positioning between hierarchies that shifts once they pull
away from the “center”: their identity provides them with the safety net they need to take risks,
38
but also with the relative advantages of positioning themselves at a higher hierarchical echelon
elsewhere.
What Tsing aims to do is put into Marxist and economistic language what economic
sociologists and anthropologists already have known and studied, which is that culture and the
economy can never be separate. In this dissertation I argue how in the “structurelessness” of this
case, workers use or navigate existing global structures to try to find a niche in the global supply
chain of remote work. This is location-independent workers leveraging their nations of origin,
and the local paisa workers finding roles that reproduce Medellin’s image and industry of care,
hospitality and other reproductive work that fits this chain.

Additionally, the city of Medellin is also trying to find its space and role within
international destinations, competing with other cities. By luring capital and investment,
government officials aim to make it an innovation hub in the region. The tension between
adapting to what foreigners want in the city, whether as investors or location-independent
workers, meets in it being chosen for its “quality of life” which although abstract, I equate to
social reproductive labor. This includes the cheaper feminized labor of cooking, cleaning, but
also its appeal in beauty, pleasant weather, and modern-enough infrastructure. It also
demonstrates that despite wanting to be “innovative”, the city’s appeal lies more in the specifics
(cost of living, infrastructure, and weather) and more abstract (welcoming culture, good vibe,
and being a good place to live) that makes it more appealing to both foreign companies and
individuals. This, combined with the increase in tourism partially catalyzed by its renewed
visibility, puts locals in the space of conforming to expectations of what foreigners want, to
pushing back and demonstrating how much their city and country has to offer.
39
Chapter Summary
This leads me to the specific analysis of this dissertation, which is how location-
independent workers from “Global North” countries deal with their own increased flexibility, or
precarity, by working from “Global South” places. Chapter 1 explores how, as workers become
individuated, they absorb much of what is involved in production, they find themselves moving
to places where social reproduction is cheaper, better, and allows them to “run” from their
current situations in their native countries. It also explains how running translates to autonomy in
being able to bridge the line between work and nature, and work and leisure. For this I focus on
individual agency within structures, borrowing from theorist Michel De Certeau and his concept
of strategies and tactics
Chapter 2 explains the “culture that sits” in the city of Medellin, Colombia, which is
battling its own role in international narratives and imaginaries by pushing back on the narrative
that brought it there to start with, the violence associated with narcotrafficking, particularly in the
80s, with its current goal of becoming an innovation center for Latin America. The chapter
focuses on macro narratives in international media, from newspapers to Hollywood, and how
they are enacted on the ground by tourism officials. The chapter’s goal is to ground this
discussion, but also to show how, even location-independent workers see themselves as “free,”
the choice of where they are going can never be separated from historical and political junctures.
Chapter 3 Describes how the internet, more importantly chats and online groups, comes
into play at the ground level of reproductive labor. This is facilitated through the “meta tactic” of
the digital nomad term, which allows them to crowdsource sociality, logistical planning of life,
how to deal with or avoid taxation and regulation, sociality, and finding commonalities that
depend on their identities. The second part hones into the role of local service providers who are
40
finding a market via that meta-term as well, including co-living hosts, domestic workers, and
yoga instructors. Chapter 4 demonstrates how productive labor, which is the work they are
getting paid for online, continues to depend on structural forces. These location-independent
workers, while working remotely and from a cheap cost of living, keep their nation-of-origins
rates by avoiding the online “race to the bottom.” The chapter shows how they do it with by
relying on structural forces that keep them at a global, hierarchical top via identity, such as
nationality, language, “habitus” of the workforce from these countries, networks from home. It
also shows how they use this to create their own niche in this labor supply chain. It adds to the
understanding of digital inequalities. As already established by new media scholars, the
separation of the digital from the offline does not contribute to our understanding of the
internet’s use. As Nancy Baym states, we have to “recognize that the internet is woven into the
fabric of the rest of life” (Baym 2006, p.86).
Chapter 5 lastly, shows the tensions that can emerge when the digital collapses the
simplified views that “guests” and “hosts” often have, and reproduce, of each other. The chapter
utilizes anthropology of tourism theory and work to understand how this phenomenon that is
supposed to be about work, is actually about life. It focuses on the informality of relationships
that can emerge between the two camps, which is usually rarer than those traditionally
encountered by the hospitality industry. The blurred lines that occur when the internet mediates
encounters, such as Meetups, dates, or even travel blogs, shows how individuals navigate the
over-determination of their identities.
Conclusion
What I wish to contribute here is how, in Tsing’s example, super exploitation happened
to fit into the large scale of global labor chains. In this dissertation, I explore the micro version of
41
this: i.e., how in individuated work, enactments of identity are what workers carry with them.
The extended case method begs us to ask the following question every day during fieldwork and
analysis: What is this a case of? I argue in this dissertation that this is a case of a global supply
chain, where reproductive labor in poorer nations is subsidizing capital in richer ones. My
evidence shows how different actors leverage their identities to fit themselves within the larger
supply chain of remote work. My argument is that as they become more individualized, these
location-independent workers from Global North countries are outsourcing the reproductive
labor of home to the relatively comfortable Medellin. Moving abroad becomes the next frontier,
but instead of natural resources, remote workers find the life they wish they had in their
countries. In this it is the exception to the rules, the “disruption” to formalized systems of
outsourcing that allows for it.
This dissertation argues that if diversity is a requirement of global supply chain
capitalism, identity is tied to the independent one as well. There is no such thing as structureless
social arrangements, and so we come back to the perceptions, ideas, and cultural capital that
underlies current global identities. Online, erasure of borders to procurement to online work
leads to a “race to the bottom” which these workers are able to avoid by relying on cultural
capital: home networks, recommendations of each other, and “culture.” It also argues that while
Medellin is desiring to be a center for innovation, it is being chosen as a city with low cost of
living and the overlooked, under or unpaid feminized labor of hostessing. Lastly, the
structurelessness welcomes this to informality: going around laws and regulation and depending
on word-of-mouth with weak institutional support. People from rich countries have the safety net
of their nationalities.

42

43
Chapter 1: Run

The narratives of the individuals who choose to travel as they work mean that narratives
like Jeremy’s were quite typical among my interviewees. Part of the reason for knowing their
narratives well is the need to justify themselves, given they are going against the grain. Some of
the clarifications explained how no, it was not prohibitively expensive to constantly travel, in
fact they were spending much less money in comparison to rent in the cities and countries they
hail from. And no, Medellin was no longer the dangerous place their parents remembered from
the 80s. In general, though, the commonality in the narratives of what catalyzed the decision
often involved different meanings and connotations of the word “freedom.”
Isaah Berlin’s (2014) “The two concepts of liberty” splits them in between negative
liberty (freedom from), which is freedom from external restraint on one's actions, and positive
liberty (freedom to) is the possession of the capacity to act upon one's free will. My interviewees
expressed wanting to run, or be free from: the burden of possessions, prohibitive fixed costs,
overbearing bosses, depressing office settings, cultural norms and expectations, overwork, lack
of security, unfulfilling work, and isolation in urban centers. They also shared a common run
towards the (positive) freedom to: travel, adventure, learn, prioritize joy and fun, work less, live
in an ideal city, have time for an entrepreneurial project, to engage in spiritual search, and to
improve their overall quality of life. While the hardships and difficulties associated with this
hyper-individuated quest for freedom were rarely hidden, the basic narrative of “escaping” the
office to live in a semi-permanent, semi vacation permeated the imaginary.
The socially acceptable small window of “freedom,” when young people no longer need
parental oversight, but have yet to enter a stable career, accrue debt or dependents is when many
44
Europeans and Australians have taken a gap year to travel . Americans often postpone travel
until they retire. These location-independent workers aim to push back on the social demands of
working adulthood in their home nations, by saying that travel, or what they call “slow travel”
or “workcation” can be done independently, while working, and more importantly, indefinitely.
This commonality tends to apply to most, with the variations more in what they do for income.
Due to the number of unconventional choices accrued in taking on the lifestyle, a pattern
emerged around the retelling of their personal narratives: their stories had the fluidity and self-
reflection of a story many times retold for different audiences in varying ways. They had told it
to friends and families to justify the decision and assuage concerns. Colombia may have been
their only destination, the fourth, or they may be returning. Each retold differing trajectories,
either of one decision, or gradual steps, of walking into an unknown (although not completely)
unknown path yet knowing of someone who had already undertaken it.
Location-Independent Workers
As far as its use and study in academia, the “digital nomad” term was first used by
Makimot and Manners (1997). Reichenberger (2018) places them in the socio-historical juncture
where holistic balance and self-motivation are encouraged and made increasingly necessary by
the blurring of work–life balance. Richards & Wilson (2004) fit them in a detailed taxonomy,
among the tourist, the backpacker, the volunteer, the language student, the exchange student, and
the intern; as well as migrants and explorers; However, they are less compelled to find
commonality, community, or “tribe” (p. 343). The juncture also represents the rise of nomadism
as an industry (Jarvis & Peel, 2010), 2010), yet the nomads of Ibiza and Goa (D’Andrea, 2007)
as well as some of Bali (Woldoff & Litchfield, 2021) embody a seemingly deeper commitment
to place: whether an immersion into a foreign culture, a focus on spirituality, or an artistic
45
diaspora to escape the regimes of state and market (Richards & Wilson, 2004), 2015, p. 342).
Müller (2016) interrogates the term, and whether it can even be used as a research category or if
it is indeed just a buzzword. While there is no one categorical definition for who falls under the
term, it is analytically useful as an entry point to questions of modernity, digital life, and
advanced capitalism. Nicola (Bozzi, 2020)posits the figure as “the cultural avatar of
contemporary neoliberalism, which celebrates a depoliticized aesthetics of work and helps
establish a material geography of globalization through social media” .
As explained in my chapter introduction, although I found most of my participants via
online groups that utilize the term “Digital Nomad” in their title, they rarely use it to identify
themselves, and almost never offline. Because of this, I will refer to my interviewees as location-
independent workers, particularly in this chapter as it speaks about internal motivations.
While many of the younger and less professionally experienced location-independent workers
head to the bigger hubs in Southeast Asia, most of my participants ranged from late twenties to
early forties. This means they had already some work experience and had acquired skills and
knowledge of the labor market in their home countries. Their choices led them to take on the
lifestyle eventually, more than aiming toward this goal from the beginning, or having that
catalyst moment so often embedded in narratives. Jeremy’s job in London was in online
advertising, and in the end is what he ended up doing again. What he found was a way of
keeping his London income while living abroad.

I think some people are like quite intentional about being digital nomads. It's like this is
what I want.... Especially like some of the groups and the Facebook groups online, there's
a lot of people like what steps can you take? But for me it was more like I'm just going to
46
quit my job, see what happens. Um, and then after that I actually went to Ecuador to learn
how to be a teacher. So, I completed my course and then I moved to Bogota. Cause the
idea of teaching just the, just to get away from London [inaudible] I'd take industry but
then in Bogota starts to pick up more work online. So, it's kind of a slow transition. So, I
didn't have like a set sole job to get bits of work.
In the progression of neoliberalization, more of the responsibility, risks and costs shift from the
nation and companies to the individual. As individuals, becoming “independent” in terms of
work allows for greater autonomy as to how to spend their time. In this chapter I argue that these
location-independent workers are 1. Running from unsatisfying lives in their native countries 2.
Searching for autonomy over their time by focusing on the “flexibility” aspect of independent
work to engage in location arbitrage 3. Doing this by running, but not escaping, capital
arrangements of work and 4. In search of “the good life now” rejecting the promise of capital to
work hard now to earn rest during retirement. While their “run” may be to escape the trappings
of overwork in their native countries, they are not “escaping” the system, but rather finding a
different type of safety net by engaging in location arbitrage.
Outsmarting (or Outrunning) the Market
Beck (2004) argued that “The risk society” came hand in hand with modernity, so while
pre-industrial workers were at the whim of nature for their economic stability, neoliberal workers
are at the whim of markets, globalization, and the uncertainty that makes them function. In the
world of tech, Gina Neff (2015) wrote about “venture labor” that is the shifting of risk from
companies to the individual worker in Silicon Alley in New York City. By leaving their
comfortable positions in more traditional employment, workers accepted equity as part of
47
payment while forgoing the financial security of their previous jobs. However, taking on the risk,
she argues, is a reaction to a precarious job market rather than individual decisions.
people’s desire and need to take on economic risks stemmed from a lack of job security
and an increase in employment flexibility, not the other way around. Because work in
general became riskier, people became more willing to take on more risks (Neff p.10).
She cites Jacob Hacker the “great risk shift” or a societal move toward greater personal
responsibility for economic well-being and away from responsibility shared within companies
and the nation-state. Workers welcomed risk because it gave them control, or autonomy, “in an
era when many things were out of ordinary employees control” (Neff p.11.) The underlying
narratives of successful companies, particularly tech companies, focus on how that successful
company founder “outsmarted the market” and took on great risk. Hacker (2006) argues that
while early Silicon Valley was influenced by a particular brand of libertarianism of the
countercultural movement (Turner, 2010), the culture of risk was just as important to the rise of
the commercial internet (p.13). This conversation has continued with the rise of contract work
and the on-demand economy, where not only risks are shifted from companies to the worker, but
also sick days, leave, insurance, equipment, and support networks. What nations and institutions
are doing in a market-based economy is acknowledging the unpredictability of human life, while
trying to formalize responses to this unpredictability. World Bank Report that explains that
perceived uncertainty is required for labor markets to work. If risks were indeed calculable, there
would be “no motivation for workers to innovate and to take responsibility for themselves and
their household” (Aharoni, 1981).

48
The reason these matters to this study is how it is all embedded in the lived experiences of
workers. In her paper on the use of risk in the workforce, Amoore (2004) argues that this link of
risk and globalization/uncertainty is not only a pervasive rhetoric, but it has become central to
programs of work flexibilization, casualization, and fragmentation. How risk is framed
concretely shapes social practices (p.175). This is also stated by several reports by the World
Bank and the IMF, where they explain how uncertainty of global processes harness “individual
responsibility and entrepreneurialism” (Amoore, p.177). Geoffrey Hodgson (cited by Neff p.14)
in his critique of “the learning economy” argues that the utopian vision of market individualism
lies in the individual’s ability to choose what is best to fulfill her own needs. Yet as Neff
explains, economic decisions are complicated and intertwined: do people make choices based on
their best rational judgements or because of how they interpret the multiple competing signals?
In more recent iterations of the worker/entrepreneur, the shifting of risk has seen itself
more individualized. While Neff spoke about leaving “cushy” jobs for a nascent tech industry,
my subjects consider the tech industry’s jobs as the current comfortable ones. What they had in
common was the non-tech work that they did that is now absorbed by tech companies. Instead of
taking the risk of leaving comfortable jobs, many if not most of my interviewees were taking the
risk of leaving their countries behind. They are interpreting the signals of their own precarious
work situations which promises the “freedom” and autonomy of independence and lashing on to
that freedom to its full advantage, meaning freedom from living where their employers do.
The reasons that people use to migrate have been called “push factors” by geographers
(Cadwallader, 1992). Push factors vary greatly, but they mostly result from “calculations about
the trade-offs to moving and acting on this decision” (Lee, 1966, p.13). The research on
migration incentives tends to focus on two streams: either forced migration, or voluntary
49
migration to seek better economic opportunities in other countries (p.14). Due to wealth
concentration, governmental stability and opportunities, the vast majority of migrants around the
world move from less privileged nations to more privileged ones. Research on the opposite
direction moving is scarce, and often focused on institutions that transfer workers overseas
(Baruch et al., 2016). Woldoff and Lichfield’s study of the biggest and most well-known hub for
location-independent workers, Bali, Indonesia. They found push factors as a combination of
these two streams:
Like elite expats, Digital Nomads have skills that can bring highly compensated work.
Yet more similar to less fortunate migrants, nomads migrate toward places where they
may find networks for work rather than to a specific job. (2021,p. 14)
They argue that the push factors uncover the increasing hostility of the large metropolises in
richer nations; cities that are so expensive that the day-to-day life becomes unsustainable and
unhealthy for these relatively young professionals. The calculations and trade-offs, like Neff
argues, are partly about the autonomy embedded in neoliberalism, but also partly the interpreting
of signals. While we often think of those from richer economies who decide to travel as wealthy,
and they are, relative to the global average. Only two of my interviewees had left a lucrative
career in New York and London, but they did so to work on projects of their own. The rest were
freelancers, straddling between doing work for clients “back home” and some trying to or
considering starting their own business. The commonality lay in an overall dissatisfaction with
life back in their native countries, mixed with a desire to travel and see the world once they
found that it was possible. While the ones from important firms had the “benefits” we associate
with full-time employment, many were working as full-time contractors, temporary workers, or
already freelancing. Given the “precarity” rising in their countries, leaving did not appear like
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that much of a risk, that is, not much was being lost given that they can “always come back.”
Scholars of entrepreneurship (Duffy, 2017) have demonstrated repeatedly how in risky or
precarious labor markets, those with existing safety nets can afford to take more chances at
independence. The trade-offs to these workers appeared to be “no-brainers” as to why live in
expensive San Francisco when they had no job security anyways? None of my interviewees were
in an upper-class bracket in their native countries.
The push factors for them, I argue are an additional category to Woldoff and Lichfield,
are that economic opportunities can be gained if more of their time can be freed from work. The
forming “hubs” for location-independent workers share the commonality of having a low cost of
living. This outsmarting of the market the reason for chosen migration are indeed economic
opportunities, but not by finding work when they move, but finding a “better life” in several
ways.
Location Arbitrage: Using Space to Gain Time
As stated before, the main reasons for doing this are “flexibility and freedom.” According
to the Upwork survey, 68% of new freelancers say that “Career Ownership” is a top draw,
followed by the ability to work remotely at 54%. Of “skilled remote freelancers” surveyed,
workers cite the following as key reasons for doing so: 78% cite “schedule flexibility”, 73% cite
location flexibility, and 73% say freelancing allows them to pursue work they find meaningful.
They state that “The future of freelance is bright: 9 in 10 freelancers believe that the “best days
are ahead” for freelancing; two-thirds (67%) say they are optimistic about their career in 2022,
compared to 58% of non-freelancers.

51
To look at this specific enactment of autonomy, I turned to French theorist Michel
DeCerteau’s work “The Practice of Everyday Life” which theorizes the agency of individuals,
particularly as consumers. For the purposes of this dissertation, agency is the ability for humans
to make choices (or have power over their choices) within existing socially created structures,
such as race, class, family, culture, the nation, and the institutions maintained by the nation.
Structures have been created and are usually maintained by a powerful few, be it the state or
powerful corporations, and they officiate and mandate social order.
To explain his central argument, DeCerteau defines strategies and tactics in enactments
of power. De Certeau calls a “strategy” “the calculus of force-relationships when a subject of
will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution).... assumes a place that
can be circumscribed as proper (propre) and thus can serve as the basis for generating relations
with an exterior distinct from it.” (De Certeau, 2011). The relationship of temporality and space
is important to his framework. Strategies attain legitimation through time (robustness of
institutions for example) and depend on spatial authority. Laws and regulations give or create
spatial authority.
4
On the other hand, he names "tactics' ' the “art of the weak,” that is unable to
count on a "proper" (a spatial or institutional localization),” (xix) . Drawing from the Greek
rhetorician Corax, De Certeau asserts that tactics ``make the weaker position seem the stronger”
by taking advantage of situations. De Certeau utilizes guerrilla warfare as an instance of tactics,
deployed against the strategy of military armed forces, compensating for a relatively inferior
position through superior knowledge of terrain and the ability to quickly adapt to the
environment. They operate within the finer temporal scale circumstances, taking advantage of

4
Something he discusses via Foucault, yet not the focus of this chapter.

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temporary opportunities, “a mobility that must accept the chance offerings of the moment, and
seize on the wing the possibilities that offer themselves at any given moment, ... to make use of
the cracks that conjunctions open in the surveillance of proprietary powers…”(p.37) He cites
Clausewitz’s (2003) treatise On War as he talks about deception: “power is bound by its very
visibility. In contrast, trickery is possible for the weak, and often it is his only possibility, as a
‘last resort’’. Trickery here is connected to wit by Clausewitz. The art of “pulling tricks'' involves
a sense of the opportunities afforded by a particular occasion. Strategies depend on the
legitimation afforded to them by place. They are constrained, guided, and made possible by
structures, but given the cunning and wiles of the individual, they are the specific ways of
finding exceptions within those structures, or of the customizing one’s inhabitation of them.
DeCerteau’s tactics serve well to not only explain the logic of these location-independent
workers, but also how their position depends on their ability to move and think quickly and adapt
to circumstances. My interviewees shared the commonality of ridding themselves of their
material possessions, or storing them, to untether themselves from the requirement of a monthly
rent or mortgage payment. The moving about is temporary, but there is also no impediment to
staying longer if they like a place or picking up and leaving after a few days if they do not. It is
tactical because it operates in a regulatory gray zone: It is tactical because, for the most part,
they circumvent the hospitality industry, by finding short-term leases or staying in inexpensive
Airbnb’s. It is also tactical because many of the decisions are done quickly, and due to a lack of
intermediation, there is always a risk of something not working. Lastly, it is tactical because a lot
of the logistics are shared with like-minded others who give on-the-ground updates, be it about
COVID restrictions, local service providers, or taxes.

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When looking at De Certeau through the lens of “formality” and “informality” of labor
we can see some parallels in what is “proper,” “legitimate” and recognized as formal to
“strategies” while what is classified under “informal” labor as “tactics.” Tactics are everyday,
they often involve production outside of the market, and even help with it:
Dwelling, moving about, speaking, reading, shopping and cooking are activities that
seem to correspond to the characteristics of tactical ruses and surprises: clever tricks of
the “weak” within the order established by the “strong,” and art of putting one over on
the adversary on his own turn, hunter’s tricks, maneuverable, polymorph mobilities,
jubilant, poetic, and warlike discoveries. p.40
In summary, tactics are what individuals do to navigate the structures imposed upon us. The
notion of tactics contributes to my theorization of the reasons behind the choices these workers
make. Their “clever tricks” often include finding loopholes in the global economic arrangements.
When starting this project, I kept being gnawed at by the knowledge that this was not a project
about work. When studying labor or working lives, leisure, free time, or consumption is seen as
separate. According to Millar, “This binary between work and life tended to generate separate
conversations in the social sciences between issues of political economy on the one hand and
those of phenomenology and subjectivity on the other." (ref 11 p. 10). However, as I will
demonstrate further ahead, the inseparability of the two, particularly as location-independent
workers, is reflected on the blurred lines of work and life facilitated by the internet.
What we think of the 9-5, traditional work arrangements were created to fit a specific
type of worker. Alternative, flexible, arrangements are often requested by mothers, people with
disabilities, or those looking after elderly family members. From the factory floor to the office
floor, the norms of full-time employment are based on male workers who have a partner at home
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to perform the reproductive labor required for capital to always have new workers. Part-time
employment is often taken up by those who need specific time arrangements and is therefore
portrayed as “secondary” in what are expected to be traditional households. The support for on-
demand, free labor reverts to this need of “flexibility”, so that workers can prioritize life and
work around it, instead of the other way around. The argument for it has been seen as the “flip”
side of precarity. Like the recyclers in Millars book, we cannot argue that all workers engaged in
on-demand economies are doing so out of desperation. If anything, it shows how traditional
employment has never fully fit a lot of workers.
The term “life-trepreneur” harks back to the classic neoliberal definitions of individual
choices in career but also in consumption. Mark Pilkington (2016) describes neoliberalism as,
like globalization, “not merely an intellectual edifice, but a continuous process of constructing a
shifting reality, that of neoliberalization” (p. 226). Harvey (2007) characterizes neoliberalism as
the choice of consumption and ultimate individualism, marketization of public services, the
installation of the enterprise form as a model of government and social organization, the
dissolution of social insurance and welfare state models, the protection of private property rights,
and the safeguarding of and legitimate intervention in competitive financial markets.
For the “regular” worker, vacation time is then the moment to escape the drudgery and
responsibility of their working lives. Traveling for longer or having various homes is something
afforded only to the rich, or to those without responsibilities, the “vagrants” or the “backpackers”
in a more modern sense. “Lifestyle design” implies an extra step in choice, given that one is not
choosing what industry to work for, one creates one’s own work, and one’s life is no longer
determined by social ties nor an employer's location. It is about taking control not only of one’s
work and career, but everything else in life. Looking through the history of workdays and labor
55
helped me see these individuals as those who apply those same entrepreneurial values of risk-
taking to life itself, aiming to “game” the system, the way (Neff, 2015) described tech company
founders as “outsmarting” the market, but in their personal choices as both workers and
consumers.
The “nomad bible” as an interviewee called Tim Ferris’ book “The Four-Hour
workweek” (Ferriss, 2009) main contribution is defined as “lifestyle design,” where the “new
rich” are defined by their currencies: time and mobility (p. 7). It is not a coincidence, then, that
Ferris’ book’s subtitle says, “escape the nine to five and join the new rich.” Ferris introduces
readers to labor arbitrage- the practice embedded in outsourcing of finding the best and cheapest
labor from around the world. He argues that the same principle can be used to the advantage of
the independent worker from a wealthy economy, leveraging mobility to gain time. “Why should
companies have all the fun?” (p.4). As an independent worker, one can turn this idea on its head
by choosing a place to dwell in that is cheap and allows for a superior quality of life. He also
uses online labor to outsource some of his own work, that way working only four hours a week.
While not all my interviewees knew about him or the book, the basic idea undercut the logic
behind all of them. Of course, the concept of arbitrage underlines most capitalist arrangements.
For example, the logic behind the giant income generating practice of remittances, is a similar
one, where migrants from poorer countries to richer ones send money back to support their
family in their cheaper, poorer home nation.
While Ferris says “escape” the 9-5, I say they are running, since they are not fully
escaping either labor, capitalism, not even the urban. Like vacations, the escape is temporary. In
the anthropology of tourism literature, a main tension central to “the development of modern
tourism” was explained by (Enzensberger, 1996)( [1958]: p. 129) as ‘“the yearning for freedom
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from society” being “harnessed by the very society it seeks to escape.” As (Wilson, 2008) states
in his introduction to The Impacts of Tourism in Latin America, it is rarely the going to see
another culture, learning, or immersing that drives mass international tourism of travelers of
richer countries into poorer ones: it is the fact that it is cheap to do so due to cheap local labor.
The way that these remote-workers can center other priorities is by working less hours, and they
can work less hours because of the location-arbitrage.
The idea, however, is not to work to earn a vacation, or work to be able to travel during
retirement, but rather be able to do it combined in the now, by making certain trade-offs and
choices. Mobility and cosmopolitanism is often associated to modernity; Zygmunt Bauman
(2000) notes the turning on the historical dismissal of nomads: it is now the “besieged sedentary
populations” who “refuse to accept the rules and stakes of the new ‘nomadic’ power game,”
while the “up-and-coming global nomadic elite” looks down upon the sedentary barbarians (p.
198). The nomad differs from the migrant as a “vector of deterritorialization, changing the
territory on its trajectory rather than reterritorialization after reaching a point from another”
(Deleuze & Guattari, 2010, p. 45–46). The reconfiguration of space, modernity, migration, and
neoliberalism is hard to capture or conceptualize. I focus on DeCerteau because he speaks about
movement of individuals within these arrangements: the specificity of everyday life and the
small decisions that are both inside and outside of capital. Despite the scale of these changes, the
nomad remains tactical, as they do not absorb the strategies of territory. DeCerteau speaks of the
geographic tactics of immigrants in their new homes. Modernity and the market mean de-
territorialization.
In our societies, as local stabilities break down, it is as if, no longer fixed by a
circumscribed community, tactics wander out of orbit, making consumers into
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immigrants in a system too vast to be their own, too tightly woven from them to escape
from it…It transforms another person’s property into a space borrowed for a moment by
a transient (xxi)
Consumers are always immigrants in his view. While aiming to “run” from the system, these
remote workers are not fully escaping it; they are not moving to a commune to do subsistence
farming, and as opposed to other escapist fantasies, they are never “off the grid.” They are not
escaping the nation nor capital; they are using tactical decisions to improve their lives as
consumers and workers within those vast systems. We cannot separate them from the stories they
themselves tell, punctuated by instances of decision making, definition of personal priorities,
revelations, and even journeys of self-discovery. In reaction to changing, larger structures that
bring them to the “always already precarious” life, the decisions are many, they are blurry, and
they depend on the day-to-day. In the next section I will explain how and why they said they
rather prioritize other aspects of life, meaning making decisions that in increased autonomy,
changed their relationship with time and work.

Part I: Rhythms
As historians and sociologists of capitalism in industrialized nations have long shown, by
splitting the day into the employers’ time and one's own time, capitalist wage labor made it
possible to think of work as separate from "life" and introduced related social categories of
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"leisure" and "free time" (Lefebvre, 1991; (Thomas, 1964; Thompson 1967). To think through
the historical separation of these two spheres, Millar looked at the history of the workday from a
non-economist lens via E.P. Thompson (1967). Thompson wrote about the infancy of industrial
work in England, and how workers used to follow natural rhythms which would dictate whether
it was work time or leisure time. His stance showed how political economy is interwoven with
what he called "the arts of living" (1967 p. 95).
When workers were working in agriculture, for example, harvest season was expected to
be grueling and with little relaxation time, however, when not in season, being “idle” was not
considered immoral nor even guilt inducing, particularly when following the timetable of
nature’s seasons. According to Thompson (1967), industrial workers were nostalgic for these
more natural “work-life” rhythms that existed prior to industrialization (p.203). The worker
grievances brought on by industrialization and led to unions and labor organizing did not center
around wages, but rather on the control of their time; workers yearned “for the pattern of work
and leisure which obtained before the outer and inner disciplines of industrialism settled upon the
working man” (p.357). These were often represented by having to get used to the factory bell
which partitioned the workday-- ” a new experience for workers introduced to wage labor that
radically shifted their inner sense of time as well as their rhythms of everyday life" (Millar p.12)
This external behavioral time mechanism incited in workers a resentment for the human-imposed
schedules aimed at productivity. Thompson argued that labor is not just a means of subsistence,
source of surplus value, or structural condition; it is also fundamentally an experience that shapes
the inner life processes of its participants.
Thomas, on this point, explains that this was not only in temporal experience, but socially
as well: pre-industrially, technique and ritual were bound up together, each as its way of
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maintaining the unity of the group. At this point work was regarded as a collective endeavor: a
service or duty deriving from a defined social relationship. But with the coming of industrialism,
…little was heard of the old incentives to labor.which had existed in primitive society -
joy, competition, craftsmanship, social responsibility…. In a context like this the
seventeenth-century English proverb that "everybody's work is nobody's work" would be
unintelligible, for work is a common responsibility.... finally, work is not regulated by the
clock, but by the requirements of the task (Thomas p.51-52)
Agrarian life work was discontinuous and punctuated by the feasts of the church and, for climatic
reasons, virtually all medieval industries had a seasonal character" ( p.52) and the reason
holidays are attached to a pre-industrial sense of time. Holidays, and therefore leisure, were
collective because the work was collective as well. The individuation of work therefore ushered
in the individuation of leisure time: while “high” and “low” tourist seasons remain, particularly
around the holidays of the economically dominant, vacations are often individual in corporate
settings, and therefore individually negotiated with employers. Laboring so that one can afford
life outside of work is therefore a product of industrialism, leading to the work/leisure divide that
sprung up through modernity. Finding leisure time, or time for one’s own, is done around the
socially set working hours. The remaining aspects of collective times for work and leisure
remain around religious holidays, often based on the industrial revolutions center based on the
European Judeo-Christian calendar. Some holidays, however, still hark back at the natural
rhythms of labor in Europe, which depend on natural cycles of the harvest, such as Christmas
celebration around the winter solstice instead of Jesus’ actual birth date.
The discontent over someone else, not themselves, as owners of their time has remained
constant since industrialization until this point. As we shift into modernity the individuation
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attached to neoliberal ideology. Using “flexibility” as a reason to choose individual work,
freelancing and more precarious conditions is a way of regaining the pre-industrial non-
separation of work and leisure. The ability to center life over work. It however lacks that pre-
industrial social cohesion of collective work. Flexibility also means there is still something
restricting, which is capital. The more individualized work becomes, the less it is dictated by
social structures or the factory floor. The lack of commonality, however, makes it that much
harder for individual workers to organize and negotiate as a unified front.
Wasting time in an office setting is a typical complaint of the office information worker
(Gregg & Seigworth, 2010). The frustration of time spent at work yet not working is therefore a
concern of an information worker. My interviewees mentioned the joy of avoiding unnecessary
meetings, or managers unreasonable requests for arrival at early hours and staying late, even
when the work is done. Freedom, in this case, means freedom from surveillance,
micromanagement and “wasteful” office chatter and politics. That is, without the social enclave
of boss and shared office space, they gain control over their time at work. My subjects all agreed
on the ability and desire to work less than what is expected or required in the cities they came
from. Peter, who used to do marketing for a marketing firm in Ireland, explains a common
complaint about office life and structure:
Um, I initially wanted to do work for myself because I hate the idea of
conforming to someone else's time and when I need to be here and when I need to be
doing this and that. Um, that idea is fucking ridiculous to me that, you know, it's
completely outdated and what we do like, you know, so the fact that, oh, you have to be
here for a meeting at nine, eight, 9:15 AM …. Fuck off. [jokingly] All right, this is great.
It's a really good use of time. I would much rather be doing something else. Also, maybe
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I don't work so well for other people. I don't like being told what I need to do for creating
something. I'll put the ideas myself and discuss them with the clients myself. Yeah. Um,
so those were, those were my incentives…. obviously now the fact that I can do it from
other places is nice. I can make my own schedule, which was one of the reasons why I
did it. So that's one of the things that I love the most, um, about being independent of
location (Peter interview, Medellin, 2018).
I met Jeremy in a hostel coffee shop in El Poblado, after he responded to a call, I posted on a
Facebook group. He nonetheless came from Laureles, where many remote workers and expats
are, given how “touristy” El Poblado had become. His narrative is one I came to hear often:
exhaustion and stress leading to a desire to find something else, something more, and more
importantly, the time to find it. Working for an important advertising agency in London had the
allure of reputation, sophistication, and cosmopolitan life.
At the beginning of 2016 I quit my full-time job, so I was working like nine to five in an
office in London. I was working for like big multinational organization thing for an
agency, but what you're on like Google ads and Facebook ads and it was in like a really
big, big office for like busy environment, quite intense workload. So, it's not, it wasn't
uncommon to work on the weekends or Christmas. Yeah, everyone was pretty stressed
out. I mean it's really fun to work in like [anonymized] because of its reputation….like
their offices are incredible. You get free food etc.… (Jeremy interview, Medellin, 2018).
Cultural and social pressures to use time “productively” are part of neoliberal discourses that
place responsibility of success at the individual level (Gregg, n.d.). Sam, who planned to stay in
Medellin more long-term, expressed to me that people in Colombia are much poorer, but they are
“not so stressed out about it.” Part of this is arguably the distinct cultural backgrounds of
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colonizers to the U.S. The “Protestant ethic” is inherently tied to American capitalism. Colombia
as a Catholic nation is much more centered on family as the priority of one’s time. There are too
many differences to think through the accuracy of Sam’s comparison; what is palpable is the
rushing and speed that even differs between Medellin and Bogota. I also doubt that Sam spent
much time in the financial center of the city. The speed associated with capitalism has been
studied and broken down by scholars such as Judy Weissman and Sarah Sharma. They however
urge us to step back from generalized statements of speediness, as time is subjective and often
experienced differently by context .What we could argue is that the culture of “busyness” and
“productivity” is certainly less present. Therefore, the social pressure to be working even if one
does not need to be working so much, dissipates when rhythms are restructured around other
priorities. The sense of burnout, the constant after-work “hustle” necessary to be competitive in
these cities, and the prohibitive cost of living generated life dissatisfaction.
Via word of mouth was people they knew, people like themselves, showing them an
alternative. While, as Jeremy explained, in London to compete, or to earn enough to live, 80-
hour weeks are the norm, to live relatively well in Medellin he can have a 20-hour one. Of
course, Colombians do not work so little, they just earn much less. My interviewees often spoke
about this free time to use to reflect their priorities. And their priorities differed greatly, which
often pitted them against each other when it came to what type of information to share. Even
during traditional office workdays, workers scour pockets of time that they can re-claim as theirs.
Flaherty writes about time practices to demonstrate how office workers take time during their
workday to run errands, such as going to the bank, make personal phone calls or work on side
projects (Flaherty, 2003). Sharma wrote about the lunch-hour yoga class provided to corporate
workers so they could experience time differently, calm down, be mindful, and be able to remain
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present, even if that means present fully at their desk. The feeling of feeling rushed outside of the
yoga studio meant that they slowed down only during that one hour. Having more time meant
reducing the pace.
From my study, this meant, for example, choosing to start work later in the day because
surfing is better in the morning, as explained to me by Peter, who had chosen his spot in Mexico
as his first destination before arriving in Medellin. Jeremy chose to work until 3 in the afternoon,
since those were his most productive hours. Similarly, the individuals I met wanted their free
time to learn and grow, be it via Spanish lessons, salsa lessons or spiritual fulfillment. One of the
reasons to want to gain time is to re-evaluate priorities, or to find other meaning outside of work.
.Woldoff & Litchfield (2021) found this search for spirituality as a strong component
within those location-independent workers in Bali, which is however an important part of the
culture. A common activity I noticed was Ayahuasca ceremonies, the plant-based hallucinogenic,
spiritual ceremony traditional of tribes in the Amazon region, offered in the WhatsApp groups
and other word-of-mouth means. It captured my attention because Medellin is relatively far from
the Amazon, both geographically and culturally. Therefore, this is not a ceremony that local
Paisas tend to do. The market for it has expanded over the country due to increased tourism
(Sánchez, 2018). Therefore, offerings of the ceremony were taking place in Medellin, facilitated
by more entrepreneurial locals arranging logistics for indigenous guides. I did not see any
promotion to take part in any Catholic celebration, for example, even though it is the dominant
practice locally by far.
The “wellness” attached to the lifestyle became reflected in the services in the Poblado
neighborhood. My informants and even myself saw a rise in vegetarian and vegan restaurant
options in the city, something exceedingly rare in Colombia only ten years ago, given it is so
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counter to the local culture and cuisine, as well as constant offerings of yoga classes and retreats.
The “lifestyle” therefore prioritizes well-being, reflecting on the incorporation of “self-care”
practices in technology circles. The co-optation leads to a fine line being drawn between the
culture of productivity, and spirituality in service of that productivity. For example, while yoga
and the more recently trendy “cold showers” I saw were promoted among foreigners but not
really by locals.
More Time for Work
Woldoff and Lichfield describe Bali’s “scene” as a working community, that is, places
where many were there to think of entrepreneurial projects with pitches and workshops akin to
those in Silicon Valley. By working less, they can spend time working on what truly matters to
them. Medellin has a bit of similarity in this sense, but as will become evident in the rest of the
dissertation, with much more blurriness and separation between “guests” and “hosts.” One of my
interlocutors, Sophia, is an African American woman in her early 40s, who, while working for a
government agency remotely as a contractor, spent some of the remaining time building her own
company for health. She was an artist that moved around for fellowships and funding that she
received. She wants to continue to help matters of social justice for African Americans, and a
cheaper cost of living means more free hours to dedicate to this.
Given the mostly independent occupations, be it as freelancers, dropshippers or business
owners, their “quality” time does indeed equal their own company money. That is, when I asked
about work during the week, they could tell me about work time they kept track of for clients but
had a harder time telling me how long they spent on the other transaction costs of work such as
scouring for co-working spaces, securing new clients, training, networking, negotiating, working
out time zones. The term “flexibility” in work arrangements is often loaded: as Brooke Duffy
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explained of fashion bloggers, by making their life their source of income, these influencers gain
flexibility in space, but not in time. Meaning that, by fully blurring the work time/leisure time
divide, people doing what they love “will never work a day in their lives,” yet it also means that
there is no moment of their lives that is not potentially work.
In fact, I did find those who used their extra time for unpaid work were often aspiring
entrepreneurs, creating more time for their work: Josh, for example, was not trying to do work
online but rather taking a year off from his lucrative career as an engineer to think of his own
projects. By not paying permanent rent in his native country, the time to think through and
develop his own ideas was spent in cheaper countries than Singapore, where he was from. The
location-arbitrage created time for him to think. When we met in 2018 in Medellin, he was
planning to make his way up by land through central America all the way to Silicon Valley,
where he planned to already have perfected his pitch to look for venture capital to support his
idea. Therefore, he was living off his savings but with a noticeably clear path of how he was
going to make his idea into a reality. However, after we spoke two years later in 2020, he had
gone back to Singapore, still working on his business idea, but recently finding funding from the
local government for entrepreneurs. His trip had been for traveling and for spiritual search, and
in Colombia he engaged in the famous Ayahuasca trip in the Amazon. Nonetheless, it was the
nomad “lifestyle” that inspired the project that he eventually started developing: an app to
quickly find virtual assistants from the Philippines.
The tension between those that rejected the “hustle” to pursue other passions and those
who wanted to use the time gained to hustle even more was constantly present. Co-working
places and meetups often consisted of those pertaining to the latter camp. Those I met were
indeed working remotely and still subject and depending on the hours set by their employers.
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Living abroad while working was just a way of doing exactly that: living the life and enjoying
the weekends the day a 9-5 worker would in Medellin. Those that I met in coffee shops or in co-
ops instead of Selina expressed disdain at the “tech bro vibe” associated with the lifestyle, which
ended up positioning this young, white, mostly American male at the center and the rest as
subject to their productivity and pleasure.
You Can Run, but you Can’t Untether
Despite their new-found temporal freedom, remote workers are still reigned by the hours
of the “center” to which they remained tethered to for their incomes. According to Said (Said,
2012), “imperialism” means the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating
“Metropolitan Center” ruling a distant territory; “colonialism,” which is almost always a
consequence of imperialism, is the implanting of settlements on distant territory. (p.9.) While
often confused with each other and used differently by different scholars, Said’s assertion is that
colonialism is a product of empire, and not its only one. While no longer officially occupying
territories (with a few exceptions), Empire works through financial, cultural, and military
domination. It therefore continues culturally and discursively, particularly in terms of
hierarchies, to delineate cultural, categorical divisions, and cultural hegemony.
Time zone dominance has evidenced itself in the lives of telemarketers in India, who
need to adapt their bodies to circadian rhythms of the countries of their clients (Poster, 2007). To
Carey, it was the telegraph that allowed for a central management of a remote empire from an
imperial center: ”The control of time allows for the coordination of activity and, therefore,
effective social control.” (Carey, p.173). Technology to measure time and work, therefore, is
relatively new. E.P Thompson finds it ominous that Henry Ford created a watch with two dials:
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one for local time and another for railroad time. “Attention to time in labor depends in large
degree upon the need for the synchronization of labor” (Thompson, 1967, p.70)
A common client or employer concern with time zone difference includes having
emergencies or need for quick responses. One of the requirements of Remote Year’s pick for a
coworking space is a 24-hour availability of the facilities, which is part of that infrastructural
assurance for the employers “back home”. This constant availability means no socially
designated hours of rest. One of the main appeals of Medellin is the EST time zone that allows
for a “normal” working hour schedule for Americans, and an easier one for Europeans.
As explained by Cheney-Lippold (2011), this may be a creation of an identity-based
market on the internet, but it also clearly correlates with the other structural needs happening
elsewhere. Critical researchers consider the rise of co-working spaces as a reflection of the
increasingly informal, precarious, and individualized nature of contemporary knowledge work
(Avdikos & Kalogeresis, 2017; Avdikos & Merkel, 2020; de Peuter et al., 2017; Tintiangko &
Soriano, 2020). The same issues that traditionally surround freelancers are therefore becoming
more prevalent. Location-independent workers that I did meet in the common seating area of the
co-working space voiced a common opportunity they hoped for: a chance to network. They also
said they wanted or needed to see or even meet people for the sake of it. Scholars have
documented a growing number of freelance workers and their need and desire to work physically
side by side with others who understand their work. According to (Spinuzzi, 2012), working
alone “can take a toll on people, who sometimes find themselves cut off from networking and
trust-building opportunities, with limited access to infrastructure and without firm barriers
between their personal and work lives.” (p.5) Teleworkers struggle with separating their work
lives and home lives and sought other teleworkers with whom to socialize during weekly lunches
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(Kjaerulff, 2010). Similarly, (Clark, 2018) described how rural teleworkers struggled with
professional isolation and sought local networks of freelancers.
By becoming an obvious type of “diaspora,” there is more ability to find commonality as
remote workers in Medellin. The problem of isolation so often discussed in digital nomad online
spaces and academic papers is part of the reason these “hubs” are taking shape. The difference
between these workers and the millions of others who are part of global supply chains is their
autonomy, their identity, and their mobility. While they are indeed dependent on the centers of
control, they are more of an extension of them because of this. The maintenance of this
difference is key to be able to support what they are doing, which will be better unpacked in
upcoming chapters.
Retirement is Now and… Never
The last temporal assignment comes with the decision to be living in the now.
Interviewees expressed a rejection of what Max Weber called the “Protestant Ethic,” which is
often associated with American work ethic as moral and retirement as a well-earned rest. The
norm seemed counterintuitive to them, not only because they no longer had the same work
stability as those before, but because aging means one is more easily tired, and not able to enjoy
traveling the same way. More recently, awareness of overwork and the dissolving of the
American dream for millennials who entered the job market after the 2008 crash, has ushered the
preached “work life balance”, “self-care” and “wellness” discourses that put the responsibility to
push back on overwork back on to the individual. Sharma (2014) says that were he alive now,
Weber could include volumes of The Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism to explain
how “an overwork ethics is normalized, and the body becomes happily indentured to a company
and economic system that cared about workers’ total selves-- physical, material, and spiritual
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well-being.” (p.84). This includes yoga classes during lunch hours, after work amenities for
employees and corporate pushes promoting exercise.
The location-independent workers I met do not fully divorce from this, but instead of
having all the services associated with a good and balanced life, they are moving elsewhere
where they are much cheaper and available. Part of the temporal autonomy is to not have to wait
until retirement to feel like they have earned “the good life,” or to travel. “Both vagabonds and
tourists move through other people's spaces, they both separate physical closeness from moral
proximity, and both set standards for happiness and the good life” (Urry, 1992, p.140). Bauman
explains that “the good life” has come to be thought of as akin to a “continuous holiday” (1993,
p. 243). Therefore, no longer tourism or retirement, but simply how life is lived at least for the
prosperous one-third within the new global order.
Europeans felt less need to justify this side to me, as traveling in a “gap year” between
high school and college is a well acknowledged practice. Australian and Israeli backpackers have
similar rites of passage (Noy & Cohen, 2012)). However, when I asked about their goals for
retirement barely any of them had considered them, with one even telling me (in jest) that it was
a rude question, with the implication that they had accepted the fact that they would not retire in
the way expected or seen by their elders in their home countries. What the “good life” means is
certainly subjective, which is why generalizing about the purposes and lifestyles of this group
proves difficult and ineffective. While Medellin has places like the Productive House, where co-
working and co-living are incorporated but the priority is working, not partying, others were
there simply to “bum out” as explained by 40-year-old Sophia when describing the 20-something
year old white men who earned just enough to “scrape by”:
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They are not very ambitious…. They're here because they want an easy life. You know, a
person can, a person can be a loser in the US and especially a white guy, …. It's like, you
can, like, you can be like a guy making 15 dollars an hour that no American girl would
want to date you, but you come to Colombia and your whole future is completely
reversed here….[there are those] Who just came here for an easy life, which, I don't
blame them at all, but you know, I didn't come here to pay $200 in rent so I can work two
hours a week, you know? (Sophia interview, Zoom, 2020).
The extra time earned by the location arbitrage then, can be used “productively” or not,
but this ideological difference made some clear distinctions among them. Leila, who left a very
lucrative consulting job in London, for example, fully changed her life due to burnout and felt a
deep change in her life priorities. She said she avoided the “Digital Nomad” groups and even
some of the co-working spaces because “what you do becomes the first question people ask you”
as people continue working 60-hour weeks. “Why leave then? You are doing the same thing but
abroad!.”
While, due to the obvious autonomy of time, each of my interviewees managed theirs in
an unusual way, the main commonality was autonomy over rhythms. Sarah Sharma (2014)
focuses on the lived time of “speedy capitalism” and how the speed of some depends on the aid
of workers whose time is “worth less” . What I noted was an appreciation for the slower
movement of time in Medellin, while still being able to keep a foot in the faster one of their
home nations.

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Part II: Break Free from the Office
The “aha” moment for many of the workers I interviewed came from realizing that they
were in the risky position of contractor or freelancer work, yet not the safety net to endure it if
they lost a client. While my interviewees are employed in many different fields, the commonality
lies on their “location independence” whether that be as independent contractors, freelancers,
business owners. While some still worked as sole employees to a company, given the legal
loopholes they were either on sabbatical or a short-term assignment. Many referred to jobs or
bosses who required them to be physically at the office as “outdated” or “restrictive” and argued
that being remote did not lessen their work capacity or productivity, it simply eliminated a lot of
the unnecessary extras, such as small talks, meetings and even distractions that come with office
culture.
As explained in the previous section, the boundaries delineating work time vs leisure time
are a product of capital. Space of work, particularly information work, is portrayed in the popular
imaginary as the drabness and uniformity of offices, cubicles, and fluorescent lighting: a modern
rat trapped in a working maze. The ennui and affectual dissatisfaction are depicted in popular
media such as The Office or Dilbert cartoons. The separation of space between work and life,
therefore, reified the idea that what is done at home is not “work” (Williams, 2014). The internet
encroached upon this spatial boundary.
Before then, Melissa Gregg (2013) wrote about “creep” of work back into the home of
Australian information workers who found themselves answering emails at night or on
weekends, in order to keep up with the definition of an “ideal worker”. Not only do workers feel
pressure and tension to stay “at work” even after they leave the office, but those who take
advantage of official flexibility offerings are penalized for it. The cultural requirement of a
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“good worker” not only extends to constant availability, but rewards physical presence (Elsbach
et al., 2010) showed that “dependability” and “commitment to work hard” were two of the traits
most typically attributed to people who displayed high levels of passive facetime in the
workplace.
Scholars who found correlations of facetime with promotions: working mothers, for
example, are penalized not because their work is less efficient or good, but because their
lessened presence in the office leads to managers doubting their commitment and how therefore
passed on for promotions (Cristea & Leonardi, 2019). Asking for flexible work arrangements is
usually attached to the “mommy-track” that is, a cultural acknowledgement of stepping to the
side in the race up the corporate ladder, what scholars have called the “flexibility stigma” (Stone
& Hernandez, 2013). This tendency freed them from pretending, or the performativity of
business required in an office setting. Since they are not employees looking for a promotion,
being in an office more than they need to be part of the performance of a “good worker.” As
remote workers, this surveillance of presence is gone, allowing for their work to be measured by
its own merits instead of perceived effort.
The term “Telework” was coined by Jack Nilles, a physicist working for NASA, in 1973.
He suggested a way to save time by not commuting to work. In 1979 a New York Post article
further pushed the idea of Telecommuting to the wider public. Benko and Molly Anderson detail
in “The Corporate Lattice: Achieving High Performance in the Changing World of Work,” the
nature of work itself has changed. The term "work" is evolving from a place you go to something
you do. President Obama passed the Telework Enhancement Law in 2010, which requires each
executive agency to establish a policy to allow eligible employees to telework. Among its goals
is “to enhance federal employees' work-life balance.” However, according to the report
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commissioned by the Act, in the fiscal year 2017 43% of federal employees were eligible for
telework yet only 20% teleworked in some capacity. The issue, they claimed, is that employees
see it as something they should be allowed to do, while managers see it as something they must
grant their permission for. While different work consultancies would push the type of work,
culturally it was hard to do. According to this Deloitte study, the reasons for remaining hesitant
about it included some ingrained perception that 1. The home is not an office, therefore calling a
worker there feels intrusive 2. They cannot know whether employees are working, and their
absence will also exclude them from team building and camaraderie 3. Lack of reliable
technology 4. It works for some teams, but not for theirs. Nonetheless, COVID brought it to 90%
during 2020.
The COVID19 pandemic brought the question to our collective awareness. When many
workers were asked to work from home, the questions of the endurance of life in expensive,
small apartments just because of its proximity to their work made many workers leave cities such
as New York City for the countryside or to Florida (Paybarah et al., 2020). They measured by
“mail forwarding requests” finding, of course, that residents in poorer, black, and Latino
neighborhoods had much fewer of their residents leaving. The concern in the city is for a loss of
money in income tax, given it is the richest New Yorkers who fled the fastest. Tensions between
the “escapees” and the locals “ran high,” including protests in small towns. The separation
between workers who could work from home, and those who were frontline workers showed a
clear distinction between information workers and service workers who maintain services and
infrastructures.

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Isabel, a government employee focused on attracting tourism to Medellin, told me that
even though the city, like the rest of Colombia, had had a serious lockdown and quarantine when
people had set times and structures when they could leave their homes, tourist entry had
increased. Restaurants and bars may not have been open, but Airbnb’s were. Sophia, for
example, told me she had arrived a month before everything happened. She had been able to see
some of the city but had been basically locked up for three months by the time we conducted our
Zoom interview. She was rather enjoying it, however. She had the view of the green mountains,
and the nice weather and a balcony, none of which would be available were she back in Atlanta.
In accordance with this, the location-independent lifestyle did not, in my findings,
correlate with career advancement ambition, given the decision to abandon physical presence at a
workplace. For example, Cody, an American programmer, said to me that this was “not the life
for someone who wanted to climb up the ladder of Silicon Valley;” it is not the most ambitious
workers who adopt the lifestyle, but rather those who do not see a point in the number of hours
required. My interviewees clearly fit within the category of workers who did not see themselves
climbing a corporate ladder, or who are in that second pool of contract workers instead of full-
time employees. Rather than “loving their work” in the neoliberalization of it, particularly the
ethos of open-source programming and hackers (Coleman, 2012; Himanen, 1999), my
interviewees are motivated to find work that allows for a good life. As Takhteyev explains,
many programmers code because they get paid to do so (Takhteyev, 2012), not because of a
higher calling of technical savvy; my interviewees were more likely mid-level workers earning
middle-class wages, who saw little benefits to staying put in an office to cash in on that “face-
time” with eventual promotions.
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A common thread was a disenchantment with traditional corporate structures. The allure
of working long hours for a lucrative career lost a bit of luster, particularly for Jeremy, who had a
more technical job and not much of an upward organizational trajectory to look forward to. Just
like an increasing number of workers (Manyika et al., 2016)), Jeremy was an independent
contractor, so while working in this fancy office he sat where the open floor plan was, without a
permanent desk. His body sat at the desk of this well-reputed agency but being there did not
mean he belonged there. However, I found many of these location-independent workers had been
employed in contract positions, freelancing etc., therefore to remain in an office or have a
manager appeared to them as becoming subject to the downsides of working for corporations: a
watchful and controlling boss, fatiguing office culture, yet without the benefits of upward
mobility or financial stability: the precarity without the flexibility.
Rick, for example, spoke to me of doing his job sitting at an office in Glasgow, while
another contractor that collaborated with him called in from distinct parts of the world. The
question of: “if he was doing it why couldn’t I?” If their current jobs paid the same, and they
had the same contractual benefits (often little to none) what was it that tied them to the rain and
to expensive rent? This moment of realization that this arrangement employed by someone they
knew could also be adopted by themselves was a common theme throughout my interviews.
Therefore, what the tactics of movement do is change their lived-in space and therefore switch
their relationship to their current structures. While “run” is not an escape from capitalism, it is an
attempt to, like businesses, outsmart it. With a $3,000 a month income, life in Los Angeles may
have been rough, but the two-bedroom apartment for $500.00 a month in a lovely high rise with
the mountain view makes them a local high-earner.

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Lastly, there remained the dream or idea of a capitalist frontier. In their native , large
cities, the innovation was already done, while Medellin is “on the rise.” The celebrated dreams-
come-true in New York City or Paris were dreams of their parents, and now there is more reality
of unemployment and crowdedness. Mike who decided to move to Medellin to do a PhD,
explained this rationale:
Mike: I don't want to be in the States anymore. It's past its prime. There's no reason why
anyone with any sort of talent that they're able to mobilize through digitally should stay
there. There's absolutely no reason… every digital nomad should leave, leave the States
immediately. If you have any sort of tech skills, leave the States.

Andrea: What about Silicon Valley?

Mike: You know, I have yet to meet a person from the area that had a lot of positive
things to say about it. They will say that, yeah. You know, some of the qualities of it or
you know, living wise are great, but they, the level of stress to maintain that lifestyle,
they all say is not worth it (Mike interview, Medellin, 2018).
Looking for the “next best thing” in this sense is looking for the “next best place.” Like the
California Gold Rush, or even to the discovery of the Americas, moving to find where the next
business opportunity may be is an affordance of ease of mobility. The headline of a New York
Time article says “coworking on vacation: a desk in paradise” (Mohn, 2015), succinctly
elucidating the blurring of the boundaries of time and space, of not being fully at work or at
leisure.
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Working abroad temporarily is not an entirely new concept. Professionals from richer
countries have often done such sabbaticals when choosing to teach English abroad, volunteer or
work in international aid. Moving somewhere warm after retirement is also common, particularly
for Americans. Moving to “live where you vacation” has often been part of escapist utopian
dreams for the regular worker. More recently, utopian thinking of life post work imagines a life
of little or automated work. The goal of tactical thinking is to aim for the best life possible, to
extend their well-being now. The search for “well-being”, as explained by (Docherty,
2021)(Ryan & Deci, 2001), in the psychological literature, the term of “well-being” is a broad
term comprising one of two: (1) hedonism, which measures subjective experience of happiness,
affect, and life satisfaction; (2) eudaimonism, which measures positive relationships with self
and others and experiences of living well. I found evidence of both, and because of this I am less
interested in the why than the how.
What both share is the need for autonomy of space or environment that accompanies the
dream of escaping the rat race. In traditional office environments, wanting to escape the cubicle
became an American popular dream (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010). The dominant imagery that
accompanies the lifestyle is often one of a laptop with a beautiful backdrop, be it a beach, green
mountains or other type of “paradise”-type landscape associated with vacation or the tropics.
During the summer of 2018 in Medellin, I sat at Selina co-working space, an Israeli chain trying
to cater to this market, which Forbes called “The digital nomad hotel of the future”. This is
because it is a higher-end type of hostel given the offer of shared rooms, but also has a beautiful,
comfortable, relatively expensive co-working space. The place had the usual “hot desks,” had a
reserved section for the workers using Remote Year service, and another section where a couple
of Colombian startups had set up their offices. While most people in the hot desks would not
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speak while working, I was able to strike up conversations and set up interviews by hanging out
by the coffee machine. I sat with Peter on the balcony, which overlooked a small river coming
down the hill where the space was perched on. This coworking space was not only cool in
design, but they also made certain every window had a green background–not hard in Medellin–
be it the beautiful green Andes, or the vegetation next to the river. The sound of the water current
against the rocks permeated the space with a serene, nature-filled environment, occasionally
disrupted by partying taking place in the shared area in the evenings. Given the noise, one could
assume to be outside the city, yet I had only walked about three blocks uphill from the trendy,
bar and restaurant filled area El Poblado.
Once the structure of the employer-provided workspace is dissolved, the necessity to
“relocate” for a job, or to be in an office most of the week, dissipates. Therefore, the decision of
where to live becomes another consumer choice. These co-working spaces, as opposed to
traditional office spaces, tend to provide not only work infrastructure but also a “feel.” Selina
was often described as having a “great vibe,” and given its attachment to a relatively upscale
hostel, shared quite a few of the amenities with it including a good, affordable Colombian lunch,
good nearby restaurants, and access to English-speaking staff who could provide tips, advice and
services given its role as hospitality provider. However, the rise, or dominance of co-working
spaces in real estate demonstrates a jump from working in offices managed by big companies, to
those chosen for, and often paid for, by independent workers (“Coworking By The Numbers,”
2018). The dreaded “office” persists. However, many I spoke to said that co-working spaces
were too expensive and a waste of time. Not only that, but they were aware of the irony of
leaving home to go somewhere else and then spend their time in an office, with others who
wished to talk about work first. A more recent trend are smaller companies or agencies that do
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not have any headquarters whatsoever (Ceniza-Levine, n.d.). Adriana, one of my interviewees
who planned to go to Medellin before COVID put her on hold, explained that her new employer
gave her a stipend for co-working space, given they did not have headquarters: the cost of
workspace was factored into her salary.
The company Remote Year, for example, serves as an intermediary to legitimate a
sabbatical year for employees. The guarantee of availability during office hours and 24/7
availability of co-working spaces with reliable internet for workers provides a security to
attenuate their employer’s fears of unavailability due to distance. When speaking to Jose, the
Remote Year head for Medellin, he said their main clients and way of approach were large
American companies to provide this option for their employees. Independent workers and
travelers may find the service too expensive, particularly with the expectation of a monthly fee,
something that a freelancer can rarely meet.
During my time at the co-working space, I noticed how much the patrons conformed to
the regular 8-hour workday. When I asked why they came at all, they said they needed the space
to force the discipline and accountability that used to be provided by their employers, since they
were now in control of their own time. While most of the Remote Year workers had bosses and
remote meetings/schedules to conform to, those independent workers had the extra labor of
disciplining their own time. Nonetheless many of my subjects thought that paying for a co-
working space was an unnecessary luxury. The space was, indeed, costly: too costly for locals if
they wished to work there.
Working From Paradise
In terms of the internet, while their originators aimed to create a space where the “giants
of flesh and steel” could not find nor regulate them (Barlow, 1996). We have since then seen the
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internet both aid in organizing protests and provide alternative public spaces (Castells, 2015;
Kraidy, 2016; Papacharissi, 2014); while also allowing for more tracking, surveillance and “data
capitalism”. The original debate in development agencies was the up-and-coming ICTD
(information communication technologies for development), which often focused on what we
came to know as the “digital divide.” The divide focused mostly on accessibility, who has access
to the internet, as in what countries had been connected to the undersea cables? But also, on
actual user-end access. The now infamous “one laptop per child” project saw providing every
child in the world with a computer as the way to democratize education (Ames, 2019). The lack
of understanding of the many structural barriers unrelated to computer access was revealed in
this instance when the children used the laptops as light sources in their homes rather than for
homework.
Nonetheless, access has been indeed acquired by many, and it did include what in ICTD
is called “leapfrogging”: that is most people in the world have accessed the internet via their
mobile phones, not computers (Alarcon, AoIR). While now the academic conversation about the
digital divide has moved on to inequalities (Eubanks, 2018): how technologies not only often
reflect inequality, but also perpetuate it. It also shows how connectivity is accessed differently,
and the different relationships to technology depending on existing structural demarcations.
Many places, including Colombia, still lack basic connectivity.
However, what “connected” means is up for debate. According to Jabba, ICT is one of
Medellin’s strengths, with a higher internet penetration rate than Bogota and Cali. “This was to
be expected given the city’s recognition of orienting its economic and social development toward
knowledge creation, science, and technology. The high connectivity penetration can be
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explained, according to Jabba, among other factors, the city having “an important company
dedicated to providing public utilities” including the internet.
The contrast is often evident without looking too hard, with COVID becoming almost a
natural experiment. While a French translator worked from his home in central Medellin earning
$3,000 a month, his wife, a Colombian university professor developing a program for gender
education in the comunas, told me that the children she worked with had halted school because
they did not have a stable-enough internet connection to attend an online classroom. This
discrepancy in quality of internet access is common in cities in the developing world (Nemer,
2015), particularly in informal settlements, such as the favelas in Brazil.
David Nye (1996) calls the “sublime”, a “religious feeling, aroused by the confrontation
with impressive objects”, and he includes the natural ones such as the Grand Canyon and
Niagara Falls, together with the awe provoked by great technological advancements such as the
Golden Gate bridge, (xiv). Technology as a way for man to tame nature underlines most of this
narrative (M. R. Smith & Marx, 1994)). Nye then called “electrical sublime” called power
attributed to electric power in cutting distance and allowing for speed.
The “sublime” is often attributed to scenes of magnanimous beauty of the natural. The
search to return to this is embedded in the category of the “ecotourist.” (Fletcher, 2014) talks
about the (usually white, male, westerner) traveler who wishes to go into the “wild” to escape the
problems of their modern lives, including work, social issues, and routines. To him, part of going
into nature is to reconnect or find that “inner wild,” yet still following a regime of “productive
leisure” in the challenges of scaling mountains, rafting or survival camping. He concludes that
“modern subjects” are like Don Quixote tilting at windmills once they realize the fantastical
landscapes and experiences produced don’t exist.
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While the image is of technology in nature, the location-independent worker has no such
fantasy. They indeed have that bittersweet awareness that their lifestyle depends on the same
system they ran from. What it does allow for is an in between. While Sharma talks about the
adoption of the Taoist ethic as exemplified by yoga classes in lunch hour, the location-
independent worker who aims to escape is still depending on being tethered to the center. The
connectivity from a country that never fully “tamed” the wilderness outside the main cities, there
is a freedom from the concrete and order of modernity in their countries. A comment in a
Facebook group said Medellin was “deceptively” green. The mountains as a backdrop appear
like a natural spectacle, but there are few available natural parks or hiking trails to go up them.
Fletcher talks about the logics of capital and social organization following adventurers into the
wild. Co-working spaces where people are working alone and then try to socialize with others,
potentially meeting a future co-worker are the cyclical, within-market organization of the same
feature.
As a destination, Medellin is a tactical choice; part of finding spaces “off” the beaten
path. However, it still needs to have the basic infrastructure that makes it “surprisingly modern”
as one of my interviewees remarked. Public transportation and multiple shopping centers and
restaurants make this so, but, like many other cities in the developing world, it is limited. While
Medellin is well-known in Colombia and even in Latin America as beautiful, most of the world
still carries the image of it as too dangerous to visit. In fact, one of the reasons that Colombia is
still so green is the lack of state presence in many of its territories, part of the reason the FARC,
ELN and other armed forces were able to slowly occupy them. Simultaneously, the drawn-out
conflict meant no investment in those occupied areas, meaning a halt to “development,”
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including infrastructure. An upside to this was leapfrogging the lack of eco-consciousness of
making highways that cross the jungle.
The Colombian conflict is mostly a jungle conflict. Guerilla warfare in the US became
well-known as the way the Vietnamese defeated the US in the Vietnam War. Indeed, the
Colombian jungle remained preserved due to the guerillas use of tactics the same inspiring
DeCerteau’s framework: the government did not tame and organize, regulate, or police the
jungle while these militias scurried through them with ease. While Medellin’s mountains make
for an impressive view that make visitors ``fall in love with it” during the winding drive around
them from the airport, they are not hikeable in the way Americans and Europeans are used to,
without trails and good places for petty theft. In one of the Facebook groups a visitor complained
that Medellin had very little green space to be in, without big public parks or hiking trails.
Other parts of Colombia are more attractive to tourists, such as the popular coastal city
Cartagena, the inspiration for Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novels. The Amazon jungle is also a
popular spot, as well as the island of San Andres. Nonetheless, the first is too expensive due to
its standing as a tourist destination, and it also has tropical weather: the heat does not foster
productivity. Medellin, with its apt city motto “the city of eternal spring” sits at a comfortable 22
°C (72 °F) all year, achieved by its tropical latitude that robs it of seasons, but elevated 1500
meters above sea level by the Andes. Bogota, the capital, is too cold, too crowded, and as many
locals from Medellin like to say, not a buen vividero the way Medellin is. The other destinations
mentioned lack reliable internet connection. When I spoke to the Colombian owner of an off-the-
grid hotel in the Amazon, they saw the entire thing as a fallacy: Medellin may be well connected,
but much of the country is not. The eco-hotel uses rainwater and solar power on purpose, but the
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lack of internet or cell service is not purposeful nor decided: moving from 3 to 4G had taken it
down.
Alas, the sublime in this case is attached to the ability for technology to allow for a
coming back into nature. The photos often associated with the lifestyle, chosen for media
articles, blog posts and social media are that of a laptop on the beach. In the case of Bali, the
most popular hub, they often include the green hills that extend behind the co-working spaces.
For Medellin, it is the green mountains and the buildings projecting between them. I often heard
stories of “falling in love” with Medellin; the airport is a 45-min car ride, away from the
mountains, meaning the ride into the city is a winding road that takes one up the Andes and
down into the valley. And it is indeed breathtaking: as a Bogotana, I had only been once to
Medellin in my childhood but had always had it in my head as beautiful. Arriving at the airport
and having that first impactful view does indeed mix the sublime of nature with that of the
technology of a city. The mix of well-enough modernity for a foreigner to be comfortable, such
as public transportation, and internet access, with the poor-enough that maintains it relatively
cheap. It is the combination of these that allow for Medellin to become a tactical spot. Nye says
that “Kant’s sublime made the individual humble in the face of nature, the technological sublime
exalted the conquest of nature” p.152. While rarely is the connectivity what causes sublime, it is
the ability to continue modernity while embedded in nature that is epitomized by the popular
image associated with this specific instance of remote work.

Figure 1.2
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Google search result image from “Digital Nomad” term search, location unspecified.

Note. Google Image Search Result, 2019, [Screenshot].
In parallel to paths of gentrification, one of the reasons that this is paradise is less to do
with the place itself, and more to what can be accessed in it. These transients can afford short-
term rentals in the city’s hippest neighborhoods, and photos of views from the top floors of these
buildings are often shared on social media. The ability to live in one or two bedrooms in the best
area in town gives it that. However, what this has done in turn is pull in another type of
informality, i.e., criminality, to the area. While Poblado a few years before had been mostly
frequented by well-off locals, the descend of foreigners brought locals wishing to provide the
services that they assume foreigners want, including sex work and drugs. In the three-year gap
between my first research trip and now, local tourists said they had included observing sex
workers as part of the tourism, much like Amsterdam’s red-light district
Conclusion
While the popular imaginary of the nomad is of “the new rich,” those I interviewed
would classify as middle to lower class in their native countries. As explained by tech workers
leaving comfortable jobs for riskier ones in Gina Neff’s study, location-independent workers are
in part responding to the environment of precarious labor in their countries by taking advantage
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of the flexibility side of the precarity coin. The “workday” as it stands is a product of
industrialization and the worker rights unions that pushed back on worker exploitation. The
“flexibility” that they are stretching provides them with greater autonomy over their time.
Nonetheless, they rarely count the time it takes to acquire clients as working hours, and they also
do not see themselves retiring in the way they saw their parents do. As freelancers, they gain
further autonomy by removing themselves from the constraints of having to work where their
employer is. As freelancers, independent workers or budding entrepreneurs, the cost to their
business is their own labor. Given that every hour of the day is time for their own money-making
potential, the “tactics” for functioning or responding to their environments is to take on the
outsourcing business model of making their cost of living cheaper by working from places with
low cost of living. The following chapter delves into the history of Medellin, and the politico-
economic arrangements of the narratives surrounding it.
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Chapter 2: Medellin, The Comeback Kid

In summer of 2018 I attended a party in the rooftop of RutaN to celebrate Accenture’s
Innovation Lab’s inauguration in Medellin. It was a catered affair, with local government
officials in suits, mingling with media personalities as well as other companies who decided to
house their offices in the space. Some attendees flew in from other parts of the country,
particularly Bogota, to attend this event. The mayor at the time Federico Gutierrez gave a
speech, in which not only did he thank Accenture for choosing this spot, but he also spoke about
its significance in making Medellin the innovation hub it hoped and knew it could be.
Paisas, which is how those of the region of Antioquia refer to themselves, are known in
the country for their local pride. Colombians, TV world travel personality Anthony Bourdain
argued in his episode (“Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations” Colombia (TV Episode 2008) are
the people he has encountered who are most proud of their nation. The push demonstrated by the
government and tourism officials is reflected, and encouraged by, its citizens. Participatory
citizenship has been part of Medellin’s strategy for inclusion of the youth who used to form part
of gangs (Brough, 2020). Mary Roldan describes the city as a place where “paternalism, civic
duty, a tradition of non-partisan public service, and ascent based on merit have always coexisted
with exclusion, discrimination, parochialism and selective repression” (Roldán, 2020 p.4) They
distinguish themselves from the rest of the country, including the history of Antioqueñismo
taught in schools. This begins with the settlement of the city by Spanish Jews in the sixteenth
century. While the city has many immigrants from various parts of Colombia, the appearance of
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a Paisa is often equated to whiteness, popular reggaeton artists JBalvin and Maluma epitomizing
the regional appearance. Its location makes it one of the biggest cities for Afro-Colombians from
the Choco and other departments of the region of Pacifico, where most of black Colombia is, to
immigrate to the city, yet still not fully be accepted as a Paisa.
From the visitors I interviewed and met, I often heard stories of falling in love: one-hour
drive from the airport to the city brought upon comparable stories of awe of this city embedded
in the green mountains. Driving up the winding road through the Andes reveals a type of secret
metropolis in the tropics. That, in the end, is what characterizes it. Medellin, the capital of the
department of Antioquia, is couched in between the Andes mountain range in the northwestern
valley of Aburra. Its population, at 2.5 million, makes it the second most populous city in the
nation. Spaniard conquistadores chose cities in the Andes across the continent because of the
respite from the tropical heat and the disease-carrying mosquitoes that accompany it. Colombia’s
capital Bogota stands at 2600 meters above sea level: Colombians affectionately call it the
"fridge" because it averages about 70F and rains most of the year. However, like many
developing nations, about a fourth of the country's population concentrates in the capital.
(Medellín weather). Medellin is indisputably beautiful, and rarely does anyone who visits not
consider staying. While this chapter shows the tensions between the distinct reasons why
Medellin is a place to invest in, set up your company, or visit, the general agreement on why its
choice remained in its cost and its comfort. Nonetheless, the surrounding understandings of what
the city means for travelers, for their families, and why it is a “new discovery” for them is
influenced by their media consumption about its past, and word-of-mouth, better explained in
chapter 3.
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This chapter focuses on the macro narratives about the city of Medellin at the
international level. First, how the city has “appeared” in global narratives that associate specific
events to places, or how Benedict Anderson called them, “characters” in the continuous novel of
consumption of international news. It focuses on how the city has appeared and re-appeared in
the international stage, from a violence-ridden city, to an innovative one. I argue that its past is
what makes its present newsworthy in a narrative of redemption and recovery. This is based on
international media coverage of the city as re-discovered by English-speaking media audiences.
The second part argues that city government officials have jumped on this narrative
sociotechnical imaginary co-created by government officials, businesspeople, and locals to brand
their city and attract startups, young workers and foreign companies and investment. Lastly, how
tourism officials on the ground grapple with trying to attract the “right type” of visitor, focusing
on health and wellness tourism as well as repudiating the demand of independent travelers to
engage in narco tourism and sexual tourism.
The tension exemplifies what, from a Foucauldian perspective, is a discourse as a form
of power circulating in the social field, and its meaning can aid strategies of domination as well
as those of resistance. The hegemony on representation that the United States possesses, as well
as its historical relationship to Colombia particularly in the mostly unsuccessful “War on Drugs”
has permeated the international narrative about the country. Indeed, this period is only one part
of Colombia’s violent history, since it’s the location for the longest-running armed conflict in the
West Hemisphere (Ocampo et al., 2015). Yet given that this is mostly internal, the international
image of the city, not the country necessarily, remained as the representational period of the
country since the 80s. Not only this, both local retellings of the story of notorious drug trafficker
Pablo Escobar in Colombian television and in Hollywood have solidified this violent and painful
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period for locals in international memory. The irony to locals is the desire of foreigners to attach
to a story that appears amusing or interesting, when the cause for violence in their city and
country is the prohibition of a product consumed abroad. Local officials are then attempting to
resist the discourse by narrating the period as historical and focusing on the victims rather than a
criminal that terrorized their nation for so many years. To others, leaning into it is a chance to
make money from tourists, as well as profit from a story that has indeed captivated international
audiences for decades.
In this chapter, however, I focus on how the city as the place associated with it grapples
with the effect of not only the violence, but the material consequences of the reputational damage
done to the city. Unable to fully fight this deterministic image, locals have used it as a point of
departure for the narrative of change, redemption, advancement, and even modernity, tying
together complex histories to present a cogent one to an international world that only knows one.
In this sense, violence and cartels are outdated, and even if always present in the story, only as
what is repudiated. It is rarely about the politics surrounding the war on drugs, but in fighting the
negative consequences of the discourse on their city. Officials are instead focusing on the future
of the city: Rather than negate a past, or even the current reality of still-present poverty, violence,
and inequality, they have carefully constructed what Jasanoff and Kim called a “sociotechnical
imaginary” to enlist support from their citizens, other governments, and the tech industry.
The chapter analyzes the tension that Paisas expressed when dealing with commodifying
their own suffering for entertainment abroad, and of tourists to the city. While the local
narratives of past violence have indeed provided rich material for the local and international
media industries to benefit from, the tension of whether to lean into those narratives for profit or
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if to fight them to ameliorate the city’s and the country’s international image is constantly
present.
From my findings, what Paisas feel on the ground then is the ambivalence often felt by the
residents of the tourist destinations (Azcárate, 2020), of, one the one hand, joy of showing their
city to foreigners, aid in ameliorating their home’s bad reputation, and on the other the potential
money-making opportunities that trap them into the roles that these foreigners wish to see. The
fact that some of those foreigners may indeed be in the city to procure “drugs or girls,” as the
owner of an Airbnb in the trendy neighborhood El Poblado told me “This is what they are here
for.” The irony of foreigners making a touristic spectacle of the same bloody history that has
been financed by American and European money, buying those products that they themselves
made illegal touches a specific nerve that I quickly noted in anyone I interviewed. The same
division has been key in a lot of Medellin and Colombian history of division: those participating
in the criminal economy, and those who blame it for the past, and current, armed conflict in the
nation.
Again, the tensions often arose when those expectations were shared, given how
experiences are so vastly different. In many blogs or posts, foreigners warned each other to not
bring up the show “Narcos” with locals, “they don’t like it.” As Melissa Brough (2020) said of
her interviews with local youth in Medellin, violence is one of the topics they bring up first, yet
the last thing they want to be known for. However, in this sense, being a Colombian
ethnographer did give me a particular insight, as in Paisas took for granted that I know about the
violence, and it is the innovative future in which I was interested. The local tourism officials I
spoke to would assume I share their frustration of being reduced to a trope, and they were not
wrong, but therefore felt no need to regale me with stories of it: they assumed I knew them.
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knowing that this is what the foreigner is interested in hearing about, while being aware of how
much else there is to know and see about your culture, people, and city.
Brief History of Medellin
Like many developing country cities, it possesses some of the wealthiest neighborhoods,
with luxury malls and restaurants, while further up the mountains it hosts the infamous comunas,
or shantytowns. The locals pride themselves in their self-sufficiency and historic industry: the
department of Antioquia’s economy first boomed from gold mining (80-90 percent of the
country’s gold) (Gouëset, 1998) in the nineteenth century, and 23% of Colombia’s coffee
(Bejarano, 1987). At this time, the country’s economy relied on exports of primary goods .By the
mid-20th century it stood as the leading textile exporter in Latin America. “Since then it is
evident that Medellin is an entrepreneurial city, since it knew how to transform the accumulation
of wealth to the country 's first national industry” (Sánchez Jabba, 2013). Meaning the mining
companies invested in other types of industry (Lleras, 1965; Botero, 1984). Until that point
industrial development was small and “modest,” by artisanal vendors with low productivity.
Sánchez Jabba (2013) claims that for this reason, the commercial class “in a natural way and
without frictions” led the process of Antioqueño industrialization (Botero, 1984).
Ergo, the city was seen during the industrial era as the most important one in the country:
while other urban centers also had some textile factories, scholars agree on Medellin as a
pioneer. Bejarano (1987), based on Ramos (1970), indicates that in 1916 Bogotá had 13
factories, the Atlántico department over 10, while Antioquia had over 25. Sánchez Jabba cites
other scholars (Botero, 1984; Bejarano, 1987; Gouëset, 1998) that have mentioned “the
entrepreneurial vocation of its businesspeople “as a crucial factor to Medellin’s position as
Colombia’s industrial center in the early 20th century. However, he argues, “its industrial
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specialization was also its economic downfall: with neoliberal policies and global competition
the textile industry declined, and due to a lack of diversification of sectors, so did the city.”
In the 1970s, the textile and manufacturing industries began to dwindle due to global
competition, which led to an increase of unemployed young people, the highest in the country ref
25. The lack of work “weighed heavily on Medellin's working-class youth, approximately half of
whom came from single-mother households. Some of Medellin’s young men from poorer
neighborhoods and the comunas joined the street gangs and cartels in charge of the newly
arriving cocaine business. According to a UN report the homicide rates were 40 times higher
from what the UN marks as an epidemic. Studies establish that close to 80% of the rise in
homicides during this period can be attributed to the rise of narcotrafficking activities. By the
1980’s the country was the main epicenter of cocaine and drug trafficking to North America.
Drug cartels, the most prominent in the cities of Medellin and Cali, invested or bought out local
commerce for money laundering via violence, kidnappings, murder, and bribery.
Infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar’s famous phrase was plata o plomo which translates to
“silver or lead.” The term “plata” is the Colombian term for money in general: i.e., the level of
corruption and overtaking of the city’s police, government officials and even the justice system
lay on the power to exert violence on those who did not accept bribery. Through donations to the
poorest comunas of Medellin, Escobar managed to get himself elected to congress, mostly to
fight back on Colombia’s agreement to extradite narcotraffickers to the U.S. but was quickly
expelled by the Minister of Justice Rodrigo Lara Bonilla. (Castells, End of Millennium)
According to Riley, 1996, some of the most infamous crimes committed by the Cartel of
Medellin included , Lara Bonilla’s assassination in 1984; the takeover of the Palacio de Justicia
(court house) by the guerrilla group M-19 en 1985; the assassination of the Procurador General
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de la Nación, Carlos Mauro Hoyos, in 1988; the assassination of presidential candidate Luis
Carlos Galán 1989; the bombing of a commercial plane and that same year the assassination of
200 public servants of the Supreme Court and 40 judges. During this period more than 200
police members were assassinated in the city, for which Escobar offered rewards (Riley, 1996).
Medellin’s history is couched, of course, within Colombia’s longer history of armed
conflict since its inception. The period known as La Violencia (1946-1958) began as the most
contemporary one, up to the peace agreement reached in 2016. The main actors included the
right-wing paramilitary, the state, and leftist guerrillas including the ELN and more prominently,
the FARC, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia. The longest-running internal conflict in the Western hemisphere meant the largest
number of internally displaced people in the world . The comunas became particularly violent
due to Escobar arming its residents, and the gangs began acting as the police force in this part of
the city that lacked state presence. During these years Medellín, to a far greater degree than any
other area of the country, was transformed by the infiltration of narcotrafficking into all areas of
its social and institutional life. Medellín soon became recognized as the most violent city in
Colombia and in all Latin America (the peak was in 1991-1992, with a rate of 444 homicides per
100,000 inhabitants). Riano Alcala Roldan, who studied the impact on youth, writes that “death
became a commodity, highly valued, and sought after by obscure economic and political
interests and the drug cartels. It was bought and sold in an escalating cycle of terror and violence
that reached its most dramatic expressions in the second half of the 1980s….(Camacho 1992;
Perea 1998 Pilar Riano-Alcala, 2017; Roldán, 2020 p..144)
To push back against the leftist guerrillas, paramilitary forces emerged, originally
financed, and developed by local businesspeople, landowners and others who thought the state's
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lack of presence in rural Colombia would allow the guerrillas to take over. Paramilitary rise and
growth in the country is often traced back to Antioquia. Eventually paramilitary groups also got
involved in drug trafficking and were the ones mostly controlling the routes and trade after the
fall of Escobar in 1993. The political conflict between the FARC, paramilitaries and the state
were partly financed by narcotrafficking, the guerilla and paramilitary groups used the money to
finance their campaigns, and US aid money financed the Colombian military.
The relationship of the U.S. with Colombia’s government has been one of partnership,
particularly during the “war on drugs.” While the U.S. popular image of the country is due to this
relationship, narcotrafficking served as part of a larger tangle of political violence happening in
the country. In the 1980s, the Colombian illegal drug economy developed into one of the most
powerful in the world, controlling the management and distribution of cocaine as well as in the
processing of the alkaloid (Salazar 1998b). The dismantling of the Cartel de Medellin gave way
for what some call the “urbanization of Colombia’s armed conflict” (Riano Alcala, Dwellers of
Memory). That is, the guerrillas and the paramilitaries, who mostly battled in rural areas until
that point, crept into the comunas of Medellin to take over the drug trade. The local youth in the
comunas were born into this conflict, and therefore heavily recruited and taught to fight. By
1999, the United States had increased its military presence in Colombia, with military aid
purportedly aimed at combating the narcotics trade, but has also been used to fight guerrillas.
The ‘Plan Colombia’ made the country the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the
world.
The peace agreement signed in 2016 between FARC and the Colombian government
created a new redistribution of the issue. While most of the combatants (who in 1997 had 17,000
active members and a presence in more than 60 percent of the national territory) demobilized,
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some disidencias remained, as well as the continuing of the other guerilla group the ELN
(Palacios 1997). The drug trafficking business, therefore, has not dissolved with elimination of
leaders or with the peace agreement, but rather fractured and become managed by bandas
criminales (gangs), continuing to fuel government corruption, violence, and displacement of
farmers of their lands. The U.N estimates 7.4 million displaced people in the Colombian conflict,
Afro-Colombian communities and indigenous people have been particularly affected, accounting
for 10% and 3% respectively. The number (by 2017) continued growing despite the peace
agreement.
Academic understanding of race varies between American scholars and non-American,
particularly Latin American scholars, who tend to be more focused on class. As Hall explains,
categorical understandings of the social creation of race and whiteness, they are of course
economically, historically, and culturally driven. As Wade (1993) writes about the Colombian
context in comparison with North America, and how in a sense the existence of
“blanqueamiento” [whitening] has often been taken as indicative of a lack of racial
discrimination…. [yet] the Latin American racial orders need to be understood in their own
terms” (1993, p. 297). Race and racism certainly exist in Colombia, just not in the same way.
Law-mandated segregation did not historically exist, and even Simon Bolivar was disappointed
upon meeting the founding fathers because they did not think their attained liberty included their
slaves.

Wade (1993) takes Stuart Hall’s approach (p.340) of theoretical convergence between
class and race. He argued that the United States and Latin America came to attach quite different
meanings to the category black due to political and demographic factors (p.342). The main
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difference is that, while in the US it is a matter of ancestry, in Latin America it's a matter of
appearance. In the U.S, whiteness is something to be lost, stemming from the “one-drop rule,” in
Colombia, is something that can be aspired to through marriage, and often through possessions
and money, given the continuation of a mostly white Elite and the extreme poverty of the mostly
black regions of the country. Wade states that “blacks are subject to pressures stemming from the
high value attributed to lightness and the negative value attributed to Blackness which can induce
them to adapt culturally the mores of the non-black world, which may involve finding a lighter
skin partner” (1993, p.286).
Nonetheless, economic, and de facto cultural segregation are strong. Most recently, the
country categorizes itself as 15% Black, 5% Indigenous and 80% is “mixed” . Historically, in
Brazil, as well as Colombia, the attempt to whiten the population was government led; policies
of blanqueamiento, or whitening, encouraged European immigration and miscegenation to
“mejorar la raza'' (improve the race) created a cultural sense that the native and black populations
could be made whiter through procreation (Stam & Shohat, 2012). Contrasting this with North
American, French, and Dutch settlements, shows how European and whiteness have evolved as
categories, differently, separately, but with the same hierarchy that keeps whiteness at the top
and as the goal to be achieved. Wade compares the neighboring regions of Choco and Antioquia
(of which Medellin is its capital), where the geographical provenance and race seem to be
equated. Choco is the blackest department, and Antioquia the whitest. Immigrants from Choco
but also from the Atlantic coast move to Medellin, but due to the contrast, in addition to the
parochialism of Paisas, almost never belong, or are not considered real Paisas. Given the Choco
region as the black region of the country, leaving it can for some mean an abandoning or
rejection of blackness, since although it could mean leaving poverty, it also means leaving the
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community, and likely finding a lighter-skinned partner. It “inevitably creates a structural link
between economic improvement and possibilities of race mixture” (p.299). Given the whiteness
and economic prosperity of the region of Antioquia, just moving there represents a step away
from blackness and into whiteness (p. 300)
Despite the different historical contexts, the attachment of whiteness to wealth persists.
However, it is the nationality front that also adds to this, meaning while rarely is race explicitly
mentioned in Spanish or Colombia as a descriptor or a signifier, gringo, extranjero, Europeo and
lately a growing use of the traditionally mocked Americano are the ones that meld with this
identity. The nationality itself is a portable possession. With it comes implicit trust, such as the
Airbnb owner who told me she used to only accept foreigners to her rental before Airbnb
encoded that she could not refuse a request. Once, she told me, some locals created a fake profile
as a European to be able to rent her place. She explicitly did not want to discriminate against her
own people, but Colombians “complained about everything and tried not to pay” .
Sociotechnical Imaginaries
Medellin’s complex history means that how it arrived at its current success, or what are
measures of success, are harder to determine. Indeed, as explained above, the city has had a
multilayered approach to actual social improvement, including reduction of violence and a move
toward participatory politics to include youth in the governance of their city ({Updating}). This
chapter focuses specifically on the image of Medellin to the global community. In this sense, the
city relies on current infrastructural achievements as examples of its modernity, while making
“promises” “commitments” and proposing laws to make it a city of innovation.
At the country level, governments, particularly those trying to “keep up” with modernity
are relying on the hope attached to innovation to make its nation and citizens competitive. The
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rise of ICTD in the development sector showed the hopes pinned into technology for economic
development (Donner, 2015). The language of “development” is a state in progress: an in-
betweenness that will take the non-industrialized to the modern. As scholar Arturo Escobar
(2011) emphasizes, the concept and language of “development” dominates the way that
governments view their goals and allegiances, and replicates the ideal of a linear modernity, or
the hope to “catch up” with developed economies. The most infamous example is Nicholas
Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child and its imminent failure. The project ran on the premise that
by giving laptops to children in poor nations, they were granting the agency allotted by the
technology, eventually aiding in reducing inequality. The project became the poster child on how
not to do development nor technological interventions, epitomized by the image of a child using
the laptop as a light in their dark home (Ames, 2019). The techno-solutionism to inequality,
poverty, and other social ailments professed by technology leaders and governments alike has
been criticized and discredited, but it does fully lose its force. A recent example was Facebook’s
Internet.org initiative, which aimed at providing free internet to the world’s poor, using similar
rhetoric, imagery, and logic to the World Bank for its promotion (Alarcon, AoIR). Pushing
beyond just connectivity and access, in her book “Chasing Innovation,” Irani (2019)Lilly Irani
focuses on how the narrative of development is pinning increased hopes on technological
innovation. Her study of Indian tech workers shows how the concept concentrates on Indian
citizens so that they become “entrepreneurial citizens”, that is, showing how by becoming
innovators and entrepreneurs Indians would not only be achieving individual success, but
bringing their country along with them.

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A few different imaginaries converge in this analysis. Imaginaries have been used often
in association to the political, as well as social movements. Taylor’s social imaginary focuses on

something much broader and deeper than the intellectual schemes people may entertain
when they think about reality in a disengaged mode. I am thinking rather, of the ways
people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on
between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper
normative notions and images that underlie these expectations (Taylor 2004 p.23).

First, based on Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities”, it is that of the nation
state; a product and the basis for order in modernity, it needs to be defined, and redefined by
artifacts, particularly media artifacts, including the museum, the media, maps and sporting
events, in order to create a sense of unity and homogeneity in the nation. “An imagined political
community- and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (Anderson, 1991, p.6). To
create commonality across a large territory with millions of inhabitants, a national narrative is
created, recollected, as well as forgotten. Colombia has lived with armed conflict since the
1950s. At the same time, it is often ranked as one of the happiest nations on earth. Rankings, in
this sense, matter to Colombians sense of self, or identity as a nation, because at an international
scale it is often, like many countries plagued with violence, reduced to that one narrative. It also
compares the country to others around the world, particularly since its identity, definition and
reputation has been defined by what the U.S. state and media consider its one reason for
appearing in them at all.

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Secondly, within it is the region of Antioquia, and its capital, Medellin, which has always
had a type of exceptionalism within the nation. The popular narrative spins that in a nation of
violence and corrupt politics, Paisas are the industrious ones, the ones who ushered modernity
into Colombia. They are the lifting-themselves-with-bootstraps region. Former president Alvaro
Uribe epitomized the Paisa culture: a man not well-educated abroad or in Bogota, but rather in
rural Antioquia, where rural landowners had had to pick up arms to defend their land from their
creeping guerrillas, creating the paramilitaries. The “city on a hill” narrative extends to schools
that have Antioqueñismo, as part of the curriculum. As an informant said to me “we have
always been a city of entrepreneurs.” The local government counts on this identity to bring
citizens together to help economic growth and social inclusion, and it has, for the most part,
worked. As opposed to Cali, the other city ravaged by the cartels taking over and then dismantled
in the 80s, Medellin bounced back. My parents are from Cali, and they remember the city where
foreign and domestic companies had set up their factories including Union Carbide and
universities trained their young for these positions, such as my mother earning her degree in
chemical engineering in the late 70s.

The studies of hope, imagination and “progress” of the nation state attached to
technology has been captured by Science and Technology scholars Jasanoff and Kim. In their
study of US and South Korean responses to nuclear power, they spoke of national sociotechnical
imaginaries as “collectively imagined forms of social life and social order reflected in the design
and fulfillment of nation specific and/or technological projects” (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015), p.120).
They then edited the meaning to mean “collectively held and performed visions of desirable
futures (or of resistance against the undesirable),” and they are also “animated by shared
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understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of,
advances in science and technology” (2015,p.19). The choice of the term desirable futures and
the resistance against the undesirable is particularly important in the present case because the
selling of a city does not necessarily imply a hiding of the downsides, but a strategic and
purposeful choice to highlight its benefits. They also wished to highlight the fact that they are
desirable futures, because “efforts to build new socio-technical futures are typically grounded in
positive visions of social progress.” Making Medellin the center of innovation is not only for the
rich: the argument is that the image benefits all its citizens. Medellin has, at the government
level, branded itself the center of innovation in the country, and hopes for, the region. It has
called itself “city of innovation” , sustainable city, the world’s first eco-city, and what former
mayor Sergio Fajardo called it the center for the 4th industrial revolution.

When foreign companies assess whether to invest or set up business in that location, the
stability of the state and its ability to protect them: i.e., the liability and potential to protect their
employees and assets is a key factor. As Hector Amaya wrote of the discursive force of the term
“failed state” to describe Mexico in more recent U.S. media, Colombia had been cataloged as too
dangerous to visit . “In these political imaginaries” states Amaya “the state is order; its failure is
disorder” (Amaya, 2020 p.59). He cites researchers (Bilgin and Morton 2002; Call 2008; Hill
2005; Jones 2008; Manjikian 2008; Morton 2012) who have found that the discourse of failed
states tends to legitimize interventions. Amaya compares the violence created by drug trafficking
in Mexico to Colombia’s because in Mexico it is mostly a money issue, which comes into
politics when corruption is needed to bypass law enforcement. “The violence shapes politics, but
it is not politically motivated. The violence is evidence of a desire for wealth that can only be
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achieved through illegal means.” (p.68) In Colombia, money for the sake of it was part of the
incentive, but it also served as the way to finance the political armed conflict as the guerrillas and
paramilitaries became involved in drug trafficking.
Competing Cities
A small number of cities drive world economic growth (McKinsey Global Institute,
2012). By 2010 600 cities were generating 60% of global GDP (Dobbs et al., 2011). McKinsey
calculates that even though at that point most of these cities were in the “Global North,” by 2025
a third of those will have been replaced by 136 cities from “emerging economies” , mostly
China. (p.11) Nonetheless, the rise in terms of GDP is not reflected in equal distribution of
wealth if anything many cities depend on exactly that. Cities in the developing world are
expansive and often unplanned; they are projected to house 80 percent of the world’s urban
population by 2030. By 2020 a billion of these residents live in slums: “They are zones of
extreme poverty, marginality and deprivation, and day-to-day survival in an informal economy
amounting to half the world’s workforce of 1.8 billion people (Expected to rise to two-thirds by
2020) according to the OECD” (Jutting and de Laiglesia, 2009, from (Amin & Thrift, 2002)
As “emerging economies” cities continue to rise, so do the attempts to make them the
centers for investment, as they compete to attract companies and workers. “Because of their
cultural dynamism and their employees’ disposable income, startups appear to be a route to
regional economic security” (Greene, 2021). The neoliberal creep into government institutions
presents itself at the international development level via global institutions like the World Bank.
Like Lilly Irani states in her study of India’s innovation narratives: “global institutions promote
entrepreneurialism as a way of filling the gaps left by state and industry, fueling growth and
legitimating capitalism in turn” (Irani, 2019).
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Richard Florida (2004) famously wrote about cities competing to attract knowledge
workers, what he called the “creative class” therefore bringing in the companies that would hire
them., and the money they would bring in. He states that “creative people cluster not simply
because they like to be around each other…. Because of the powerful productivity advantages,
economies of scale, and knowledge spillovers such density brings” (Florida, 2005). The logic is
that this would aid working class residents by creating more service jobs. However, this has been
contested. In the United States context, critics argue that the influx of high-waged professionals
into the cities contributes to rising inequality and the displacement of working-class residents of
color (Peck, 2005, 2012), by allowing wealthy firms and individuals to keep revenue that would
otherwise be taxed (Jansa 2020, cited by Greene).
Competing for money, however, often relies on perception, viability, and security of
investment. This is the cycle of economic development: the city must provide conditions to
attract capital and workers, but it needs the capital to make it happen. In this sense, branding
comes in as a top-down approach, but branding a place is multilayered and complex, depending
often on the identity of locals in relation to the place. The neoliberal creep of entrepreneurialism
in urban policies was presented by Harvey (1989), and it is reflected within academic study:
being business school concepts to urban studies . Alberto Vanolo (2017) states that in the case of
cities, or places in general as assumed to function like products or services to be bought and
consumed .What differentiates branding from marketing is that in branding involves a mobilizing
a wider set of practices and “co-opting local stakeholders; investigating, changing and promoting
local identities; infusing a sense of pride in the inhabitants; building recognizable symbols for the
city” (p.203)
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The aspirational requirement in neoliberal enterprise rests on work and risk in the present
with the “hope,” “aspiration” and “speculations” about the future. The not only presence, but
requirement of hope as motivation for neoliberal enterprise makes it into the narratives of
governance. New media scholars have shown this at the individual level in the United States,
with Neff (2015) documenting the absorption of risk by individuals in tech with the hope of
future payoff. Duffy describes the free labor done by fashion bloggers and influencers which she
calls “aspirational labor,” since the hope is to one day receive sponsorship for it. Hope was also
seen by those who attend coding schools (Miltner, 2021) or coding open events (Alarcon, 2022),
2022) as the way to a better career. At the institutional level, coding is seen as the way to
“empower” underrepresented groups in tech, and providing coding instruction as the hope for
public institutions such as libraries to continue to receive public funding (Greene, 2021)
The main author in the sense of how a place is viewed is Urry with his book the tourist
gaze, where he analyzed the construction of the gaze in the tourism industry: in a certain sense,
businesses stage visual experiences, with tourists as consumers. Tourism images are produced by
a variety of actors, including writers, documentary makers, local councils, travel agents, hotel
owners, and tour operators. More recently, they are also intermediated by TV travel shows,
Hollywood, tourism, academics and, more recently, bloggers and tourists themselves though
several websites and apps. From the cultural point of view, the result is a blending of visual,
aesthetic, themed, commercial, and popular images which can make tourism the epitome of a
postmodern experience. And there is more: the pervasiveness of the tourist gaze makes us
‘everyday tourists,’ meaning that the tourist gaze operates also in absence of mobility, as in the
case of consumption of digital images through the internet. The categorization had led the
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country into being sparsely visited, and having a very weak almost nonexistent hospitality
industry (Sánchez, 2018).
Competing Narratives
In terms of the “imagined communities” of the nation state, the newspaper, as explained
by Anderson (1991), is a type of novel whose writer has “lost sense of plot”. What do news
outside of the imagined community have in common with each other? He argues two links create
this. The first, calendrical coincidence.
The date at the top of the newspaper, the single most important emblem on it, provides
the essential connection- the steady onward clocking of homogeneous empty time.
Within that time, ‘the world’ ambles sturdily ahead. The sign for this: if Mali disappears
from the pages of The New York Times after two days of famine reportage, for months on
end, readers do not for a moment imagine that Mali has disappeared or that famine has
wiped out all its citizens. The novelistic format of the newspaper assures them that
somewhere out there the ‘character’ of Mali moves along quietly, awaiting its next
reappearance in the plot (p.42).
In this sense, Medellin disappeared from the international plot for about 20 years, while
Colombia, and the city, moved quietly along. I grew up in conflict-ridden Colombia, although in
my memory it was political: where the characters in the national news were FARC, ELN,
paramilitaries and the state. The cartels, and Pablo Escobar, while notorious, was, to a younger
me, of past conflict, a terror my parents knew when newly married and that ended as I became a
toddler. Discussing the international fascination with the story of cartels, my father posited that
the narco narrative simply was more “original” for the international audience than our 50-year
long political armed conflict that continued from the communist wave of the 60s: one of many
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such conflicts in the region and the world. It also directly involved that international audience,
with the United States coming in as a central character in the narrative.
The second link is the market, he argues. “In this perspective the newspaper is merely an
‘extreme form’ of the book… but of ephemeral popularity” (p.43). The international section of a
newspaper tends to feature the events that are of “world importance” or directly relevant to the
audience. Given the “war on drugs” and the US direct involvement in these failed efforts the
point of view grabs on to the country at this moment in time in the narrative of the main
character, which is the country that is the market for the newspaper. The character of Colombia
in the Western narrative of international conflicts appears in relationship to conflict: Medellin in
relationship to narcotrafficking.
The “ritualistic” aspect of international news consumption, as also described by Raymond
Williams, means that at the time of print newspaper and TV broadcast a time-dependent
community-level absorption of current events. It means that those following the plot line from
outside of the country are seeing Medellin re-emerge in the narrative simultaneously. As I told
my American or European professors over 50 about my research topic, many were surprised, as
in their international narrative plot, Medellin was associated with this period of extreme violence
in the late eighties and early nineties and had not entered their following international narrative
plot since. During the height of the cartel violence, as Gerard Martin writes “Every national and
international newspaper of repute sent a war correspondent to Medellin” (Martin, 2019, p.266).
However, for those within the imagined community of Colombia, the transformation was
gradual, as well as other conflicts taking center stage.

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Fast forward to 2012, when it was declared “Innovative Citi of the Year” (City of the
Year — Sponsored by Citi, n.d.) by Citi and the Marketing Services Department of WSJ, together
with the Urban Land Institute. This may not be considered enough to make international news
coverage, as rankings of cities occur every year. I interviewed Camila, (interview, Zoom, 2020)
whose job in an organization meant to lure investment to the city includes nominating Medellin
for these global rankings of cities. The effect it has, she says, is exactly what got mirrored in the
international press. However, winning a ranking is not news, except in the Colombian press. I
argue it's exactly the unexpectedness of it, tied to the comeback kid narrative. It is the re-
appearance in the plot, the transformation, which gives it news value. Part of the award involved
readers themselves. The process to determine this included pairing down the 200 original
nominees to 25 via votes by WSJ readers; the process was repeated to settle on 3 finalists.
“Events were held in each of the finalist cities where we encouraged civic leaders and business
executives to use social media to spread the word. Our Number One city was so proud of their
accomplishments that the response was overwhelming.” The Paisa pride partly won them the
prize indeed, making the rankings a citizen self-fulfilling prophecy.
The article on the award stated that “Few cities have transformed the way that Medellín,
Colombia’s second largest city, has in the past 20 years. Medellín’s homicide rate has
plunged, nearly 80% from 1991 to 2010. The city built public libraries, parks, and
schools in poor hillside neighborhoods and constructed a series of transportation links
from there to its commercial and industrial centers. The links include a metro cable car
system and escalators up steep hills, reducing commutation times, spurring private
investment, and promoting social equity as well as environmental sustainability.
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But a change in the institutional fabric of the city may be as important as the tangible
infrastructure projects. The local government, along with businesses, community
organizations, and universities worked together to fight violence and to modernize
Medellín. Transportation projects are financed through public-private partnerships;
engineering firms have designed public buildings for free; and in 2006, nine of the city’s
largest firms funded a science museum. In addition, Medellín is one of the largest cities
to successfully implement participatory budgeting, which allows citizens to define
priorities and allocate a portion of the municipal budget. Community organizations,
health centers, and youth groups have formed, empowering citizens to declare ownership
of their neighborhoods. (City of the Year — Sponsored by Citi, n.d.)
This narrative from “murder capital” to “most innovative city” underpins most of the media
articles found about the city in international media. Headlines are often variations of this same
story. The continuing variation shows its shift toward a tourist destination: the news moves from
surprise to showing off the audience's awareness of this since Medellin is a top tourist
destination. However, the “violent past” does not leave the narrative. A Telegraph article is
headlined “How Medellin went from murder capital to hipster holiday destination” (Stewart,
n.d.). Reuters one focused on its business side: “After a violent past, Colombia's Medellin
emerges as a hotspot for businesses doing good.”(“Exclusive,” 2019)
While Medellin exited the news plot, it remained in the imaginary of the entertainment
industry. With this also came the country’s own obsession with its sordid past. The Colombian
TV series El Patron del Mal narrates the life of Pablo Escobar, and it ran in prime time from…
This show was the precursor for Netflix’s Narcos, and they were both based on the biography
written by Virginia Vallejo, called Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar, since she is most well known
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for being his lover. In the realm of narco-aesthetics is the also famous Sin Tetas no hay Paraiso
(without tits there’s no paradise) which focused on young women who were sex workers,
girlfriends, and wives of the cartel members in the 80s and would get their surgeries paid for
with drug money.
The accuracy, nuance and feelings of Colombians shift with Hollywood examples. This
includes the 2001 movie Blow was the adaptation of Bruce Porter's 1993 book Blow: How a
Small Town Boy Made $100 Million with the Medellín Cocaine Cartel and Lost It All. American
Desperado, in which Mark Wahlberg will reportedly play a kingpin smuggler for the cartel in the
forthcoming Hollywood film (Kroll, 2013), and the HBO series Entourage (2004-2011), in
which the main protagonist endeavors to make a dramatic film. For the current generation, the
Netflix show Narcos introduced the narrative to younger, worldwide audiences. In an audience
analysis of the show Narcos to American and Colombian audiences, this person (Cano, 2015)
found that Colombians contextualize and explain the show within larger narratives of the
country. The episode “The War at Home” in the second season of the political drama The West
Wing explains the irony of the conflict in its conclusion:

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Figure 1.3
White House conversation between characters Leo McGarry, Chief of Staff, and Jed
Bartlett, president, about the futility of the “war on drugs” in Fictional TV Drama The West
Wing

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Note: Sorkin, A. (Writer) & Misiano, C. (Director). (2001, February 14). The War at Home
(Season 2, Episode 14) [TV series episode]. In Falls, K., Schlamme, T., Sorkin, A. Wells, Jo,
(Executive Producers), The West Wing. Warner Brothers. Television; John Wells Productions.

Modernity and Infrastructure
According to Salazar et al. (2011), between 2009 y 2011 Antioquia dedicated 23% of
investment into activities related to science, technology, and innovation, and 27% on research
and development, only surpassed by Bogota. It rose significantly in national rankings on patent
submissions, moving from 11th department in this arena in 2001 to second in 2012 (Robledo et.
al 2012). In this article, a The Telegraph reporter shows the direct association between the two:
In 2013, Medellin was hailed as “the most innovative city in the world” by the Urban
Land Institute, brimming with creative ideas for urban living… I asked my guide, Julian,
what had happened, how Medellin had gone from gangs and gunfire to zen-like
experiences for bare feet.
“Public transport,” he said. It was a moment before I realized he was serious.
“Don’t laugh,” he chided me. “The metro was the beginning of all the good stuff. It was
like a bridge to a different world. We suddenly realized that things could change. It was
the beginning of a revolution in Medellin.”
This interaction caught my attention because it epitomizes the assumptions of modernity
stemming from someone from a “developed” nation to one of a “developing” one. An
interviewee told me that Medellin was more “modern than what [he] had expected.” When I
asked him to elaborate, he said that it had “comforts and infrastructure one is used to in Europe,
like public transportation“.
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Indeed, the metro is not only “the bridge to a different world” but has symbolically stood
for Paisas as the obvious demonstration of their city as superior to Bogota, whose (lack of)
building of a metro story resembles a Gabriel Garcia Marquez tale of absurdity in idiosyncrasies.
Among the location-independent workers, public transportation came up in conversation,
although not as much as it does for Paisas. The availability of cheap taxis is much more
convenient to move from the neighborhoods of Poblado and Laureles, where most of them
concentrate. Riding the Medellin metro is indeed an interesting and unique experience in
Colombia, being the only one. However, it is the more recently added connection between it and
the cable car which makes it into international media photos (see below). If modern cities are
bound to have slums and shanty towns, then how to make them officially part of the city is one
of the biggest questions for urban planners in developing economies.
In Science and Technology studies, the normative assumption of assuming technology is
politically neutral has been contested, famously by Winner (1980). Infrastructure is also often
forgotten, particularly once it has been standardized and fades into the background (Star, 1999).
Nonetheless, postcolonial and decolonial STS have brought another view of infrastructure as
always political in countries that have not reached this state of assumed modernity . What is
different about the cable car is its role in connecting the mountain-based comunas to the city
center, to infrastructurally include them in city life. This also includes an escalator to some of the
comunas. In this sense, infrastructural technology is clearly political: the infrastructural inclusion
of the comunas aims to generate or aid with social inclusion of its residents. This infrastructural
inclusion is also symbolic of the local government’s effort of participatory politics (Brough,
2020), and trying to instill a sense of belonging and cultural identity to Medellin’s poor youth.
Figure 1.4
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Cable car over the Medellin comunas

Note: From “How Medellín, Colombia, became the world’s smartest city” by Freedman, D.H.,
2019, November 11, Newsweek. Copyright:JOHN CRUX PHOTOGRAPHY/GETTY
The tour guide’s astute comment of what brought the transition equates the metro to the
hope of that “other world” that not only the government, but also its citizens, hope to enter.
Jasanoff and Kim (2015) look at how individual visions “sometimes rise to the status of
collectively held objectives” by not only looking at “the material instruments that reformers are
able to accumulate but also their uses of symbolic and cultural resources, such as images, texts,
memories, metaphors, and language itself.”( p.25. The image of the metro car to the comunas has
become one of those that pull in the residents of the city to the imaginary of modernity. The
Newsweek caption for the image above (Figure 1.4) is “The gondola in Medellín, which opened
in 2004, is not just a tourist attraction. It is also a lifeline for many of the city’s poorest
inhabitants and a symbol of the city’s transformation.” (2019, para 1).
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Of course, what does modernity mean? While the city is indeed quite livable in
comparison to Bogota, it is still a city in a middle-income nation. The narrative often obfuscates
the remaining poverty and inequality. One of my interviewees, a French man who lives outside
of the city center with his Colombian wife said:
Yeah, I remember that before I came here when I Googled Medellin. It came out as the
next big, the next most modern city in the world and blah, blah… This was back in 2017.
And I would see it was very far from reality, in my opinion. Maybe my understanding of
like, the most modern city is also, it's obviously based on what I know. And just in terms
of, for example, architecture. You look at Medellin as a whole and you look at, I don't
even know if that's called architecture, the way houses that built in the less privileged
neighborhoods….They're so precarious. And for me, for people to advertise Medellin as
the future or the next big modern city, that's excluding roughly 70% of the population of
the city…I think the numbers came out at the beginning of the quarantine, but it was like
55% of people in Medellin…live from basically black market business or I don't know,
what's the term? What's the right term?
The right term is informality. Indeed, what innovation means is a moving target.
A Commitment to Innovation
The city’s “success” story focuses on the decrease in violence, and its inclusive infrastructure.
What they call cultura ciudadana is a push to make the Paisa pride to work by giving citizens
direct ownership of the success of their city. Focusing on youth participation, scholar Melissa
Brough, (2020) summarizes it:

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But a change in the institutional fabric of the city may be as important as the
tangible infrastructure projects. The local government, along with businesses, community
organizations, and universities worked together to fight violence and to modernize
Medellín. Transportation projects are financed through public-private partnerships;
engineering firms have designed public buildings for free; and in 2006, nine of the city’s
largest firms funded a science museum. In addition, Medellín is one of the largest cities
to successfully implement participatory budgeting, which allows citizens to define
priorities and allocate a portion of the municipal budget. Community organizations,
health centers, and youth groups have formed, empowering citizens to declare ownership
of their neighborhoods.
While different branches of the local government as well as many other actors as delineated there
carry the common imaginary, I here focus on Medellin’s business, technology, and political
leaders who aim to make the city the leading digital hub of Latin America. The focus on
economic and technological development is mirrored and led by residents' choice in who governs
them. Daniel Quintero Calle was elected in 2020, and at 39 was the youngest person ever elected
to that office. He was criticized for not belonging to any political party and having little
experience in the public sector. His degree in electronic engineering is a deviation from the
norm. Media narratives follow the fact that he was coding by the time he was 12 and went to
university at 14. He also ran independently and got record votes, with what was seen as residents
of Medellin as tired of politics as usual. Before then, Sergio Fajardo, currently a presidential
candidate, named during his tenure as mayor the city as the spot for the next industrial
revolution. The most recent motto is “sustainable city.”

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The capital, Bogota often has the default space for foreign investment, given its
concentration of centrality of industry, government, and general development. Medellin, like
many "second cities' ' is often compared to the capital in terms of infrastructure and livability and
comes up winning. The comparative narrative is often that Bogota is the default cultural,
political, and economic center of Colombia, (like in many developing countries?) i.e., people live
there out of necessity, not choice. Medellin is selling the city at an international level to ensure
foreign investment and tourism: if choosing to come and invest or set up your company in
Colombia, why wouldn’t you choose Medellin?
And indeed, international corporations such as Hewlett-Packard opened regional offices
there, in what developers hoped would become one of Latin America's largest information
technology districts. The city invested in cultivating "digital citizens" with major government
commitments to bridging the digital divide and promoting digital literacy and e-governance. I
often heard about the city’s compromiso (commitment) to innovation. Up until 2020, the city’s
push had been in the creation of a district and infrastructural provisions. Unlike some of the more
rhetorical aspects of the imaginary of innovation hub, the commitment has been made into
regulatory reality. In 2021 a bill was introduced in congress to designate the city as Distrito de
Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación, which will include tax incentives to lure companies to set up
their headquarters. I interviewed an executive who was lobbied to choose Medellin for
Accenture’s innovation center, although she did not use that term, particularly since it is an
anglicism when it is used without a well-known Spanish translation. I learned that a common
corporate strategy for multinationals providing services, particularly Accenture, consists of
establishing their offices in the “second city” of a specific country. By doing this, they can
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engage in a nation-specific arbitrage, since workers in Medellin could provide services to clients
in Bogota.
The particular case of Medellin is that it wasn't just cheaper… although that was
obviously interesting. We did it above all because of the commitment that Medellín has
with the innovation arena, that is, no other city in Colombia has made such a clear, open,
and concrete declaration, with clear results.
City officials approached, called, and strongly lobbied, promising a big welcome, office space
provision at RutaN as well as the promise to “connect them,” that is, to formally introduce them
to the local networks. The Accenture executive admired their tenacity but also, how she felt
personally welcome to the city. Commitment and betting on both have the discourse
particularities of present decisions and investments with future payoff. The most tangible
enactment of this is RutaN, where Accenture opened its innovation center in 2018. Founded in
2009, it is a complex of buildings made to “inspire and encourage innovation in the city” and
create “favorable conditions” for entrepreneurship. The complex, comprising three buildings, is
located in the "innovation district" of Medellin, a newly created sector located in the north of the
city in the Sevilla neighborhood, which was relatively impoverished. It is a massive and indeed
impressive structure.
It however has its critics, including local government officials that have not seen results
from the massive structure, and question the hype. From what I could gather, the complex is an
infrastructural office provision for companies. When I asked the woman who was giving me the
tour of the complex, one of the creators of the place, what made it special, she said that there
were spaces to collaborate to help foment ideas. When I asked if this is what actually happens,
she laughed a bit and said, “not really, we are not American”. The implication with this is how
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the conception of the building came from an imported concept of how innovation happens and is
fostered in shared space. What I saw was more akin to a giant, 4 storied co-working space but at
the company level.
The gap between the imaginary and reality was brought up by some of my informants.
According to an executive from the building, Hewlett Packard left because they could not find
enough qualified staff to hire. He also noted a big skills gap: for his American company
headquarters, even the fact that they could not find enough qualified English speakers. When I
lived in Bogota in 2016, I became acquainted with the American diaspora in Bogota, including a
group of ivy-league graduates in their thirties who launched a business incubator. They chose
Medellin because of this commitment but also its appeal as a city to live in, but eventually had to
move to Bogota because qualified Colombians to hire, as well as potential investors, clustered
there.
I interviewed a city branding specialist, who had worked in Medellin about a decade ago.
“It is all smoke and mirrors” (Interview, City Branding expert, Zoom, 2021) he said. Yes,
Medellin is a fun, good city. But for the type of tourism, they are trying to attract, particularly
health tourism, it makes no sense. There is too much pollution, he says. Other Colombian cities
like Bucaramanga are competing to attract foreigners to undergo surgeries and recovery time at
their hospitals and care facilities. Medellin has the name and the strong promotion, he said, but
not enough to back it up.
“We Can’t Cover the Sun with a Thumb”: the Present Past
In 2019, city officials demolished the building where Escobar used to reside, which had
more recently become a tourist destination. The plan is to build a park for his victims instead.
After the televised demolition, Colombian president Ivan Duque said: “Today, that building falls
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and hope begins,” and “it is impossible to change the past, but you can build a better present and
a better future” (New York Times). The spectacle provided by the demolition of a building set
the stage for its envisioned future by literally tearing down the past. As explained by Jasanoff
and Kim, performativity is an important part of sociotechnical imaginaries. The Accenture party
with important businesspeople and government people served as a clear example. “Coalitions
between corporate interest and the media, through advertising and outright control, are
increasingly likely to play a pivotal role in making and unmaking global sociotechnical
imaginaries” (p.27).
Anthropology of tourism has grappled with the host/guest debate and is often stuck in the
exploitation/helping local economies political debates as well. In her book “Stuck with Tourism”
(2020) Matilde Cordoba Azcarate writes, "Reducing tourism to discussions about its benefits and
disadvantages loses sight of both the predation that makes these benefits possible and the forms
of entrapment that they in turn create" (p. 190). Part of the entrapment she refers to is the implicit
commodification of local culture, including the re-arrangement of the local culture to suit the
demands of the foreign consumer. The upcoming section explores the tension of how to manage
the international narratives on the ground. For example, while government officials distance
themselves from what are called “narco-tours,” like the drug itself, if foreigners are willing to
pay dollars for it, a local is bound to provide the service.
While we have focused on individuals and their choices of where to travel to,
intermediators continue to play a vital role. At an institutional level, travel brokers and agencies
are the ones absorbing the risk involved with travel decisions. Isabel must do the work on foot:
the imaginary is not only a city slogan, but the actual convincing of the people in her industry
conferences who make these decisions of the attractive quality of the city. The pushing of
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Colombia into the international consciousness has been attributed to the successful ProExport.
One of its promotional messages displayed at the end of their colorful videos in airplane screens
is “Colombia: the only risk is wanting to stay.” The comeback kid narrative has been taken on by
the nation, not only Medellin. The 2016 opened doors for the nation by allowing it to position
itself in the tourism industry. Until then, Colombia had been categorized as too dangerous to
travel to.
The labor of tourism officials like Camila and Isabel is always in tension with the
narratives they must fight. When I asked about the individual tourist that visits for purposes of
drug and prostitution, she says that it is clearly a downside of opening the country, but that
individual tourists are never where the aim of their promotion is. Narcos release coincided
calendrically with another shift for the country, the rise of tourism. The first season was released
in 2015, while the country’s peace agreement negotiations were taking place in Cuba. As the
country aimed to move on, trying to forgive (Alarcon), and signing it in 2016, the past re-
emerged in the international plot. Tourism to Colombia has been reduced and limited due to
armed conflict, particularly during the 90s (Gomez, 2002 p.57; Van Broeck, 2002 p.44). Peace is
a necessary condition for the development and promotion of tourism (D’Amore, 1088: p.38;
Litvin, 1998 p.64). The cease fire and subsequent end of the armed conflict has, with
reinforcement of institutional support, has since 2013, led to a doubling in the numbers of
visitors, positioning Colombia as the fourth tourist destination in South America (MINTIC,
2016). Markets assess the risk of countries with armed conflict or general violence, formulated
by ministries of foreign relations or other government entities, but also on media (Draberk 200
p.352). While these are recommendations and not mandates, they have a strong impact on
decision-making by tourists.
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I interviewed a tourism official, Isabel, who had spent much of her career at the national
level, before focusing on Medellin. That is, thinking of the nation’s strategy and policy for
exports. While tourism had not been a focus before, it is now a clear focus.
We continued along a line that was being traced for tourism, if it was time to position
ourselves on the tourist map of the world... The potential of tourism is large, until we
reached the point of placing ourselves for a period of time as the second export product
after energy mining, even surpassing bananas, coffee, flowers… Tourism occupied at
least 30 percent of this category, and it also became a great element for attracting direct
foreign investment. So, let's say that things did happen that were very definitive for the
position that Colombia has today. We identified the strengths of the country in terms of
both nature and culture products, but we made the decision to focus on four products that
we consider to be of high value…Colombia wants to orient towards sustainable tourism,
so we are going to focus our efforts on the highest value products…And that is how we
focused on nature and ecotourism products, meeting tourism, cultural tourism and health
and wellness tourism.
Tourism classified as an export demonstrates the categorical location of the industry. It relies on
local labor but assumed to be of international consumption. To be competitive in this sense, she
said, there is a need to see what exactly makes Colombia unique. Beaches are more beautiful
elsewhere, particularly in comparison to the rest of the well-known Caribbean destinations. It is
Colombia’s nature, its positioning as the most biodiverse country in the world, for example,
making it a top destination for birdwatchers and other nature seekers. Support for the
environmental ministry became much more of a priority. The other, meetings and health tourism,
required stronger investment in infrastructure to support it. Health tourism, while there is the
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misconception that it is mostly for aesthetics and plastic surgery, sees most of its income in
cardiovascular, fertility treatment and other kinds of major health-related surgeries. The lifting of
the international warnings opened the gates for this, because Colombia already had the
“conditions”: peace radically opened the gates for a lot of international investment. “Having a
black star over us meant that those tourism brokers or international businesses that wanted to be
here could not, because insurance would not cover it.” (From interview). While we see and focus
on independent travel, the truth is, she says, most money in tourism, particularly in these sectors,
is still heavily mediated and brokered.
Figure 1.5
United States Department of State’s Bureau of Consular Affairs website’s color-coded map

Note. The map is updated daily to reflect the most recent travel advisories. Department of State
dynamic mapping application. [embedded widget]. Travel.State.Gov.
https://travelmaps.state.gov/TSGMap/
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Cocaine-financed violence is not a past story for Colombians, even if the height of the
cartel one in the cities was. Most of the victims of the political armed conflict were rural
Colombians, including indigenous and black communities (Llano, 2011). Cocaine production has
since moved away from the guerrillas closer to the “apolitical” arrangements in Mexico, what are
known as BACRIM (criminal gangs). What this calendrical coincidence achieved was two-fold:
Colombia moved on from a blacklisted country due to violence in terms of tourism, but this
means a rise in what local government calls the “wrong kind” of tourism which includes drugs,
prostitution and child prostitution (Moreno Alarcón, 2014). All my Colombians interlocutors
working in tourism and the chamber of commerce expressed a reticent surrounding their
industry. While Camila referred to Escobar as “the one who we don’t talk about '' in reference to
Harry Potter’s Voldemort, she still knows that “we cannot cover the sun with a finger.” As in, if
Escobar and the 80s will never leave the global cultural memory, what is the best way of dealing
with it?
The Mexican government has attempted censorship, calling narcocorridos “the largest
cultural threat to the nation” (Amaya, 2020, p.93). Colombia’s equivalent occurs in vallenatos,
where songs about capos and violence are narrated. While TV, movies and books on the topic are
popular, they are usually nuanced and rarely congratulatory of the drug trade. Music in Medellin,
particularly coming from the comunas, is more associated to violence in urban life. Beginning in
2016 or so, Medellin became South America’s “center of reggaeton”, sharing the world stage
with the artists from Puerto Rico and Miami. The most famous reggaetoneros JBalvin, Maluma,
and Karol G, sing about love, dancing, partying, never cocaine. In fact, JBalvin’s video for his
hit “mi gente” is celebratory of “his people”.
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While in communication and media we think about representation, encoding and
decoding, the tourist gaze was more often limited to the tourism industry, travel narratives of
tourists themselves, and what they produced. I surprisingly heard an interesting connection: some
of these travelers had never heard of Medellin, but the series Narcos, shot in Colombia, showed
the beauty of the country and the splendor of the green mountains, making them curious and
wanting to visit the city (Naef, 2018) that the absence of narratives on the drug war, be it in
institutional settings or in public pedagogical spaces such as museums has allowed for the
entertainment industry to fill in a gap. The Hacienda Napoles, Escobar’s famous mansion
outside the city, is a thematic park for families. The staff is discouraged from answering
questions about the drug lord except the ruins of the home, turned into a memorial museum that
presents his timeline.
Ascarate’s chapter on Temozon Sur in Mexico looks at hacienda tourism, in the
romanticization of hacienda owners' lifestyles through "selective architectural, landscaping, and
social practices" (pp. 110-1). The attempt to make something authentic in tourism often also goes
into what is popularly known as “poverty tourism.” In the line of poverty tourism, the comunas
have tours given by residents to show the transformation, but also give a glimpse to tourists
about a slum area that has recovered, particularly the infamous Comuna 13. In her book,
Ascarate critiques tourism research that gets stuck in the visitor/host duality and does not appear
political. In Colombia’s case, there is no escape from tourism as political. What I found were
government officials trying to take back control of the narrative, and in this way centering the
victims of the violence instead of the perpetrators. At the national level, NGOs and government
officials are employed in the challenge of centering victims and recording the history of the war
and peace agreement in memorials and museums. Part of the deal includes historical memory, as
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well as acknowledgement and reparations to the victims of the armed conflict, including a statue
made from the melted weapons given up by the FARC members who demobilized in 2016
(Alarcón, 2021)). Additionally, many of the formerly occupied lands of the FARC are now
finally available for both local and international tourism. I have found myself traveling inside of
Colombia now, given how in my childhood it was too dangerous to do so. Previously
inaccessible sites included the famous “lost city” at the top of a jungle mountain inside the
Tayrona national park, on the Caribbean coast; the Amazonian region; and even the multicolored
river Cano Cristales, referenced at the beginning of Disney’s Encanto. Part of the peace
agreement is a re-insertion of former guerillas into civilian life: they have a tough time finding
jobs after a lifetime of rebel fighting. However, quite a few have turned to providing tourism
services in the areas that, due to the former occupation, are only well known to them.
The tension between wanting to push back against the international reputation of the city,
vs commodifying and monetizing it is evident on the ground. (Goyes & Franko, 2021)The
controversial narco tours take on curious tourists in what locals described to me as “morbose” re-
telling of Medellin. Nomadic Matt, for example, one if not the most popular blogger for “digital
nomads” has a list of “14 things to do in Medellin and 1 not to do”. The last one being
“No 14 Finally, Don’t Do the Escobar Tour!”
The locals here are not fans of Pablo Escobar. His violent life and legacy caused untold
amounts of harm to the city and its population, and while it’s always good to learn about
the history of a destination, glorifying this is not something I want to support. You can
learn about his life online in a way that doesn’t spit in the face of the locals, many of
whom don’t even speak his name. Out of respect for them, I encourage you to skip the
Escobar tour.
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Scholars have found how representations in media can incentivize tourism. For example, New
Zealand as a destination for Lord of the Rings fans, or Croatia, the set for Kings Landing in the
popular Game of Thrones television series ({Updating}). Research finds that “the idea of
leaving the tourists’ beaten track in order to see media-featured sites and objects related to the
War on Drugs can be a significant motivation for some visitors in Colombia and elsewhere.”
(Naef, 2018) The local government distances itself from such tours, and as the city comes more
into the limelight, they have edited their narrative. While I thought that “the one that cannot be
mentioned” was something that Camila said to me, I later found out it was the name of one of the
tours. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) classifies visits to plantations
and clandestine laboratories as part of the definition of narco-tourism (Van Broeck 2018). It is
not only the harming of an image, but also the catering of a culture to the expectations and
desensitization of the violence that the city, and the country, suffer because of consumption of
the illegal narcotic in Global North countries.
Conclusion
The city’s attempt to re-brand itself follows a path to what the “future” is expected to be.
Leaders have called itself City of innovation, Sustainable city, the world’s first eco-city, and
what former mayor Sergio Fajardo called it the center for the 4th industrial revolution. Both
Fajardo and Gutierrez are now front runners in the 2022 election. The pragmatic, “non-partisan”
center Fajardo represents emphasizes a pragmatic, industry-based approach to the country’s
direction. The country has an association of the “industrious” personality of Paisas as
emblematic to those mayors who have run Medellin. The innovation narrative runs parallel to the
reason to choose it as a temporary home or headquarters, whether by a large company or the
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individual workers. The city’s official motto is “City of Eternal Spring,” which is not speculative
but tangible, geographical, and its most salient feature to visitors.
When I asked my interviewees about what their families said when they said they were
going to Medellin, many said they had to appease them because the imaginary of the violence is
still so present. Researching the city included blogs and web sites as affinity spaces, but also the
legitimation provided by reputable news sources from their native countries, which reported the
ranking and the comeback-kid narrative. Choosing an underdog, or a non-touristy place, helps in
its positioning as a good place to work from, as prices remain relatively low. While the existing
tension between city officials hoping to make it a center for innovation, my corporate
interviewees as well as the location-independent workers rarely mentioned it. The main reason
remained the cost-benefit analysis across responses. The real reason is the “home” aspect of the
“home for innovation”: the infrastructural “modernity,” the weather, the friendly locals and
culture, and the existing affinity space which pulls in the “digital nomad community.” Of course,
part of the reason that locals are friendly is this desire to perform good citizenry, by showing the
congenial side of the city. More importantly, how cheap it is to receive good services, be it health
related, dance lessons or cleaning staff. Within urban studies and literature, this is reflective of a
trend documented in various parts of the world (“The New Boomtowns,” n.d.) of cities trying to
attract those who do not want to or cannot afford the “centers”. Yet the narrative of conviviality
and servitude can also attract potentially unwanted tourism.
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Chapter 3: Tactics

As previously explained, Medellin is a rising destination for investment, tourism, and
location-independent workers. However, unlike the first two, the latter moves in an unregulated
space. As independent travelers who wish to experience the city “as locals,” they depend on each
other to navigate it. The labor of social gathering, support, information sharing, and grouping is
often unrecognized or uncounted. The more workers are independent and individualized, the
more their social work lives depend on their own time and effort to support each other.
Many of my interviewees struggled with the question of whether they classified
themselves as “digital nomads” or not. The ambiguity of the term stems from its lack of official
categorical definition: for example, how long does one have to travel and work to be considered
one instead of a tourist? The reticence also stemmed from the awareness of a negative
connotation attached to the term, due to its trendiness, and its apparent denoting of relative
leisure or privilege. Nonetheless, I found most of them through this term: via Facebook ,
WhatsApp groups, Meetups, or panels. While the term “digital nomad community” is often
written about in the online spaces that I joined, it was rarely spoken of that way by those I
interviewed, nor in offline spaces. How come?
The lack of individual identification with the term, yet the continuous use of it shows its
fully pragmatic application, as stated in the previous chapter, they build on what anthropologist
Michael Jackson (2012) calls the “pragmatic efficacy” of beliefs: [rather] “than in the
epistemological veracity of the beliefs they espouse'' (p.35). The term, therefore, acts as a useful
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information category: a tool for indexing which allows these independent workers to locate
relevant information online. Therefore, using DeCerteau’s concept of tactic, think of the term as
a meta-tactic.
My online ethnography started in 2017. Like Hine (2011), who used the search engine as
a tool to identify sites for an online ethnography of television watching, I used Facebook to
search and map out Digital Nomad groups. At that point I had already, like many users, become
a more passive Facebook user than I used to be. I had unrelatedly to my field work stopped
posting since my practice of content sharing moved to Instagram and WhatsApp instead. In this
sense, my Facebook account opened in 2005 became mostly used for this dissertation’s
fieldwork. What I began to see was how the platform's suggestions and advertising shifted me to
a potential “consumer.” The term has quickly become a niche market. The term itself serves a
role in online convening, but via this, also of categorization, the type of statistical grouping or
stereotyping that comes from the creation of online identities.
Cheney-Lippold (2011) describes this market-based creation of identity as a category
“wholly embedded within the logic of consumption, where categorical behaviors are statistically
defined through cybernetics of purchasing and research that marketers have deemed valuable for
identification and categorization.” (p.36) There are continuously growing services catered to
them, from a Nomad Cruise to co-living spaces, to events and conferences. The company
Remote Year, for example, formalized the lifestyle by mediating and taking care of logistics, a
brand of travel agency mixed with a study abroad program. As an official business catering to
this demographic, Remote year, which on their website write “see the world without having to
compromise your professional pursuits” for example, exempts itself from any visa
entanglement, making individual workers responsible for their own. Hugh works as a life coach,
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a job found readily among “digital nomads” (Woldoff & Litchfield, 2021). Like online marketers
and dropshippers, the lines between the life and the professional blur to even make their same
affinity group into a market.
Community, Network or Affinity Space?
Let's begin with this not being anything new to this grouping. The internet has been
heralded as a place for smaller, or non-space defined communities can find each other: be it
belonging to a countercultural stream (Lingel, 2017) fandoms and interpersonal relationships
(Baym, 2015), activism (Papacharissi, 2014; (Kraidy, 2016)) or support groups. The term
“community” also changed with the scale of the internet. In her study of a soap opera chat forum,
Nancy Baym found an online community as vibrant if not different from an offline one, pushing
back on the moral panic of the internet as a way communities would dissolve. Nonetheless, in
this case what ties these transients together is not necessarily community, but the need for
information: information that official channels cannot provide due to the regulatory gray area in
which they operate. Many informal economic activities, from the illegal to the extralegal are
aided by the peer-to-peer infrastructure of the internet. File-sharing was, in web 1.0, arguably the
most prevalent extralegal activity happening due to this affordance (Lessig, 2000). The more
contemporary equivalent is the dark web, due to its untraceability. Undocumented migrants and
refugees use social media to share up to date information on border crossings, resources, and tips
(Diminescu, 2008). One of the angles picked by Western mainstream media to cover the Syrian
refugee crisis was the first smartphone migration, with headlines such as “Technology comes to
the rescue in migrant crisis” in the Financial Times (Khalaf, 2016). The phones documented
bottom-up narratives of mobilities, but also due to the smartphone as an essential tool for
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emotional uses (such as staying in touch with family along the way) and pragmatic in terms of
navigation, translation, and community support (Alarcon et al., 2019)
Woldoff & Litchfield (2021) call the digital nomads a “working community”. While this
is partly true, the blurred lines between living and work, the many distinct types of employment
by its members, in addition to the cultural barriers to belonging to it, make it closer to a
diaspora. Diasporas are often associated with permanent migration, which is why they do not
fully fit this study. However, they do share the commonalities of how they work pragmatically as
a default community based on the shared identity as outsiders who speak English: Stuart Hall
writes:
Diasporas are composed of cultural formations which cut across and interrupt the settled
contours of race, ethnos, and nation…This means that to be the subject of such diaspora
is to have no one particular home to which one belongs exclusively. (p.172)
Given the lack of common ethnic, national, or racial identity, they do not operate as a diaspora.
They are closer to an “Expat community,” a term that carries a power connotation that
“immigrant” does not since it implies choice, intent to return to their country of origin, and
relative wealth. They also lack the permanence required to establish strong ties or community.
What they do have in common culturally, is the narrative of countering expectations, “thinking
differently,” seeing the world, and an ability to work remotely. What the work is matters less,
since it is not this that they are in Medellin for. Since they are not a community nor diaspora, I
argue that they fall under what James Paul Gee’s (2005) “affinity spaces” (better explained
ahead) to describe the online presence instead of community; defined as spaces for personal,
social, and individualized knowledge acquisition, centering spaces rather than communities.

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The main use for the term is to facilitate what I call crowdsourcing logistics, many of which have
to do with finding loopholes. As already established, one of the main motivations for choosing
Medellin is cost of living: by being independent workers, their costs are their own working
spaces and living costs, i.e., the main tactic is to outsource themselves. One of the main ways to
be able to afford what they are doing is by avoiding the hospitality industry, which, even in the
poorer country where they are, would be much too prohibitive to live in. Hostels that cater to
backpackers are proliferating in Medellin, however, most of my interviewees opted for Airbnb
and short-term rentals. In this sense, whose job it is to make a “home” becomes more dissolved:
the paid and unpaid, the formal and the informal meld in these relationships.
Informality lives in a loophole or is rather the biggest loophole there is. Since the main
issue with avoiding regulation is that regulation is not there to protect you, the risk is absorbed
by the location-independent workers. In places with weak institutions and big poverty,
informality counts for much of the productive activity. Each interaction is therefore a risk, given
the lack of enforceability, which is why so many productive activities in developing nations
depend on family and social connections (Gaughan & Ferman, 1987). Given the always already
existence of informality in Medellin, the dependence on word-of-mouth to find someone de
confianza (trustworthy) via personal connections is the norm. Locals trust foreigners more
generally due to their cash and the already mentioned cultural capital. Foreigners ask each other
for recommendations given the avoidance of regular tourism intermediators in the crowdsourcing
of logistics. While in richer economies the on-demand platforms are making work “more
precarious,” in developing economies they are semi-formalizing already-existing, informal
practices, such as letting out a room or apartment without a contract.

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The current chapter argues that the term “Digital Nomad” can be used to share on-the-
ground tactics. That is, while many in the larger groups have discussions of what remote work
can be done to achieve this, the everyday use is rather how to travel while working given the
regulatory gray area. While the term “digital nomad” serves as a meta tactic to share logistical
information, it also serves to concentrate a market, and to allow those who want to provide
services of those markets to reach them. I show this by 1. Showing how questions about border
crossings and taxes are common in the chats 2. How the spaces are managed to be interpersonal
and not “ad related” to push back on it as a market designation 3. How the main use of the many
local online groups is to recommend local, individual workers to hire informally. The second half
argues that social reproductive work subsidizes capital via 1. Locals being hired to intermediate
and are recommended when they help to avoid “gringo prices” 2. The emotional labor involved
in any service provision is to make them feel “welcome” because this guarantees more word-of-
mouth recommendations 3. Intermediating to help avoid the regulatory loopholes of short-term
renting or the hospitality industry. 4. The fuzziness of the market pushes locals into an informal
“hospitality” industry. It concludes that the major tactic is the same basic one of “disruptive” and
“innovative” businesses in Silicon Valley, that is, basing a business model on the avoidance of
existing regulation.
What I found was in line with Tsing’s argument of diversity and identity as part of, and
sustaining of, supply value chains, but replicated in complicated ways at the individual level.
Outside of formal relationships, de facto hierarchies and structures prevail. Freeman, writing
about the U.S. feminist movement, noted that there is no such thing as a structureless group, just
one explicitly structured or implicitly structured. The argument equates this to the well-known
critiques about objectivity of news, neutrality of technology, or the free market. As Freeman
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notes, “A "laissez-faire" group is about as realistic as a "laissez-faire" society; the idea becomes
a smoke screen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others.”
(p.152). While the American or Europeans I interviewed appeared aware of the inequality that
allowed for this, much more than the tourists I have encountered, they cannot separate
themselves from their identities, and may not wish to do so online.
Part I: Crowdsourcing Logistics
Given that they are not a community, I argue that the term “digital nomad” serves as a
tool to share the tactics required to undertake this lifestyle. The internet allowed for a rise of
what James Paul Gee called “affinity spaces” where learning becomes “both a personal and
unique trajectory through a complex space of opportunities” and a “social journey as one shares
aspects of that trajectory with others (who may be very different from oneself and inhabit
otherwise quite different spaces)” (p.231). It is a social space -whether virtual or physical—
convening around a topic or interest, where informal learning occurs with varying levels of
participation and varying levels of knowledge. He purposefully wishes to differentiate them from
communities of practice, particularly due to the porous nature of belonging. I use Gee’s
framework because interviewees spoke of meeting like-minded individuals; they occasionally
referred to work, but when seeking the specific group for Medellin, they mostly referred to other
travelers that worked who were willing to socialize, or to share knowledge of short-term leases
or local service providers. Gee defines the characteristics of affinity spaces as: Common
endeavor, not race, class, gender or disability, is primary; Newbies and masters and everyone
else share common space; Some portals are strong generators; Internal grammar is transformed
by external grammar; Encourages intensive and extensive knowledge; Encourages individual and
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distributed knowledge; Encourages dispersed knowledge; Uses and honors tacit knowledge; Lots
of different routes to status; Leadership is porous and leaders are resources.
While Gee focuses on participation in the sharing of knowledge in affinity spaces, the
debate of what constitutes participation, and what is “free labor” is the agency/exploitation
debate in internet studies. Internet scholars have spoken about the autonomy tied to individual
content production via the participatory design of the web (Jenkins & Mimi Ito, 2015). Jenkins
also used De Certeau (Jenkins, 2013) to explain how media consumers can be “poachers” of
mainstream media as a way to appropriate mainstream media and make it into their own stories,
or use them for civic media purposes. The production of online content, according to Terranova,
walked this line between personal enjoyment and free labor for the internet companies that
would monetize it. The author focuses on processes and the non-linearity of events that have
assembled into this cultural moment she defines as “network culture.” The seminal essay
exploded the academic concern about production of user generated content for the enrichment of
Silicon Valley, bringing in the critical, Marxist account to the web 2.0. Terranova explores the
concept of “free labor,” a trait of the cultural economy at large, and an important, and yet
undervalued, force in advanced capitalist societies. By focusing on the internet as a specific
instance of free labor, Terranova highlights the connections between the “digital economy” and
what Italian Marxist autonomists called the “social factory”: a process whereby “work processes
have shifted from the factory to society, thereby setting in motion a truly complex machine.” In
this paper, however, Terranova emphasizes that free labor is not necessarily exploited labor: “it
is also 'willingly conceded in exchange for the pleasures of communication and exchange.'"
(p.132).
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Jarrett (2015) explores the participatory, free-labor nature of the internet through a
feminist Marxist lens, describing it as “the digital housewife”. Instead of simply focusing on
exploitation, she finds a parallel between consumer labor and domestic labor: Users’ exploited
yet leisurely activities on commercial websites resemble domestic labor’s emotional and
unrecognized work. Jarrett’s working hypothesis is that gifts (use-values) and commodities
(exchange-values), exploitation and self-actualization, and production and reproduction coexist
in digital media platforms. In the line of bridging feminist theory to describe the reproductive
activity happening online, Nancy Baym (2015) brings in Hochschild’s concept of “emotional
labor” to the “relational labor” taking place in social media, to explain the additional work that
musicians have incurred as they are expected to connect to their audiences via online platforms.
The extra layer of work exercised by users is rarely accounted for, except for the role of
“community manager”, a job category emerging as direct result of the work involved.
The work of content moderation exists at different scales: mostly unpaid community
managers for individual accounts, and paid, usually cheap, outsourced labor on the side of the
platforms (Gillespie, 2020; Roberts, 2016) What Terranova argues is that anyone who owns,
administers or even participates in a shared digital space has a level of “free labor” in their
participation. Jarret would say that it is an online version of the social reproductive labor that
women tend or have traditionally taken on within social arrangements and without
compensation: mediating communication, setting, and maintaining house rules, organizing dates
and calendars, and maintaining peace. Jessa Lingel spoke about the “gentrification of the
internet” in terms of Web 2.0 platforms sanitizing and profiting from community contributions,
comparing Facebook and Twitter to the popular site in the US Craigslist.
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The attempt to keep it “casual” is to maintain a sense of common interests at the personal,
not business level. However, in informal economies this distinction is almost non-existent
(Gaughan & Ferman, 1987). By keeping messages about services at an individual level, with
recommendations and casual greetings, the muddling is what allows for it. In the second section I
weave in the local workers whose job includes the emotional labor of hostessing. (Hochschild,
2012) aims to specifically focus on the emotional part of wage-earning work, usually part of the
hospitality industry. However, the people I interviewed were often not part of the hospitality
industry, at least not the official, certified one. Given the gray area of these foreigners as neither
tourists nor residents, locals take on the role of aiding with loopholes. They also communicated
the importance of showing kindness, coolness, and welcoming culture as part of their job. While
the culture of beauty, niceness, openness, and fun is indeed endemic, the performance of it
becomes part of the general labor of “a good hostess.”
WhatsApp, however, given its design between a messenger app and a social media app
has a sociality of its own based on its particular affordances (Pang & Woo, 2020)). Peer-to-peer
technologies are, in a way, an enactment of informal economies. What in the “Global North” has
been equated to decentralization, or deregulation, of transactions, be it via the internet and file
sharing in the early days of the internet, to blockchain and bitcoin now, the aim to “disrupt”
institutional intervention has underlined the libertarian tendencies of these particular
technologies (Coleman, 2012). However, what many of these have depended on is the labor of
content moderators, whether paid or unpaid. The “tone” of the group depends particularly on the
reasoning behind the forming of the group. One of the owners stated their intention to create a
group that brought foreigners and locals together, purposefully excluding the “trash” content
found on the Facebook groups. I analyzed a screenshot of a common exchange, and a
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conversational steering that, except for expelling someone, serves as the only type of content
moderation afforded by WhatsApp. I am paraphrasing and omitting to make the conversations
less searchable therefore protecting anonymity. After someone posted an individualized-type
message of a meal delivery service where it says, “allow us to cook for you!” one of the group
owners responded by saying “Sorry this group is not for advertising, please post on Facebook.”
While motivations for doing so vary, some argue that those who take on this role gain
some cultural capital. An example was one of my participants, nicknamed as “mayor of El
Poblado” by another member in the chat, is one of the managers/owners of the Facebook and
WhatsApp groups for Digital Nomads in Medellin. The WhatsApp group of the city, which will
have about 250 people (by 2022). He arrived in Medellin not long after COVID, and due to that
and the connection he felt to the city he decided to stay. I read someone calling him the “mayor
of El Poblado,” because he was de facto in charge of the get-togethers, outings and had met
many local service providers and friends along the way. His role included curation and
intermediation. The stereotype of “gringos in Medellin” he said, include a lot of disrespectful
tourists or people coming into the city for drugs or prostitution. He purposefully would say on
occasion to the chat that “if you want to have that type of conversation go to the Facebook
group.” Trying to draw lines not between tourists and location-independent workers, but
between types of them continued as a community work of curation.
Given the already-discussed blurred lines in previous chapters, the WhatsApp group that
was the site of my research for two years aims specifically to disrupt the binary of foreigner and
local, as the owner invites both in. The hope is that it will remain separate from Facebook groups
that are often “sketchy”: that is, who view foreigner/local relationships as transactional and
maintain a flattened understanding of locals. Effectively, a few of the WhatsApp and Facebook
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groups made the distinctions clear, as in when someone wrote something disrespectful of the
locals or asked for recommendations on illegal activity, they were removed from the group or
told “for that kind of talk go to — group.” Most of the recommendations on this specific
WhatsApp group fall under the categories of health and wellness services (from medical doctors
to aromatherapy, to yoga), service work (cleaners, food services), venues and targeted events
(such as “gringo Tuesdays” or a curation of events geared toward this specific demographic).
Mobilities, Destinations and Border Crossings
Gee of course sees the rise of affinity spaces as congruent with neoliberal ideology where
individuals must choose what it is they wish to learn. While “common endeavor” and not identity
is what allows for these relatively open spaces to have anyone join, the pre-existing barriers more
tacitly exclude many who may try. Given what I delineated in chapter 1 in terms of tactics,
sharing information with each other, via various media, becomes a sharing of tactics. As
explained by DeCerteau:
A tactic is a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus. No
delimitation of an exteriority, then, provides it with the condition necessary for
autonomy.... it is a maneuver "within the enemy's field of vision," as von Bulow put it,
and within enemy territory...it does not, therefore, have the options of planning general
strategy and viewing the adversary as a whole within a district.... it takes advantage of
"opportunities" and depends on them, being without any base where it could stockpile its
winnings, build up its own position, and plan raids” (DeCerteau, P.37).
Although some static content does exist, the tactic is a search for an opportunity, finding the gaps
and the ways of achieving the goal in the moment and not as part of a long-term strategy. As they
move through space, the trace data they create helps create a path for the following. Using the
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war analogy is interesting in the sense that it requires constant movement and no protection or
resting. Looking for and taking advantage of opportunities requires a keen and vigilant eye. The
need to always be “on the lookout” for potential work or clients is one of the common features of
freelance, or on-demand work (Gray & Suri, 2019, i). The discussions of jumping across borders
to renew visas, taxation, and English-speaking doctors meant that they were not only tied
together by identity, but by the level of power and privilege their nationalities afforded them in
their current place. In this sense, their ranking within the global hierarchy is evidenced by the
hypervisibility of the content about who they are and what they are doing, and the lack of fear of
attaching one’s name to practices in legal gray areas.
Part of the relative advantage is nationality, but also the mobility afforded by the
passports relative standing. As Robertson (2010) explained, two concurrent developments in the
18th and 19th century provided the historical context for the development of the passport: the
emergence of the nation state and claims to objectivity in the production of knowledge. “These
developments…also contributed to the process through which identity and identification became
a problem for which the passport was seen as a solution." Governments and the nation state try to
standardize categorization as the technology for population management within the nation state.
As explained by Susan Leigh Star & Bowker, “systems of classification (and of standardization)
form a juncture of social organization, moral order, and layers of technical integration. Each
subsystem inherits, increasingly as it scales up, the inertia of the installed base of systems that
have come before” (Bowker & Star, 2000, p. 33). At the levels of border crossings, the
categorization that matters most is that of the passport and nationality. In this dissertation, the
given organizational categories that come into place rely on other categories that assume a
standardization and formality across borders.
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However, there are numerous ways in which categories emerge from social arrangements
(as explained by Bowker & Star), how we retroactively apply them is often a debate among
scholars of information history. “One maintains that we should only use classifications available
to actors at the time, much as an ethnographer tries faithfully to mirror the categories of their
respondents…. “If a category did not exist contemporaneously, it should not be retroactively
applied.” As an ethnographer, I use the in vivo language of my interviewees. They have trouble
categorizing themselves because they are aware that what they are doing is in fact,
uncategorizable, and it is exactly this avoidance of the official that allows them to do so.
Countries trying to keep up and remain a destination for this work/travel hybrid are
releasing Digital Nomad visas. The issue with this is that by formalizing them, they can make
requirements that would not allow for my interviewees to partake, such as a minimum earning
assurance. By the time of this dissertation about 21 countries had implemented this new
categorization: Barbados for example asks for a $50,000 a year income minimum. Costa Rica
requires $3000 a month. Estonia was the first country to create an e-residency program. The
digital nomad visas allow for a legal alternative of working elsewhere from six months to a year
if their earnings are indeed from somewhere else, without having to declare taxes locally.
Nations with robust tourism or migration have established normative classifications to
determine visa or residency status. For example, Anita, the Belgian hotel owner, thoroughly
researched where in Latin America was the hospitality industry was growing the most, finally
picking Mexico to open her business. However, Mexican immigration systems did not accept her
request: “they didn’t understand what I was.” Mexico has a much more established hospitality
industry and is a top spot for American retirees. She was too young to be retired, and too poor to
come in with a proper investor visa. The type of business she was hoping to open, a small
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boutique type hotel, she called it, but it was closer to an Airbnb from what she described, is the
type of business that a local could open, so she was denied entry. Colombia, on the other hand,
allowed her in, given its historical lack of tourism due to the 50-year-long conflict. However, she
was not registered with the department of tourism. The informality translated to a lack of
Colombian government support during the COVID19 pandemic that destroyed the hospitality
industry.
Remote Year was the most well-known and established company during this time: it runs
on blurring the line between work and travel. Consumption requires much less regulatory
oversight: they are clear that those who join need to procure their own employment as well as
their own visas. While I could not get anyone to formally comment on this policy, their choices
of destinations, as well as the allotted time for each one correlated with countries that for
American citizens either require no visas or that allow for tourist visa-on-arrival. The risk of
deportation or fines for working while on tourist visa is therefore placed on the individual. One
of the reasons that my interviewees were, for the most part, freelancers, entrepreneurs or
independent contractors, is the already existing regulation for companies in terms of outsourcing
or legality of their workers. A one-year sabbatical has a precedent. However, if any of the
employees I met had wanted to stay, they would have to register as the domestic arm or presence
of a foreign company, which brings its own set of Colombian regulatory and taxation
frameworks with it. It would also adapt their salary to Colombia’s cost of living and median
salaries, which would certainly move the arbitrage of saving money from the employees to the
company. The embeddedness of identity into the design of the lifestyle reveals itself to those
who do not have the privileged passports that allow for less surveilled border crossing. Nishash
for example, an Indian national who joined Remote Year, explained to me how she had had to
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skip parts of it because some of the destinations required her to request the visa in advance from
India, and she could not do it so far in advance before the trip. “Yeah, this is def thought for by
Americans” while some countries do restrict Americans, the destinations on the program are
chosen in part, but not explicitly, because of this ease.

Yeah. So, I also learned a lot of these concepts like travel health insurance. So before
Remote Year began, we had all this info on vaccines that we had to take for different
places. I've never traveled like that. People were talking about storage units and like
putting things away, selling their cars. And I always traveled with all my belongings in
Bombay and just went on and came back. So, I was like, oh, there's international health
insurance that works across countries for nomads. Um, there's like cards that you can use,
but like a lot of it was geared mostly all the information online is mostly for Europeans
Americans, British…. Cause I had a, I had a tough time with like, you know, figuring a
whole bunch of these things. Cause you don't under a motel Slack. Like I was looking to
see if there were more Indians who had done that were living in India.

Um, so yeah, that's, that's been like interesting, cause there's not so many people, like
there's a lot of Indians who are all so like working remotely and living this life that I
guess percentage wise it's a lot lower. Um, so just learning all these has been like a big
revelation. It's been incredible. Like I started seeing remote, working as such a different
thing that you can, it's actually like a life plan. It's not just taking your bags and traveling
for three months and going home. Um, so it's like all that's been interesting…. So, I have
Yama in Indian insurance. Um, again, like bank accounts, like the payment things.
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There's a lot that I'm still figuring like taxes and things in different places, but yeah, it's
making me want to do it more and more. Yes. All my accounts are still Indian. They're all
linked to my Indian bank accounts and credit cards. Everything.
Being added to the Remote Year Slack channel was an important reward, but as Nishash said, the
conversations did not apply to her often. As an artist who had lived in New York she also had the
cosmopolitan edge that allowed her to easily move in these circles. An example that gained
media attention was that of a woman in Bali who posted a video about escaping the oppression
of the United States that she felt as a black lesbian and finding her community with other
Westerners in Bali. Bali authorities deported her, saying a statement on its website, the
“immigration office said Gray may have violated several immigration laws, including by
spreading information that could disturb the public, such as suggesting that Bali was “queer
friendly” and easily accessible to foreigners amid the COVID-19 pandemic.” (Reuters' ' 2021)
The hypervisibility of this instance broke the assumption of flying above the law, however a
deportation back to the US may mean a racial struggle, but it is still a country where most
immigrants are trying to get to. It is the minimal risk associated with publicness.
How to move from place to place becomes part of the constant narratives found in blogs
and websites. DeCerteau shows how maps used to be based on routes, but increasingly “the map
has slowly disengaged itself from the itineraries that were the condition of its possibility.” p.120.
“We thus have the structure of the travel story: stories of journeys and actions are marked out by
the ‘citation’ of the places that result from them or authorize them. (p.120) Different institutions
rank passports on their strength, which include their ability to do visa-on-arrivals, having to
request visas at all, and the price to pay for specific visas. Given the differentiated ways in which
each nation decides visa and immigration requirement, it is not a generalizable rule. However,
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the strength does tend to skew in some logical ways, as in countries whose citizens are unlikely
to try to stay as undocumented immigrants have an easier time crossing borders.
My informants had found diverse ways of coming into the country and staying if they
wished to. A common one among is the jumping from one country to the other to restart a tourist
visa. Many achieved this with either their home countries, or nearby ones, which being Panama
or Mexico. Another way was getting student visas, by enrolling in local Spanish classes or
schools. I did not verify this, but some told me the schools did not really check nor cared if you
attended class, so again, an open secret of how to remain in the country if you were willing to
pay for the classes. Lastly, medical visas, which, given that Medellin is trying to become a health
tourism destination, are readily available. Healthcare is much cheaper in countries like Colombia
than the U.S., and the practice of coming for major surgeries, plastic surgeries or other
procedures is common (BioXcellerator, n.d.). However, the location-independent workers opted
for orthodontics, given they require time and are not an invasive surgery. Those who met a local
and married them could of course get their residency, while some got “pareja de hecho'' with a
willing, local roommate, which is a civil partnership without marriage.
As explained by (Okagbue et al., 2021), given the usual waves of migration, those with
"strong passports" are so because local authorities assume they have little motivation to stay:" i.e.
they visit the country as consumers and not as workers. International tourism stemming from
"global north" citizens to "global south" is based on this principle: it is cheaper to vacation in
poor countries. Resorts and tourist destinations are hubs for a reason: the tourism industry
develops around it, making the destination more well-known to foreigners. The ease of
vacationing in Cancun, Cabo, or other well-known Mexican destinations for example, comes
with the understanding that the tourism industry caters to American needs and requirements.
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Here, we find another blurring of the professional and the personal lives of workers. As
Gray et al. (2016) said, “the crowd is a collaborative network”. In their study of Mechanical Turk
workers, they did network analysis of users they had contacted. These workers found each other
in other online spaces since the platforms where they worked did not allow for a search or
contacting among workers. That is, even though they work independently as freelancers or
entrepreneurs, other individuals and communities take on the rest of the “work” involved in the
workplace arrangement. However, Gray et al. spoke about the help that on-demand workers get
from loved ones or other workers online who were dealing with the same platforms. The affinity
in this case, however, is the mobility of the body across borders, not necessarily the work. That
is, if employers are not providing workspaces, infrastructure and tools, their tactics lead them to
try to figure that out individually, and they become consumers of that work infrastructure
themselves. As independent workers, the line of consumption as workers and as private
consumers fully dissipates, even though a woman I interviewed, for example, works for a fully
remote company that gives her allotted stipend for co-working spaces. Therefore the main
logistical labor that is shared online, helping with decisions and filtering information tailored to
this arrangement is destination choice.
A web site that well exemplifies this is nomadlist.co, which has created rankings of
digital nomad destinations with indicators relevant to this affinity, including good Wi-Fi, cost of
living, safety, English knowledge. By the time of writing the website claimed 37,536 “remote
workers living around the world”. While the owner of the site is a well-known nomad himself,
rankings and updates on destinations are crowdsourced from members/users. Medellin, since I
have been checking the site in 2017, has been ranked in the top 10 destinations in Latin America.
Other bottom-up type of rankings and places include travel blogs, listicles, and articles online.
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My interviewees often told me they had heard about Medellin via “word of mouth,” be it from
friends, or different online spaces and forums.
Staying “under the radar” is one of the key aspects of informality. Whether being a digital
nomad is illegal activity or extralegal depends on where they are, and what the individual is
doing. Illegal activity works without and against current law, not considering any cooperation
with the state. Extralegal, however, operates mostly in the gaps of the current legal system.
Being ungovernable by design. Setting up de facto standards means the regulatory system can
later formalize them in the legal systems -- if the state accepts it. It means that one of the goals of
the system is to be eventually legal -- through lobbying and shaping the state policy and law
changes.
As I was authoring this dissertation, some lobbyists were aiming to introduce a digital
nomad visa from Medellin. In the meantime, however, the navigation of the in-betweenness
remained a gray area that they sometimes discussed online, yet mostly as to how to deal with it
when faced with legal enforcement checkpoints: The following is an example from a Facebook
group, it shows a discussion that is recurrent in terms of advice within the social media groups:

Post: ...When entering a country as a digital nomad, when asked by immigration what
your purpose of your trip is it is important to say ¨tourist and don´t say that you are
working online. This way you don't run into problems and will stay off the radar.
Immigration around the world clearly has not yet worked out how to handle digital
nomads who make their living online.

Anonymous on November 8, 2017, at 1:07 pm
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Yes ----, that’s good advice about ‘staying off the radar,’ not just to avoid questions about
whether you are working but also to avoid any Colombian tax liability!
Infrastructurally, destinations need to be modern enough to have first-rate internet speed and
communication infrastructure. As explained by (Starosielski, 2015), the basic infrastructural
layout of this means some countries continue to have better and less interrupted access than
others. IE, the discussion about digital inequalities becomes even more apparent within the city
of Medellin. While I worked at Selina in 2018, the internet for the co-working space went down
for about an hour. However, the main liaison for the Colombian program of Remote Year
proudly said that their own internet had not gone down. He had specifically paid for the best
available in the city, which is one of the main guarantees of the service.
While I had been evidencing this divide between the location-independent worker and
those who provide services for them, during the constant quarantine enforcement in 2020, most
of my interviewees were able to continue their work uninterrupted from their apartments in
Medellin, while many of the local businesses that catered to them suffered or closed. Another
clear demonstration of the inequality deepened or reflected in technology use (Eubanks, 2018)
many residents of the poorer areas of Medellin could not connect to the internet enough for their
children to attend school. A couple I interviewed illuminated this for me: a European translator,
and his local wife. He was able to earn about 3,000 dollars a month from his home doing
translations. At the same time, his wife, who works for a local university, also works in a project
of Medellin's comunas. The kids she went to see every day could not go to school during
COVID, as they did not have internet access that was good enough to stream a class.
Connectivity also differentiates tourism destinations from remote work ones. A common
conversation in the WhatsApp groups I was in was asking about the level of internet access in
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the island of San Andres, a beautiful, Caribbean Island that is Colombian but has its own culture
and history, like many islands that are officially part of a continental nation. While some of them
wished to be working literally on the beach, the infrastructure did not fully support it.
Taxation was a common topic of conversation, who suddenly had to navigate these legal
terrains when there is little precedent. The formality of labor and its attachment to location is
often in relationship to taxes. Companies choose where to establish their corporations often due
to tributary incentives or tax havens. In becoming their own entrepreneurial business, these
remote workers are laboring under a similar premise, except due to their mobility they continue
to pay taxes depending on their nationalities’ regulations. There are several exemptions, and they
include making under a certain amount of money, given how little those earning in dollars or
Euros need to “live well” in their new locations, chances are they could indeed avoid it
altogether.
On the other hand, Europeans and Australians I interviewed, meaning some were
managing to avoid paying taxes altogether given how hard it is to prove where you are earning
the money from. They did not have to pay income taxes given their status as tourists and did not
have to pay taxes in their native countries given, they were technically not there. Speaking to a
Colombian tourism official, she said she considers them tourists, even if they are mostly
working, because they are making their money from somewhere else. The extra legality is mostly
an issue with their employers. In a New York Times article, they called it a “don’t ask don’t tell
policy,” that is, employers need not know where their employees are, given that they indeed
could be liable for local taxes for having a local presence, a practice that is much more regulated.
The risk of regulatory retaliation, therefore, shifts to the individual. By becoming independent
workers, it is the workers themselves who incur the burden of legality, with the penalty of
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deportation. As established, COVID brought to a sudden light the effects of this type of
movement. New York City is currently struggling given how much they depend on taxes of the
“ultrarich,” since they were the first to leave the city during the pandemic. A report from
Bloomberg found that the top 1% of New Yorkers had a combined $133.3 billion in income in
2018 and paid 42.5% of the city's total income tax (Bloomberg). If income tax is determined by
residence, moving around can make this obsolete.
Many of the discussions in the groups and forums centered around the specifics of travel
and borders at each destination. The tactics shared include what to put in official forms, i.e.,
"tourist" and not coming for "work". The ebbs and flows of requirements require constant
updating of what it is like to navigate them. In late 2021, for example, Mexican authorities,
according to the discussions in the WhatsApp groups, had increased their requirements for
people like themselves (WhatsApp conversation, 2021).It begs the question if the same
individuals I met will be the ones using the Digital Nomad visas that are now surfacing in many
countries . Emulating the ethos of the backpacker or of Silicon Valley, “innovation” comes from
disrupting the status quo, but the status quo often means regulation and taxation. For example,
the 25-year-old German who started working online for $15.00 an hour may live relatively well
in Medellin, but that wage may not meet the requirements of if a Digital Nomad visa becomes
implemented in Colombia. The potential formalization of this type of work goes hand in hand
with their visibility as a market for local government and industry.
Part II: A Nascent Market
Some companies, such as Remote Year, for example, have a reserved spot for their
customers within Selina. The program serves as a travel agency for international remote work
guaranteeing stable internet and taking on all the logistics. What they do not provide is actual
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employment: i.e., this is for professionals who already have work that they can do remotely.
They also do not aid with the visa aspect of the travel. While no one explicitly said this to me nor
have I seen it in any documentation, a logical reason to not involve the business in visa
procurement is exactly the regulatory gray area that permeates all the arrangements. The
countries they tend to include, such as Colombia, have relatively easy-to-deal with tourist visas
for American citizens. The service, while not exclusively for Americans, is an American
company geared to the American consumer. The non-mentioned but catered-to identity reveals
itself with exceptions. Nishash, for example, told me she could not complete the "tour" or the
"year" as designed by the company, given she had to return to India to request a visa.
On the other hand, these “open spaces” or “affinity spaces” as already discussed, allow
for little filtering of who and what is relevant for the porous grouping to include. Offline, Mel
Gregg described the job of the community manager of co-working spaces or other “productive
atmospheres” as a type of work centered on sociality and making coherence out of the coming
together of such diverse individuals. Online, much of this power and responsibility falls on the
content moderator, the community manager, and even becomes extra work for those celebrities
or influencers who want to maintain ties with their followers (Baym, 2018). The work centers on
the curation and management of these spaces. As I explained in my paper about learn-to-code
Meetups (Alarcon, 2022), the hope of sharing space to some of these professionals often
underlies the reason to do it. I interviewed the university student who had this specific job during
the summer of 2018 that I sat in the Selina co-working space. Gonzalo spoke working English
and oversaw putting together events for the space, such as yoga classes and happy hours. He
asked me more than once how I had immigrated to the U.S. and told me of his dreams of
traveling the world and working abroad. Being among English speakers would help him improve
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his English. The hope associated with sharing spaces with people who may be beneficial to one’s
future career is particularly prevalent in these open, co-working arrangements (Alarcon, 2022).
The online to offline crossover of affinity spaces happens via invitations to events, using
the popularized term meetup, which is now an umbrella term for events of the sort that are open
and promoted online for strangers to meet with a specific purpose. While Gee focuses on the
term’s use on online forums, particularly gaming, affinity spaces are also found in an online-to-
offline scenario, particularly in large urban environments (Alarcon, 2022; Polson, 2015). One of
the main appeals of joining Remote Year is the already-formed group via affinity. Loneliness
and isolation are common complaints by freelancers but also by location-independent workers.
Given the temporality of the arrangement, forming strong ties becomes more difficult. However,
as Woldoff & Litchfield (2021) said, given the implicit understanding of the lifestyle it does
provide for more quick and open meetings of strangers than it would back in their native homes.
Not everyone explicitly uses the term to find information, they do however benefit from it in
indirect ways. Surprisingly, the one who appeared to fit the description the most accurately I met
through the co-working space, and not via one of the online channels that specifically use the
name, as he had no interest in meeting the “local nomad community” and was set on only
socializing with locals. However, he learned about Medellin via other remote workers in Mexico.
Therefore, even if trying to escape the digital aspect of the term, his identity on the ground still
placed him within them, being because of what he picked, his age, and the fact that he traveled
alone.
A co-working space such as Selina becomes an almost default space for foreigners
working online from Medellin. The fact that the hostel houses it gives it that automatic
international, cosmopolitan “vibe,” but it also makes the prices much too high for locals earning
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in pesos. Like the other affinity spaces related to this, they are public and open, but often limited
by either identity or interpersonal connection. Mostly, businesses are still mixing with the
informal, open, and free, such as Meetups. To manage the distinct types that may join, in some
places in Asia there is a rise of more exclusive gatherings and conferences (from interview with
Lawyer, zoom, 2018). Many events all over the world are taking place that invite only some
individuals, i.e., the requirements of being a "Global North" remote worker who travels are not
enough. Some of these are becoming more exclusive by filtering those who may wish to join, or
asking for registration fees. While Remote Year, for example, does this by a default, I was able
to attend an event hosted in the shared area of Selina. The irony of contexts collapsing made it a
bit bizarre, since the presentation area overlaps with the bar, which was, by 7 pm, already full.
The two presenters were remote workers who met in the program, and, true to advertisement,
were able to get together to work on the perennial “side project” that so many of them have. I
had a challenging time listening to the pitch due to the noise, and the attendees were others in the
Remote Year program mostly. The goal of the presentation remained unclear to me. If they were
practicing a pitch, trying to increase visibility for the app, the truth is I could not gather much use
for it.
One of the main appeals of the "lifestyle" is its price, however, and for the independent
traveler, more akin to a backpacker, the informal will remain cheaper. I found this via all the uses
of platforms that the affinity of the "digital nomad" served to crowdsource logistics. That is,
many of the decisions of where to go, where to stay, which local services to employ, cultural
norms and other many decisions are informed by peer posts and comments on Facebook groups.
As consumers, one of the main conversations I saw in the Facebook groups were personal
recommendations of services. While Colombians are known for hospitality and warmth,
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Medellin locals specifically also have the national reputation of being very close-knit, making
the integration of immigrants, be it from other parts of the country or internationally, particularly
hard. Given how much work and trust is embedded in existing relationships, outsiders will likely
depend on each other. However, this type of system means that anyone joins groups, and the
legitimacy of recommendation is highlighted when participants push back on each other. The
following is an example of a WhatsApp exchange where the group moderator asks to clear the
name of his Colombian friend who owns a tour business in the city. When I spoke to Laura, she
said she had tried responding to the TripAdvisor rating, as well as responding to this man on
Facebook. In this sense, her business depended on client’s word-of-mouth or reviews posted in
various parts of the web.
Recommendations allow for a few implicit social norms: the trust of someone else’s
direct sponsorship with an assumption of traits of commonality as a consumer. While ratings and
recommendation systems are an important part of on-demand labor platforms as a way to help
mitigate risk of hiring strangers, other types of hiring continue via recommendations or
sponsorships by individuals, particularly as the way that influencers try to make an income
(Chen et al., 2008), and seen as much more personal and convincing than regular advertisement.
In this purposefully inclusive WhatsApp group, “the mayor” pushed back against what he
considers a relative power abuse, meaning using his own cultural capital to challenge another
member. The first one was disparaging a local service, but the moderator is friends with the local
who owns it. Instead of her going into the chat to defend herself, “the mayor,” with his authority,
confronted the disparager. When I interviewed the business owner, she said this customer had
done this on different platforms, including Trip Advisor and Facebook. His argument was bad
customer service, and that when the service providers refused to provide a refund, he threatened
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to leave negative reviews, which is what ensued. The group in this case is privy to this debate,
however, unlike review sites, it is a chat, and therefore new members will not have access to the
discussion.
Some of the tension arose in discussions of what they called “gringo prices” that is, locals
are aware of their clients earning in dollars and either openly, or implicitly, charge them more.
Given their avoidance of the mainstream, the visitors also aimed to avoid overpriced services
they associate with tourism. Often the shared recommendations included asking for the “fair
price” of something, to garner information before a financial transaction with a local. In this
sense, participants recommended services providers because they helped them avoid the “gringo
prices,” such as a real estate agent who was “honest” according to a recommendation because
she would not “let him buy an apartment that was overpriced even though her commission would
have been much higher.”
The implicit trust between likes (homophily) and the lack of a more permanent network
made this a very key use for WhatsApp. For example, sharing the contacts of house cleaners and
cooks, drivers, real estate agents, lawyers, medical providers etc. As opposed to their home
nations, the on-demand economy of this sort in a poorer country does not necessarily work the
same way. For example, I interviewed an undocumented housecleaner who had found work in
one foreign household, and therefore her other customers were recommendations. She cannot
officially register to work given her undocumented status. The informality of the lifestyle of the
"Global North" workers met the informality of the large population of Venezuelan refugees (1,7
million) in Colombia (Galindo, 2021).
Tensions arise both because many of the foreigners are themselves targeting the group for
their services as independent workers (be it coaching, yoga retreats or English teaching) or
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because many of the locals who are part of it have crossed paths with the group owners via
service provision (the owner works from a few of their coffee shops) or Meetup groups. Asking
for recommendations appears interpersonal, yet I have seen locals recommend themselves or
people they know as a response, the way Pepe suggested. However, a pre-written message with
direct advertisement crosses into promotion, which the moderator asks to not be repeated.
Nonetheless, I have witnessed a yoga instructor promote her class on several occasions, without
anyone commenting. Given the unstructured application of moderation it makes sense, but
probably also the way her messages are written, which are usually casual, personal, in English,
and an apparent personal invitation to her class.
How one presents information can also get users banned from groups or not, i.e., if
offering a service, taking care not to spam nor post promotional material After someone has
made a recommendation or if found in another way, they use a group to ask about the legitimacy
of a local service provider. Whomever responds to the group or message “vouches for” a service
provider. Pepe is studying engineering; however, he is making good money working part time at
a real estate agency. . On Facebook, conversations must look, according to Pepe, like a friend
responding to a message of someone asking for a specific service/apartment or information.
When on WhatsApp, he is often on the lookout in the groups where he has been included, and if
someone asks specifically, he will respond or ask one of his American friends to recommend
him. His niche, he said, are the “digital nomads” as he does call them, or just “extranjeros.” He
joins the groups and responds on posts when people are searching for furnished rentals. He said
it is important not to be posting about the properties in a way that appeared like advertisement or
non-personal: using his Facebook allowed him to appear like another user in the community who
knows about an available rental.
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The community manager at one of the co-working spaces also enters the online spaces as
an organizer. In this screenshot he manages to show the events while also putting in a personal
type of message, which can lessen the idea that it is advertising, particularly since it is a calendar
with events from several places. The ownership of the group by Americans, and the
conversational language being English gives it the legitimacy of a social and non-commercial
space, yet as shown, several calendars, events, and services provided exist to meet the social and
economic needs of the group. Using Facebook or WhatsApp adds a level of legitimacy or trust
(Lingel, 2020)) often lacking on other online labor platforms i.e. personal networks, or access to
someone’s phone number, becomes a source of identity verification.
De Confianza
As explained in chapter 1, part of the reason for “outsourcing the home” is to win back
time. Part of the appeal is to be able to hire out domestic work of cooking and cleaning. For
example, a common recommendation on WhatsApp groups is an iteration of this message I
copied: “Can anyone refer to a good cleaning lady that cooks as well”? Scholarship on migrant
work highlights the prevalence of women of color, immigrants, or poorer women to do
housework while the owners are performing higher income work has been a byproduct of liberal
feminism (Estévez-Abe & Hobson, 2015)). In the U.S., these are the jobs so often described by
pro-immigration politicians as “jobs that Americans don’t want” to justify the presence of
undocumented workers who often earn less than the required minimum wage. A lot of these
transactions happen “under the table,” another type of labor that can be put under the umbrella of
informality. Some countries with guest worker visas such as Saudi Arabia and Singapore import
this labor from neighboring, poorer countries. The Philippine government, as explained before,
takes on the role of “good working citizens'' as part of the super exploitation of the supply chain:
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there are many arrangements set in place for these domestic workers to send money to their own
families back in the Philippines as they care for the children of richer families.
Like in many developing economies, the number one occupation for women in Latin
America is domestic work (100 Million Women in Latin America’s Labor Force, 2014). The
influx of Venezuelan migrants has meant that they are coming in to do “the jobs Colombians
don’t want” including hand picking coffee, being the main workforce of Rappitenderos (the
dominant delivery app) and other service jobs. I found Andreina via one of my online
participation sites. I learned during our interview that she was an undocumented Venezuelan
woman who used to work at an office in Caracas, but now worked as a domestic worker in
Medellin. She got her first gig in a big, Colombian home, but from there her client recommended
her services to another foreigner, who in turn recommended her to three others. Because of this
word-of-mouth she has not had to actively search for work since. Since she gets paid in cash and
there is no formal contract involved given the few days a week, she works for each of her
customers, it is one of the few jobs available to her as an undocumented immigrant. Since then,
she has gotten more gigs all via word-of-mouth and paid for in cash. She charges 65,000 pesos
which is about $16,95 for a full day’s work. If she cooked also, she says, she would charge
80,000 pesos. She learned about the going rate in public transportation, as other domestic
workers shared the asking price during their commutes.

Given that “tactics” are often about finding loopholes, some locals aid with this
arrangement. Cheap lodging in the forms of hostels and inns have been common among young,
European backpackers in Asia and South America for many years (O’ Regan & Burns, 2008).
Given their age and professionalism, location-independent workers searched for another type of
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lodging. The rise of co-living spaces, like coworking spaces, reflects the trend of later or non-
home ownership by American millennials (Wilson, n.d.) As “Digital Nomads” are identified as a
market, locals told me of how they are catering to their specificities. I also witnessed questions
on buying homes, as some saw the rising popularity of the city as a good potential investment or
had decided to stay after a few months in town.
The Ideal Hostess
While multiple, independent adults on a lease are common in the U.S., this is not the case
in Colombia. To legally rent an apartment, a lot of documentation is required, such as the local id
number, the cedula, credit statements, deposit, etc. The informality of the “sharing economy”
aids with this entanglement. Like the other intermediary platforms already discussed in the
dissertation, the platform allows for peer-to-peer transactions between owners and temporary
lodgers. I stayed in a popular Airbnb in El Poblado during my summer stay, which allowed me
to meet various kinds of people coming through, since the rooms were rented out independently.
While the site originally aimed at homeowners to rent out their spaces or second homes when not
in use, there is a rise of commercialization of the site, as apartments are used for this purpose full
time. The owner of the Airbnb where I stayed had several apartments, and I dealt with a manager
he had hired.

I noticed a sign from the department of tourism in the living room, saying that they did
not condone prostitution nor drugs. The requirement stems from the law 679 of 2001, aiming to
curb what has been popularly called “Parahotelería: more widely known in more touristy cities
like Cartagena, it consists of individual apartments that are rented out outside regulatory
frameworks, particularly for prostitution. While hotels also deal with this problem, the lack of
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intermediation of regulatory agencies in dealing with guests shifts the responsibility of law
enforcement on to apartment owners. To avoid a lot of the risks in many of these interactions’
brokers become recommended, but also many depend on Airbnb to formalize many of the
negotiations. As in, they would not have considered this type of transaction had they not had the
vetting process and reviews available on the site, nor the payment system provided by it.
Finding a place to stay for two to three months is relatively hard for location-independent
workers: Airbnb’s are relatively expensive since they target tourists. While they would not pass
the vetting of a short-term lease, they rely on the regulatory loophole provided for furnished
apartments, conceived of much before the advent of Airbnb. Given the Colombian cultural
norms of living with family, those who move out tend to be more economically stable and
therefore unlikely to want to rent furnished homes. According to Pepe, this market has seen
exponential growth because of location-independent workers. Renting out a furnished apartment
is relatively easy, he says, mostly because it is so rare that there is little regulation surrounding it.
They only require a copy of the passport and first and last month’s rent. He found this niche
because of an American retiree he knew, who introduced him to other “expats.” By knowing
how to speak English, he inserted himself in this niche. He keeps getting clients via
recommendation. Foreigners are “great clients” because they have so much more money to spend
on rentals.
The third type I found were what are known as “group homes” in the U.S. Given the
restrictions on rentals, foreigners access them via an intermediator. Sometimes branded as co-
living spaces they can be relatively impersonal, like many advertised villas outside the city.
However, I was led to Cristobal, 40, who told me he was “hacking” the local system by renting
out rooms in a large house that he leases. He described it as a lifestyle because they were not
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making a big profit. He laughed and said, “yeah this is definitely not a business, it’s not why we
do it.” They were trying to keep a type of environment, a friendly and homely environment,
therefore the rules of the house were quite strict in terms of overnight guests and partying. They
were clear about the “type of people” they wanted. While co-living or having adult roommates in
large houses is more common in Europe or the US, the setup is relatively novel in Medellin,
where people tend to live with their family until they can afford to move out with their own
nuclear one. When he talked about having people together in his house, he reiterated that it was
not work: he befriended his house guests, and he is lucky because before then he had never had
the chance to leave Colombia, now he has friends all over the world and has been able to visit.
The line between what he and his wife offered as friendship vs house owners and hosts is
one often discussed by feminist critique of political economy and care. The economy of
reciprocity in this sense appeared in relatively early web sites like Couch Surfing, a non-
monetized precursor of Airbnb. Hochschild’s “emotional labor” refers to the often service jobs
that require an emotional component to please customers or clients, particularly hospitality. Her
example is often applied in the hospitality and service industry, where flight attendants, waiters,
and even telemarketers must invest part of their emotional being into their job. These jobs are
disproportionately staffed by women (Santero-Sánchez et al., 2015). A big reason that my
interviewees said they liked Medellin and Colombia was the kindness and joy of the people.
Hochschild's term is often misused to include the unremunerated burden that women take
on that is not part of their paid-for service, be it in their office settings, family relationships and
in romantic relationships, of managing emotions, connecting, organizing social events, listening,
comforting, and caring. The blurred lines between economic and non-economic transactions in
these interactions between “hosts” and “guests” means that the emotional labor gets diffused as
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well: making their lodgers feel like they are in a “home” vs a hotel is part of what Andres and
Liliana do even if they do not consider it their job. Andres is a music producer, but when I asked
how much time he spends in each endeavor he said about half and half. He can afford to work
less because his home is paid for by the lodgers, but it does take half of his time away from what
he considers his “real” job. What he considers managing the house includes inviting their new
friends on family trips and showing them the “real” non-touristy Colombia, discussing history
and current events, and recommending activities and restaurants around town. Had they stayed at
a hotel, the job would be officially that of the concierge. If they were guests at a friend’s house,
they likely would not have had to pay rent.
Pepe emphasized the importance of being welcoming to his clients, given that most of
them are from out of town. He is aware that they tread the line between tourist and immigrant, so
he knows that they appreciate insider knowledge from locals, such as what grocery stores to go
to, what neighborhoods to avoid, how to say specific things, or how much a local would pay for
a service. All of this is outside his job description as a rental agent but given his youthful age he
can appear as “more like a friend”.

The idea is to talk to them and help with whatever they need… like they ask how to deal
with specific paperwork, or where can I go buy this what do you recommend and I “les
colaboro” [which roughly translates to I collaborate them i.e. I help] it is not only helping
them find a home, it is also colaborar, make them feel welcome, I think it is something
characteristic to Colombians (Pepe; Zoom interview, 2020)
The term colaborar is a very Colombian-specific slang, which means “to help out.” Given how
most of the world lives in an informal economy, personal networks are generally not separate
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from professional ones (Lomnitz, 1988). Colaborar is often used to request help with something,
as in “me puede colaborar?” to ask for money on the streets, but it is part of the cultural lingo
because so often those providing services are eager to help as much as possible, because it is this
that assures a connection and potential future business. Part of the reason Pepe gets
recommended (I got his number from one of my interviewees) is his friendliness and special
attention. He has become friends with a few of his clients, and he takes the time to show them
around the neighborhoods of the places he is renting. Some of these recommendations happen
via word-of-mouth, but I also saw his name and contact more than once shared in the digital
spaces I engaged in participant observation in.
Leaning Into the Dollars
While Pepe came to Medellin because of its appeal to “innovation” and programming, his
paying job is in the hospitality industry. Jess is a Venezuelan immigrant (interview, zoom, 2020)
She finished her engineering degree back in Venezuela, and due to the economic and political
circumstances, moved to Medellin. However, finding a job as an engineer was not so easy: locals
close ranks, she said. She had made many friends, but they were also foreign, and the few
engineering jobs she had heard of paid about $600.00 a month. Her other passion was yoga, and
by looking online she started moving in this direction, until she found a small yoga retreats and
certification mediation company based in the U.S. They started paying her to help organize the
logistics of the trips. By the time they hired her full time they first offered to pay her $400.00 a
month, “because they offered local wages, but I got them up to $1.000.” she told me. The
business didn’t last long, but she remained in this career, now as an English-speaking instructor
at a yoga studio that began offering them (at gringo prices).
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What does pay quite well, is being an English-speaking Yoga instructor. Like I heard in
many other places, the lack of a clear division of the hospitality or tourism industry meant an
informal “gringo price” often discussed in Facebook groups. When someone brought it up on the
WhatsApp group, the owner replied with “Gringo prices’ is such a stupid term, used by people
who are cheap or broke. If you want an apartment that's furnished nicely, month to month, fast
internet… you will pay a premium and the market dictates price. If you want an unfurnished
rental in Bello on a year contract in some shithole, then you pay ‘local prices'’”. (WhatsApp
conversation, March 2021). She said the yoga studio where she worked charged more for
English-speaking classes. Jess is sort of a yoga “entrepreneur” as she worked for a foreign
company that is setting up yoga retreats in various parts of the world.
Therefore, the appeal of hospitality or aiding in the outsourcing of the body locks her into
this service-providing job, despite her also being a foreigner. She asked me to follow her on
Instagram and YouTube, as she tries to make a name for herself in this specific scene of yoga
retreats for foreigners in Colombia. Her fluent English allowed her to earn dollars, but the local
market demand is for yoga teachers for foreigners. By the time we talked, however, the
pandemic had halted both her regular classes at the studio and her budding business. Like many
of the other service providers depending on foreign tourism, it went away quickly.
Conclusion: Staying Under the Radar
The term “Digital Nomad” serves the pragmatic function of filtering for user-generated
content for those who share the affinity to work as they travel. Using De Certeau’s concept of
“tactics” as the way to circumscribe around existing structures in this case, the nation state.
However, they rely on their own nationalities and strong passports to do so, given the ability it
gives them to easily procure tourist and other visas. Location-independent workers share how to
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move across different countries on web sites, blogs, and social media. Emulating the strategic
positioning of platforms as intermediaries, the temporality of working while moving manages to
avoid the regulation established already at the national level, or in international agreements for
outsourcing. The regulatory gray area allows for the specificities of moments in time where this
is allowed. As explained by Jasanoff, Science and Technology Studies often overlooks the
performance involved in positioning an imaginary. Paisas attach a local pride to citizenry but
also to what they hope their narrative is and will be. On the other hand, localness and
authenticity are often performed as a way of commodifying local culture for tourist consumption.
Medellin battles between what they want to be, vs who foreigners think they are.
Secondly, linking “ethnic performance” to “economic performance,” argues Tsing,
allows for workers to position themselves in a global supply chain of labor, blurring “the lines
between self-exploitation and super-exploitation. They push themselves to succeed through the
very characteristics that define their usefulness to the supply chain. In this process, niche
differences are confirmed and invigorated in new forms.” As Colombian tourism officials try to
create an international image of what makes Colombia worth visiting, a few characteristics stand
out: the biodiversity, and the warmth and fun culture. Many places in the country are better for
this type of activity, including the old, walled city of Cartagena, the parque Tayrona with its lost
city on a mountain peak, or the Amazon region. For example, Colombia, as one of the most
biodiverse countries in the world, is a top destination for ecotourists, particularly bird watchers.
Its location allows it both a Caribbean and a Pacific coast, the topography of its embeddedness in
the mountains, and even a desert peninsula. Nonetheless, the competitive edge that Medellin has
is its comfort, particularly as a place to live and work that comfortable 70- something degree
weather, a modern-enough infrastructure, its ease of management and relatively small
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population. As explained in the previous chapter, it is health and wellness tourism, as well as
meetings tourism, which they hope to center on. There is also the cultural appeal of the
welcoming attitude toward foreigners, as well as the famed beautiful women. In essence,
Medellin as a city is a good hostess of workers, positioning itself as a good place for the social
reproduction of workers whose capital comes from elsewhere.

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Chapter 4: Working Online

If neoliberalism, risk and globalization, and capital are by definition precarious,
individual workers are left with the burden of navigating it. As explained in the dissertation
introduction, precarity is a widely used term, and more recently used by scholars to describe the
on-demand economy due to its emergent visibility in industrialized economies. While the word is
used in many studies of the rise of splintered work or what Weil called (Weil, 2014)“fissured
workplace”, scholars that incorporate a more global history of labor show how what we think of
as the “stable” 9-5 employment established by Fordism has been an exception at the global scale,
not a rule (Neilson & Rossiter, 2008). Precarity, Millar (citing Barchiesi, 2012a; Denning, 2010)
observes, is embedded in wage labor and “having to depend on a wage to sustain one's life”. If
we situate the current iteration of labor that developed economies are arriving at as an arrival to
how most of the world has always lived.
As explained in chapter 1, the reasons for taking on this lifestyle vary greatly. Woldoff &
Litchfield (2021) argue that burnout in main cities such as London and New York, as the main
push factor she found in her study, as well as the search for meaning, spiritual practices etc. My
findings don’t contradict this finding, but due to the difference in destination, some of the
reasoning did. What they all did have in common is an improvement to the life they led: i.e.,
prioritizing life over work, or at least over meaningless work. One of the reasons includes not
having the job security back home that can justify the expensive rent or the number of hours they
were working. It also correlates with the decline of the economies in the countries where they
stem from, meaning the financial security their parents had was not available to them.

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What the “race to the bottom” in the on-demand economy platforms does is put them in
the same pool as the always-already precarious majority world. Therefore, based on Tsing’s
approach, this chapter argues that they are using their advantages and identities to fit themselves
within the supply chain. Workers therefore rely on national, cultural, and ethnic signifiers to fit
within that transnational niche. To remain at a relative “elite” within those already-precarious
online markets, they are depending on what Bourdieu called “cultural capital”. His concept of
“habitus” describes habits, skills, and dispositions; It focuses on how individuals acquire social
ways of being that are not attached to capital, yet they are attached to elitism and hierarchies.
Taste and aesthetics, for example, while appearing as the most agentic forms of moving in the
world and of consumption, are a product of upbringing, class, and education. He uses habitus to
explore the question of agency and structure, with habitus as performed by disposition, and then
generating action.
What I argue in this chapter, then, is that these location-independent workers are
positioning themselves in the best niche at an online transnational level. The openness of the on-
demand platforms means that they are not restricted by explicit structures such as nationality and
right to work visas, or even minimum wages. In her essay, Freeman (1972) called the “tyranny of
structurelessness” the reality that there is no such thing as a structureless community or society.
When there are collectives or groups that claim openness, they may not have explicit hierarchies,
yet this means that implicit ones come into play. “This hegemony can be easily established
because the idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, but
only formal ones.” p.154).

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Implicit structures are hegemonic, that is relying on existing external structures:
interpersonal connections, stereotypes, assumptions, and existing inequalities. The online labor
market, therefore, as technically structureless and lacking explicit legalities, ends up relying on
hegemonic structures to self- organize. These structures stem from the legacy of colonialism,
imperialism, and cultural hegemony that permeates the day-to-day cosmopolitan encounters of
global citizenry. This chapter focuses on how the location-independent workers rely on their
identity and attachment to the “center” where they are from to procure work, but also to maintain
the rates from there. Although online labor is open to all, the location-independent workers find
tactics that rely on identity-based niches to avoid the race to the bottom such as 1) procuring
clients from their home countries 2) relying on their identities as a niche 3) Using the two prior
to leverage themselves as intermediaries.
The Rise of Online (freelance) Work
While this trend existed prior, the COVID pandemic created pushed the market in the
direction of freelancing. According to a study done by Upwork, 59 million Americans performed
freelance work in 2021, that is 36% of the entire U.S. workforce.
5
They surveyed 6,000 adult
U.S workers and found that American freelancers contributed $1.3 trillion in annual earnings to
the U.S. economy, $100 million more than in 2020. They state that the growth is driven “by an
increase in the number of highly skilled, remote freelancers that left full time employment for
flexible work alternatives. At the same time, there was a notable decline in temporary workers
and a rise in all other types of freelancing, combined.” Freelancing is growing among the most
educated: The higher skilled nature of freelancing is clear as 51% of post-grad workers chose

5
This is to be taken lightly, however, given how many full-time workers also occasionally
freelance.
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freelancing, up 6% since 2020, while the share of freelancing individuals with high school
diplomas or less education has declined from 37% in 2020 to 31% this year.
While I went out of my way to study those deviating from the norm: i.e., women of color,
non-white foreigners, the cultural adaptability still allowed a proximity to it be it in language,
class in their nation of origin, adopted nationality or residency or foreign clients. In this case, the
commodity, or whiteness becomes apparent by comparison, since the strategic, structural
backbone of both cultural capital and actual capital. The creation of the social constructs of race
are a product of, but also the justification for, colonialism. European religion, language and
culture define the default human and what the “other” should aspire to. As Stuart Hall explains in
The Fateful Triangle, Nationality, Ethnicity and Race are “sliding signifiers”: open to change
because they are created discursively.
Hiring based on “company culture” can lead to bias and discrimination. However, in the
face of lacking personal connections, visibility and adding distance to the question of trust, in
online markets clients often base decisions on global reputations, stereotypes and assumptions.
Anna Tsing (2009) discusses the importance of non-economic, or national boundaries in terms of
labor division. Supply chain capitalism makes use of diverse social-economic niches through
which goods and services can be produced more cheaply. Such niches are reproduced in
performances of cultural identity through which suppliers show their agility and efficiency.
Tsing calls super-exploitation the use of particularities of one’s ethnicity, gender, or
nationality to keep these niches. For example, immigrant entrepreneurs to the U.S. bring
performances of ethnic niche specificity into the chain. She cites Jane Collins’s Threads where
U.S. corporate managers said they brought their assembly plants abroad to match the superior
sewing skills that women in the Global South, learned at home: “This paradoxical framing of
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skill makes women’s ‘disadvantages’ in the labor market at least a temporary advantage,’’ she
explains (2003, 176). New workers are expected to already know their jobs because they are
women. (p.162)
Allotting women or ethnic minorities with the programming work that those in power
consider repetitive, and therefore potentially automated soon, has been a hallmark in the world of
computing since its inception. In terms of technology work, a well-known example was
documented by Lisa Nakamura {Updating}in “Navajo circuits”, where weaving and repetitive
work, an example of in-sourcing, were marketed as the exact innate talent of Navajo women for
assembling circuits. In her book Encoding race, decoding class, (Amrute, 2016) goes through
the day-to-day lives of Indian IT workers based in Berlin, to understand how their dependency of
contract visas, the selling of “Indian” type of tech work as repetitive and uncreative, and the
precarity of their living conditions place these in-between individuals who could be considered
middle to upper class in India as immovable in Berlin. By “encoding” race and “decoding” class,
Amrute shows how even in the same space, the culture attached to Indianness decided what kind
of labor they were allowed to perform, and the inability to break through a particular glass
ceiling within the tech company she studied, was also contingent on how dependent on visas they
were. The finding has been corroborated in many studies of outsourcing or distributed
workforces (Koppman et al., 2016)
Given its parting point, whiteness remains an almost unnamed standard. As Richard Dyer
(2008) says: "White power secures its dominance by seeming not to be anything in particular"
(p.40). The cultural contexts depend on the history of physical, forceful colonialism, to the
harder to fight-with, yet very present, global order of capital and hegemony. Edward Said
explains how in the times of colonialism, there was a tangible way of resisting the former by
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pushing back against occupation. The legacy, however, is still a world with those established
hierarchies, plus “we now have in addition an international media presence that insinuates itself,
frequently at a level below conscious awareness, over a fantastically wide range (Said, p.291).
The most relevant analysis of whiteness for this case, however, is Harris' argument of
whiteness as property (Harris, 1993). Although making a legal-historical analysis of the U.S., the
argument holds on whiteness as aspirational because its economic advantage was built into the
regulatory system of the United States. As whiteness is simultaneously an aspect of identity and
a property interest, it is something that can both be experienced and deployed as a resource.
Whiteness can move from being a passive characteristic as an aspect of identity to an active
entity that - like other types of property - is used to fulfill the will and to exercise power.
In the next sections, however, I discuss, instead of the existing strategies of global racial
hierarchies, the grounded, individual tactics that are employed by these location-independent
workers. While some of my interviewees were remote workers for a company, most of them
worked independently. Although I asked in my interviews if they could put something on a
business card what it would be, many wavered, since their multiple sources of income and
entrepreneurial endeavors. My interviewees worked as the following: Artists/designers/creatives;
Software/engineering/tech; Translators/teachers; Marketers/dropshippers; online and offline
entrepreneurs.
6

Avoiding the “race to the bottom”
Most of my interviewees had more than one income stream to create financial safety as a
freelancer, given the fluctuations in income endemic to the type of work. To safeguard potential
lag of clients or work, creating a “passive income stream” was a popular choice and advice, such

6
See Appendix B for full list of interviewee profiles
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as any type of rent, online shop, or ad-based business online. The passive income served as a
steady income that required little to no input of work from them. To start their own business, a
British couple rented out their apartment in London and with that were able to support their life
as they traveled.
Scholarship on the on-demand economy is divided between local and online services.
The first relies on local service workers such as Uber, Airbnb, Task Rabbit, and other delivery
services such as the Rappi, the Colombian delivery app that has expanded all throughout Latin
America. The latter, which is the one that these workers are part of, is online-only work, which is
information work. On the other hand, that Rappi is well known as a place where undocumented
Venezuelan refugees are finding wage labor in Colombia. Online labor platforms allow
employers to break down large processes into small tasks, enabling individuals to compete
directly with offshoring firms that are intermediate between employers and workers (Fish and
Srinivasan, 2011). Gray and Suri (2019) call this new iteration or re-arrangement of work as:
A world in which steady work and salaries are being replaced by a chaotic string of small
projects and micropayments, and human bosses are being replaced by automated
processes that are programmed to oversee a far-flung workforce of anonymous
independent contractors.” (p. xxvii).
Large firms depend on on-demand labor across to curate and moderate content, improve
search results, survey potential consumers, and optimize the services they offer to consumers
(Kingsley et al., 2015). Additionally, online work encompasses a vast number of potential
arrangements. Some academics make the distinction between discrete task work that is narrowly
scoped (e.g., getting paid 5 cents to answer a survey or label an image) and larger freelance
projects where the worker is given a broader, less specifically defined task to fill (e.g., building a
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website). As previously explained, one of the issues with the term “precariat” is that it lumps
together many distinct types of “precarious” labor arrangements into one.
While our focus has remained on the larger platforms and the “race to the bottom,” a
commonality among them remained a general avoidance of these platforms to find work.

Andrea: Do you spend any time looking for new clients?

Cody: 39:34 Yeah. Yeah, which I hate. That's why freelancing sucks, because you
spend more time looking for the work than actually doing it, and you don't get paid for looking
for it. That's why freelancing blows. But yeah, I'm always kind of on the lookout, but I don't
really make that much effort. I kind of know where to look.
Andrea: Where?

Cody: Agencies.

Andrea: Okay. So, you don't use any of the online sites?

Cody: …Yeah. No. Upwork, Angel, and Yoko. I think Upwork is mostly technical.
….But it's a mess though….You're competing with 50,000 Indians. And it's very hard to
differentiate yourself. Plus, a lot of people that source on Upwork are looking for bottom dollar.

Andrea: Bottom dollar?

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Cody: They'll take someone cheap over someone good.
While micro-work platforms, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), typically do not reveal
the specific identities of workers on their platforms, macro-work platforms, such as
Freelancer.com, allow workers to build more visible worker profiles that highlight the identities
and specific experiences of each worker (Alarcon & Gray, 2018)). As scholar Langdon Winner
(Winner, 1993) argued, there are always politics embedded in sociotechnical systems, either by
design or in consequence. Tarleton Gillespie (Gillespie, 2010) explained technology companies’
choice of the term “platforms” as strategic, borrowing the connotation of neutrality associated
with the term. These include computational, something to build upon and innovate from;
political, a place from which to speak and be heard; figurative, in that the opportunity is an
abstract promise as much as a practical one; and architectural, in that YouTube is designed as an
open-armed, egalitarian facilitation of expression, not an elitist gatekeeper with normative and
technical restrictions.” (p.353) Like social media platforms, on-demand economy ones skillfully
avoided initial regulation by branding themselves as a technology company, rather than a
transportation one in the case of Uber, and a hospitality one in the case of Airbnb. Most of the
pushback came from workers and business owners in these industries who must jump through
regulatory hoops while the “platforms” claim only to be intermediaries between individual users.
While the “neutral” platforms claim to be intermediaries between peers, in reality their
design of platforms such as Mechanical Turk benefits clients, in what is known as “information
asymmetry” in pure markets. The race to the bottom occurs when this fully open market pushes
workers to underbid each other. For example, one of the practices allowed by platforms is what
economists call location arbitrage: that is, finding the cheapest and most qualified labor from
around the world and outsourcing it there. Traditional, large companies have employed this tactic
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for manufacturing and service work for decades. While the pushback from critical scholars in the
Global North has been its return to “piecework,” there are those who see a barrier lowering for
workers in poorer economies to access labor in the “Global North.” To the point that countries
dedicate training, infrastructure, and policy to lure and maintain it. A pushback began with
workers from the developed world, who argued against the “race to the bottom” (Lehdonvirta et
al., 2014) caused by the full openness, and by location arbitrage. That is, workers located in
places where the cost of living is lower can underbid workers in wealthier nations.
My interviewees commonly used the term “desperate” to explain when or why they have
used Upwork or some of the other online labor platforms. They did, however, often keep a
profile there just in case they did encounter such desperate times, but also for other uses. One, for
example, was a low-rent type of corporate espionage, by posting a fake offer to look at other
workers' bids to strengthen their own. While the main argument against facilitating location
arbitrage filed from Global North workers is the inability to compete due to cost of living, my
interviewees purposefully did not fit into that category. The inability to verify where workers are
physically located and earning their money is one of the hurdles that Upwork tried to factor in,
by now requiring a physical mail address within the countries where workers are trying to get
jobs from and excluding P.O. boxes.
Other reasons to avoid the platforms include complaints documented by scholars of
online platform economies. First, the amount of time it takes to search for jobs, bid and maintain
good standing on the platforms equates to work time not paid for. Secondly, it allows for
flexibility of space and not time given the competition, they need to be in constant search for
snapping up a good “gig” before someone else does. Thirdly, the design was meant for one-offs
and would not lead to a recurring relationship with a client.
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Lastly and most repeatedly stated, clients who use Upwork, my interlocutors said, are
more interested in quantity than quality. Sophia, for example, said that “This is the place where
people go to get cheap work done,” and to her, creative professionals should not be allowing
themselves to be exploited this way. What my interviewees said about this is that it lowers
quality, and that creative workers need to “have each other's back” so that their work does not get
devalued. However, they were not part of a union or any attempt at organizing for this.

Sure. I mean, I completely understand and sympathize as to why those guys signed us up.
Why, because it is horrible. And it's brutal. And you read stories all the time was you
know people's profiles being canceled or deleted.

So, it's not a nice environment at all, you've got loads of people who don't understand
like the value. So typically, someone with my level of experience 50 US dollars an hour
would be normal.

And people charge more. You can charge you could probably charge 80 to 90 sorts of
the top end, but people get really annoyed. They don't want to pay $50 an hour. They
don't pay 40 on a pay as little as possible.

So, I think you have to be really, really selective on Upwork. And not bother with any
clients who aren't who want if they want really good value anyone everything you just
have to ignore them. You have to do stuff like really vet your clients very carefully and
look at their history of feedback.
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Yeah, it's not easy. Any amount of time that takes and then the amount of time it takes
to pitch work and the amount of time it takes some people they never ever get back to
you and I've done two or three hours of work for someone for a really long pitch and
you never go back to me. So, it can be. It's a lot of work getting work, but I like having
my profile on there and I like the level of reassurance, it gives me in that in worst case
scenario, like I lose a really big client and suddenly my monthly revenue hasn’t been
enough.

Somewhere where I can probably go and if I reduce my rate and sent off 10 or 15 job
applications. I'll probably get one or two.
While the workers may not fall within the more invisibilized part of the on-demand economy,
they do within the larger discourses of contracting, part-time, project-based work, and the
instability often associated with the creative industries. Sophia, who is in her forties, for
example, no longer accepts clients that want a one-off:

Retainer or retainer? Yeah. Yeah. And why is that? Because, um, I feel like freelancing is
it's, you know, it's just unpredictable and you, I mean, where do I begin? I mean, when,
first of all, you have a person come in and want you to do something like a logo and they
want you to do a website and it ends up being a lot of background work that you don't
really get an end on in terms of investment. There are so many opportunities for you to
get ripped off there's it's just kind of when you're trying to force a short relationship,
when it really should be a long relationship. And it's just frustrating the whole time at the
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same time, your income is going back and forth. Like I don't know, like you spare on
predictable, unstable, and you always have to, you have to find work, you have to chase
your checks, you have to do this, you have to do that.

So now I feel like if a person doesn't want to commit several thousand dollars to me per
month, then I don't feel like this is a relationship that's worth nurturing for me also, just
because of the nature of what I do as, um, in terms of my training and my skills are that I
am a person that writes and designs. So when I was in these one off relationships, I was
in situations where if I'm designing someone's website and someone else wrote it, and I'm
the editor I'm having to design stuff that's poorly written or somebody is, you know,
they're in the process of trying to figure out how they're going to market themselves, but
they have one person doing the logo and then they have another person doing this thing.
And then you got to coordinate with all those other people in person. I mean, it's just, you
know, now I would like to have clients that I build a relationship with. I pretty much
embed myself in their organization and, you know, just kind of become their creative
arm. And it just makes things a lot easier for everybody (Interview with Sophia, Zoom,
2020).
Professionals I found used several different platforms, many that rely more on personal
relationships, networks, and identity. Jeremy, who focuses on Google AdWords has several ways
in which he finds clients, or clients find him. LinkedIn had turned out very effectively, but there
were also these new types of intermediators who served as a way of curating talent. The way he
expressed it; it was a way for advertising agencies to reduce the costs of permanent staff
depending on projects. For example, when they had too big a load or project, they could tap him
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to provide the service, given that he was already vetted and knew the company culture. Below is
a common story of how these workers viewed, and used, the large on-demand platforms such as
Upwork.
For example, there are smaller, less-known companies that take on some of the onerous
labor of sifting and bidding for the workers, and of vetting and deciding for clients. Gerard, for
example, found that relying on an agency was much more efficient use of his time. He was
contacted by a company called Free Up, that takes on the labor of pre-vetting agencies and
contractors for clients. One of the requirements is to be “legally able to work” in the country
where the client is from, a by-design disqualification for many online, on-demand workers.
However, the only Colombian-born and raised “digital nomad” I spoke to is a fan of
Fiverr. He was 23 at the time of our interview, and he got his foot in the door early, therefore has
many positive rankings and so much work offered that he hired a friend to help him. The irony,
however, is that he offers design services. As a programmer, he automated much of the creative
work, and he can therefore quickly and efficiently provide logos and designed web pages for
cheap to customers. The tension of programmers stepping in to do “creative work” seemed
evident, particularly when clients were small and did not have the budget for a full-on campaign.
Online Work and the Varied Use of Platforms
The aspirational aspect of this life meant that when people asked the most common
question: how do I do this? In online forums, the answers ranged from the sarcastic to making
sure you have work already lined up before deciding to take off. The understanding is, the work
will not show up by itself, and searching for it remains the most challenging aspect. However, in
the groups where I joined, I did participant observation on, including WhatsApp and Facebook,
work was spoken about, although rarely in comparison to the day-to-day logistics discussed in
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the following section. Offers tended to differentiate between native English speakers and Native
Spanish speakers, although rarely did I get access to the rates.
All my interviewees belonged to Facebook groups for freelancers, digital nomads, or
other types of remote work. One of the uses is to find work or workers. One of my interviewees
was a Venezuelan immigrant to Medellin, Valentina; she began working online while she still
lived in Venezuela. She found her work as a freelancer for a Brazilian magazine in 2014 on a
Facebook group for freelancers. She got paid via her brothers’ American bank account. She
explained that due to the dearth of employment opportunities in her native country, finding work
online from other nations was commonplace among her journalist friends and colleagues. She
found work in Medellin via Instagram, working for an Australian-owned company, and she earns
in pesos, 1,500.000 a month (approximately 375.00 a month).
[Translation]The agency I used to work for closed their office in my city, and I was left in
this limbo again… I started looking on groups, and the “ingenio” (cleverness) where you
look where you can. So yes, I found these groups and they have worked wonderfully for
me. (Interview, Zoom, 2020)
I found Valentina because she promoted a job in that agency on one of the WhatsApp groups I
found. These are the only platforms she has used to both get work and find potential workers for
her employer. Michel, a translator, also found his current remote work on Facebook.
Andrea: 01:30:03 How did you get that job? That wasn't through **agency?

Michel: 01:30:06 No, that was on Facebook, believe it or not. I didn't think it
was possible. Some guy wrote on the foreigners’ page of Medellin, I think. And I was
like, "Yeah, okay. That’s super weird, but whatever, I'll write to him." And I wrote to him
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pretty fancy message, proper message, "Hi, my name is blah, blah, blah. And I've got
experience in [inaudible 01:30:31]." And the guy was like, "Yeah, dude, sure, let's have a
Skype next week." And I was like, "Yeah, okay. What the fuck is this?" It turned out to
be just the new generation of entrepreneurs who are in their early thirties and they're
super chill. One of them lived in Peru. The other guy lived in Spain. They were both
Germans and they've got a massive company. That company is huge. They make so much
money in Germany….And then I had a Skype interview or whatever, a video interview.
And that was it. I just start working (Interview with Michel, Zoom, 2020).
Meeting and collaborating with people online, although happened on occasion, was not the main
use for these channels. Online convening for offline events meant to facilitate meeting people.
The blurred lines of vacation, work events and whatever the activity (salsa dancing, language
exchanges, yoga retreats) show the potential benefits but also pitfalls of open events convened
via affinity. The first one is the implicit instability of the ties: the mobility and openness means a
mutual understanding of potentially weak ties. Networking as a type of socializing forms a big
part of the tech industry as explained by Gina Neff. However, an extra level of sociality and
traveling is added in these gatherings, which both broadens but also makes the purpose of
gatherings more ambiguous. Given the blur between personal, professional and leisure time,
Sophia, American, explains how meeting new people is always ambiguous as to what it may lead
to.

I don't say, okay, I'm going to go put on a nice, cute, happy hour outfit. This is the attire
and go, you know, hand out my business cards to people. That's not usually how I
network. Like I think that's probably when I think of networking, that's what I feel like I
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should do. But to me, what I actually do in real life is take my computer to a restaurant
where I think professionals will be at and kind of like, just get social. And eventually
we'll start talking about business. That's actually how I met my business partner in DC. I
just went to happy hour, and I heard people talking about something that I knew about,
and I chimed in and it just kind of went from there.

…. Because you don't want to force anything, you know, you want to cause when you
meet somebody, especially now, when you meet somebody, you don't know if they're
going to be a friend, a lover, a business partner, a mentor, anything you have to kind of
get to know them, or if they're going to be the worst person you've ever met before, you
have to just see what the possibilities are organically.
Sophia met her current collaborator, a Belgian woman who helps her with her work, at a co-
working space hosting an event. Woldoff & Litchfield (2021) claims it forms a ”working
community”: i.e., one of the reasons for paying for a co-working space instead of working for
free in coffee shops or from home, is this potential for meeting like-minded individuals. As
explained by Sophia, it is a mixed bag, as what brings them together is the ability to travel and
the choice of working remotely. The openness can lead to fruitful encounters, but it also often
does not lead to anything.

I met Camila at a Digital Nomads Meetup event in Medellin, and she and I were the only
two Colombians present. The event is in English, and the purpose is not fully defined. These
types of gatherings have changed, as she explained to me, they used to pull more "interesting
people" as in they geared toward the professional. She learned about drop shipping at one of
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these events, and with her working background in import/export she is one of the few who has
adopted this type of model in the country. The cross-pollination of business and finding out what
is the "latest" is also the reason Stephan hosted the meeting for a while, as a remote worker with
permanent residency.
At Selina hostel co-working this mixture became evident: travelers and location-
independent workers occupied the temporary "hot desks. Some of the space was occupied by
local Colombian businesses. Yet the networking, after hour events, hosted in the cool, large open
space that the chain is known for, was rarely attended by locals. The language spoken is a default
English, and by the default of alone, or independent travelers, it was this demographic that
attended.
Maintaining Home-Nation Networks
Freeman (1972) explains that in structurelessness other types of ties come into place that
allow for conversations and knowledge to be shared among them. Nationality, word of mouth
and trust of “one's own” comes into play when picking employees or contract workers
(McPherson et al., 2001). Network science has often reflected this, with online social networks
demonstrating the clustering of those we know through offline structures more than the creation
of relationships with strangers. When firms try to minimize bias when it comes to employment it
is this comfort which they wish to control for, given we are more likely to bond with someone
like us and therefore think they fit “company culture” better (Chang, 2019). In this section, I
show how national culture and language help in the procurement of work.
I met Stephan since he hosted the “Digital Nomads” Meetup at a cafe in the not-so filled-
with-tourists yet neighborhood Laureles. However, he had resided in Medellin for six years, after
falling in love and marrying a Paisa while traveling in the island of San Andres. He had been
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traveling through South America and had stumbled on to the lifestyle when he met a man already
working online who showed this as a possibility. Given his immobility he considered himself
location-independent yet enjoys hosting the Meetups to remain “in the know” of international
trends, and to meet other foreigners since most of he spent most of his time with his Colombian
family in law (Interview with Stephan, Medellin, 2018).
Stephan is a front-end web developer, and his clients are mostly Dutch law firms. He
finds new clients via word of mouth back home. The main advantage is, of course, earning in
Euros and at a much higher rate than what he could find in Colombia. He tried working for some
Colombian clients, but he said due to his rate, even if he had lowered it some to compete, local
clients expected some “extraordinary Dutch programming”. It was simply not worth his time.
His clients are sometimes weary of paying a remote contractor, but the mutual nationality helps
with building trust, as well as the word-of-mouth recommendation from other Dutch law firms.
Having found his niche, he does not have to spend a lot of time and effort procuring new clients.
The contrast appears clear between him and his Colombian wife, who tried convincing her
employer to let her work from home, but they would not allow it.
Procuring clients while still at home and then choosing to take off was the easiest and
safest way of traveling while working. While some of them let their clients know they worked
remotely, some of them did not. The issue became more salient during the pandemic, given that
employers can ask and tell their employees they need to remain locally, but there is little to no
way of monitoring workers whereabouts. When companies contract out work, they usually use
intermediary firms to deal with the logistical, legal, and rate-setting aspects. Large multinational
companies have cost-of-living-to-pay scales to determine salaries of their employees, even those
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within the same country. “Fairness” therefore is standardized via considerations of where
workers need to live to commute to their offices during weekdays.
Stephan found his first client via word of mouth when he was already in Colombia,
however he has been doing this for almost a decade and it seemed easier back then because his
situation was quite unique. Keeping their rate at a European level was not particularly hard when
the work was found this way: after all their state as, independent workers allow for exactly this.
Jeremy, this was $90.00 an hour, for Stephan, $44.00 for front-end web development. Stephan
learned, however, how to better price per project instead of per hours necessarily, which is one of
the struggles. Since I met him, he said he has become much stricter about what clients to take on,
and to charge more per project because it takes more hours, even if the rate per hour is not
higher. When I asked him if his clients knew where he was, he said they did. Others said their
regular clients knew as well, or at least that they were abroad and traveling as they worked.
When I spoke to a Paisa taxi driver about my project, he asked me “why can’t I do
that?” I wavered in my response because there is no clear-cut answer. Of course, technically they
can work online the way that so many from the country are already. But earning enough to live
was unlikely. Large American companies, for example, are looking for local programming talent
to work on their technology projects. An executive of Accenture explained to me how he knows
of Colombian programmers who earn en dolares in the freelance, informal way, and this is
always appealing, particularly given the sharp devaluation of the Colombian peso in the past 10
years. When I asked why a talented Paisa programmer would come work at Accenture at
Colombian rates instead of doing that, he laughed and said “we offer them a career. Those online
jobs are fickle and there is little space for growth.” (Accenture innovation lab executive, zoom
interview, 2020). The values and imaginary of wanting stable employment to remain common in
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developing nations, meaning the dream of the formality of stable employment is still there.
Choosing the more precarious of options because it is more “flexible” makes little sense to many
of the locals, given their always-already precarity is flexible. The norm established in
development discourse about what a “decent job” or “respectable employment” means has
always been scarce, and the dream of one day growing the economy for it to be the norm is
increasingly contested.
Not for everyone of course. Finding those in between served as an interesting bridge to
show how identity played a role. Alfredo, a local ambassador, and advocate for Fivver. Despite
his evident talent, one of the reasons he gets so much business are his low rates and his ability to
fulfill orders quickly. As a 23-year-old who lives at home, earning about $6.000 a month,
because “a lot of what I do is automated” (interview with Alfredo, Medellin, 2018). Like other
interviewees he has various sources of income. The automated part is the program he developed
for quickly making and re-making logos and websites, and therefore charging relatively little for
them.The trick is to have gotten into the platform early, he said. Studies of online platforms have
shown this advantage due to clients' reliance on existing reviews to pick workers (Gray and
Suri). He could have never earned this in Medellin as an employee. The Colombian
programmer, also started during his internship in Miami, speaks English. While his Fiverr profile
shows where he is and more importantly, his many good reviews, his independent web site,
written in English, gives no indication that he is Colombian nor living in Colombia, which takes
me to the next section.
Identity As Niche
Customers want workers who resemble them. An example of this linkage is proposed by
(Poster, 2007) “national identity management” as the way in which call centers based in India
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can manage the negative associations that customers have to being called or solicited from call
centers abroad. By utilizing “American accents,” American-sounding names and being broad or
elusive about where they are calling from, they can achieve the “trust” that comes attached to
shared nationality. She also found that managers ask their employees to continue using their
American “persona” at home, as well as during breaks, to fully be able to embody their phone
persona. Like Tsing, Poster argues against theories of homogenization in globalization studies by
arguing that ethnicity, nationality, and race play a significant role in the role of call center agents,
or transnational labor. The structure exemplifies what scholar Frantz Fanon referred to in his
book “Black Skin, White Masks,” meaning having to learn to put on a mask that accommodates
to hegemonic arrangements. His psychoanalytic writings focused on his experience as a doctor
from the Caribbean working in France. Putting on a “white mask” is the way to be able to be
acceptable professionally and to the world.
While Upwork found an infrastructural work-around to try to draw borders within their
search parameters, the openness of the rest of the web, workarounds, and inequalities that exist
offline find their way into the search for online labor. Different scholars have studied the
question of online discrimination. Given the infoglut so characteristic of the internet, those
looking to hire online can often rely on existing stereotypes as a way of filtering potential
workers. For example, (Galperin & Greppi, n.d.) found that in Nubelo, with everything else
being equal, workers from Spain get 42% more work/higher paid than their equivalents in Latin
America. They attributed the result to “the activation of stereotypes that orient employers’ hiring
decisions, in the absence of verifiable information about the quality of individual workers.”
(p.32) They conclude on the finding of the pervasiveness (and possible exacerbation) of
longstanding frictions in traditional labor markets, which resulted in a significant penalty for job
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seekers from developing countries. Their experiment showed that after “controlling for
observable individual characteristics and job bids, foreign workers are 42 percent less likely to
win contracts from employers in Spain.” Additionally Spanish workers can ask for a 16% higher
rate over similarly qualified foreign workers.
While many are not using the larger platforms, they do use other platforms to validate
their identity, credentials, or as a content management system to communicate with potential
employers. Facebook notoriously started the “real name” policy, and simultaneously is one of the
two main “passports” online, being the way in which apps allow their use, or how people verify
identity. Some attribute the rise of dating apps with this link, given it is harder to fake
information if, say, a Tinder profile is linked to a Facebook account (Duguay, 2017). Due to the
offline aspects including the tendency to add as “friends” those one knows offline creates an
identity verification system. The same platform design logic applies to LinkedIn, where
professional experience can be “crowd-verified” with the public link to co-workers and other
professional connections. Digital Nomad groups are common on Facebook, where again, as a
meta tactic, they not only allow for social connections and recommendations of destinations, but
work opportunities. For example, clients and agencies used LinkedIn to contact them directly.
Workers also use it as a professional, online passport, that is, identity verification distributed via
network assurances .
An example was in a Facebook group, where an Indian woman working from Bali asked
the question of why she could not get clients to offer her the payment offered to the Europeans
sitting next to her in her coworking space. While the justification for lower payment utilized by
companies who engage in location arbitrage is the lower cost of living where workers are, the
cost of living for both her and the European coworkers in Bali was the same. In the comments,
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however, many people write “cultural fit” as a reason, meaning the assumption that the
Europeans would be able to fit in better with whatever client had hired them. The quick
assumptions on both ends are tied to their identities: Europeans get to keep their “culture” no
matter where they are, while the Indian worker is also ranked lower in this global hierarchy.
To push back against this, I interviewed some location-independent workers who were of
color. What they had in common was a stint in the US, Canada, or Europe where they made
connections and could start from there. I did not meet any who had started their work on one of
the online sites, or only online. I indeed found some exceptions to this, but they usually required
a foot in the door in the offline “Global North” such as an Indian artist from Mumbai who met
many of her clients during a stint in New York, and an Indian programmer who had worked in
Canada before the decision to work remotely. They also depended on word-of-mouth for work
and did not have to start from zero with their online names/identities.
So far, we have seen how by avoiding the fully open marketplaces, these location-
independent workers are able to maintain the rates from their native countries. However, the
younger, less established remote workers I met, often relied on their cultural capital to get work,
given they entered this “lifestyle” without the connections that the older ones had. Before Jeremy
went full time into online marketing, he worked as an English teacher online. Francois, for
example, arrived in Colombia with a cultural exchange visa, and he taught rugby to young kids.
He fell in love with a Colombian. As a professional translator, Michel speaks three languages,
and found his work via a Japanese translation company. He earns about 3,000 Euro a month,
which would be average in France, but allows for a much more comfortable living in Medellin.
A 25-year-old German man came to Colombia to travel and decided to stay to start his
own business. He found a gap in the market for non-alcoholic beverages at night clubs. However,
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due to COVID, he had to stop his work. He did not want to leave, so an Australian man he knew
via the “expat community” offered him work online. He only earned $15.00 an hour, but, he
said, given his lack of experience and living in Medellin he still lived very comfortably. He was
managing Indian programmers since he had the “social and cultural skills.” The terms ``social
skills” and “cultural skills “were often evoked to justify why they could or would earn more than
someone who is working next to them, at the same cost of living. The differentiation has been
noted by scholars such as Saurte and Lilly Irani (2015) to see what part of programming or labor
is deemed to be lower-end in terms of what can soon be automated, is repetitive and non-
creative.
Ethnic Intermediators
The performances of identity are often tied to cultural assumptions and preferences. As
Tsing states, such performances, in turn, are encouraged by “new figures of labor and labor
power” in which making a living appears as management, consumption, or entrepreneurship
(Tsing, p.171). Where is the line between being a freelancer, an independent contractor, and an
entrepreneur? The following example shows another way in which the location-independent
workers use the lemons of precarity to make the lemonade of entrepreneurship:

One striking place to examine this process is in the making of white male ‘‘independent
contractors’’ in the United States. U.S. white men grow up dreaming of starting their own
businesses as a key to the autonomy at the heart of their sense of race, gender, and
national status. Supply chain capitalism has made use of this dream to tap the
extraordinary efforts these men are willing to use to hold on to ‘‘independence.’’ (Tsing,
p.167)
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In this sense, this “independence” correlates to the “freedom” so searched for by my
interlocutors. Moving from freelancing to owning their own business is the entrepreneurial
dream. Outsourcing not only reproductive labor, but their value producing labor, allows for their
placement atop the global supply chain hierarchy. As Mezzadra and Neilson explain, global
supply chains as well as outsourcing assume some hierarchical and border divisions that rarely
exist, given inequalities within borders. However, online work is often demarcated by
nationality, and lacking that, assumptions of nationality based on cultural and racial indicators.
The differentiation and classification of “freelance” work from “on -demand” or even
click-work gives the former a hierarchical status of independence, cultural capital, and
flexibility. It may also reify assumptions as to who is qualified to do which type of work. Like
traditional outsourcing, most requesters for cheap online labor come from the “Global North”,
while workers come from the “Global South” (Graham et al., 2017). According to Tsing, there
are the intermediaries in the supply chain who may offer their own services as “contractors” to
use their own network of people or community, even though they are not at fault, given their
own limited options in work. “The conditions of contracting through supply chains stimulate
performances of niche differences that affirm supplier qualifications for the necessary supe-
exploitation of the niche” (p. 180). Many of these small entrepreneurs are immigrants with not
much in the way of capital. They may recruit other immigrants/often, but not always, from their
own immigrant network. The social process occurs on online labor platforms as well.
Given that it is so hard for new-commers to establish reputations in spaces such as
Mechanical Turk, Upwork and Freelancer.com, those who have managed to do so can bid for the
work, and then pay less to another worker (Graham et al., 2017, p. 150). The lower-rated workers
could simply be newer users and therefore not have as many reviews or be less aware of how the
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system works. For example, Graham et al. (2017) interviewed a woman who noticed that she
once applied for a SEO writing task, suggesting a price of $15 rather than the listed suggestion of
$50 (underbidding is common in this open market). She later discovered that the job went to
another digital freelancer who had requested a price of $23. The contractor subsequently offered
the job to her for just $3.50 (p. 150).
As previously explained, super-exploitation comes when workers lean into their
perceived identity role in the supply chain. “The conditions of contracting through supply chains
stimulate performances of niche differences that affirm supplier qualifications for the necessary
super-exploitation of the niche” (Tsing p. 180). At the online-work level, a good example of this
is the Philippine government's pride in having a nation of “good workers” that others may want.
Soriano & Panaligan (2019) et al. found campaigns, training, and “skill-makers” for online
workers in the Philippines trying to break into the on-demand economy, particularly the online-
to-online which requires a much more “entrepreneurial” mindset. Sara Roberts (2016) studied
the content moderators in the Philippines, who are sitting behind desks managing the massive
amount of content that gets flagged as inappropriate in American tech companies such as
Facebook (Roberts, 2016). There are contracting companies to mediate intermediators for
foreign firms, and has therefore “super exploited” (in Tsing’s terms) as a space for cheap, global,
hard-working people, (Roberts, 2016) and where there are established outsourcing middle-men
who will manage the local regulations and bureaucracies.
I observed a gradual switch from a freelancer to a small business owner. With the wage
differential, workers could focus on the side of finding and relating to clients, while delegating
the day-to-day work to others. The delegated work, while sometimes could go to peers from back
home, often happened with other remote workers from “Global South “countries. Three years
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past before our first encounter in Medellin and our second interview via Zoom. In this second
one, Stephan told me how after a few years of collaborating with a Dutch partner, he went off on
his own. He however found a Nigerian worker on Fiverr, to do what he used to do in the day-to-
day. They had never met and had no formal contract. When I asked if his clients knew that he
collaborated with an employee he said no. While his Nigerian “virtual assistant” (not employee)
benefited from Stephan’s contacts and regular work, he did not have direct contact with clients,
and his work remained invisibilized.
I interviewed a pair of friends who both were their own “brand” and met in an
immersive course in California on self-branding practices. While one of them told me that this
took up most of her time, her friend interrupted, saying that it is because she has not fully
organized herself yet. He was a former cruise entertainment worker, who had set up systems in
which his how-to videos online would continue to generate a small, yet relatively steady income.
His organization, however, had to do with parts of his work that he would outsource, and parts
that he had automated (Interviews: friend traveler 1, friend traveler 2, 2018, Medellin) He did
not want to delve into the details, but it is at this intersection that I found the visible part of the
online economy meeting some of the more hidden aspects of it.
Conversations of this type were rarer, but I did gather about half of my interviewees had
a similar “system.” In one of the groups, when someone asked if anyone knew of a marketing
intern another where one of the other members recommended a web site to find them. Then
someone recommended using Upwork to find workers from Eastern Europe, where the cultural
barrier was less than that of workers from the Philippines. They also recommended Africa as a
search parameter. The conversation equated interns from North America to full time workers in
parts of the world where labor is cheaper, and where online labor has popularized.
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Another case is younger, less-established Global-North workers turning to the niche
known as “drop-shipping”: an order fulfillment system that does not require a business to keep
products in stock. Instead, the store (often on Shopify) sells the product, and passes on the sales
order to a third-party supplier, who then ships the order to the customer. The drop shipping case
shows a combination of the invisible (the Chinese supplier) with the hyper visible, the Western,
online shop. Each step of this supply chain relies on cultural assumptions and adaptations: stems
from the assumption that shoppers are more likely to trust an online shop that appears to look
local. What makes drop shipping appealing is its ambiguity: the work of marketing and branding
requires a “native eye,” what Bourdieu called “habitus”: a niche tied to identity that cannot be
learned.
Lastly, I found two cases of foreigners who went from location-independent workers to
expats when they saw how they could leverage their network back home to procure clients yet
hire local Colombians to do the work. One of them, a branding and marketing business, only has
the founder’s photos on their website which is in English. I spoke to a formal employee, a
Venezuelan immigrant working at an ad agency, where she earns one million five hundred
thousand pesos a month, in US currency conversion is 377.00 dollars (2021) a month. While this
is an average income for a professional at her level in the city, it is nowhere near what other
remote workers earn. She had immigrated to Medellin to stay, like the vast number of
Venezuelan immigrants coming in now. She said she always wanted to travel, so even if the
economic situation in her country had remained ok, she still would have left.
When I spoke to Alfredo in 2020, his business was doing well on Fiverr. He now,
however, is also trying to gain more of it via word-of-mouth, outside of the platform. As
mentioned, one of his ways is via his web site, which, written in English, gives no indication of
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who he is or where he is. One of his clients is an American web developer based in the U.S who
outsources her work to him. Additionally, he is officially transitioning to a business owner, as he
is in the process of registering his business and hiring a friend of his to help with the work. The
labor supply chain here continues, much in informality.
Lastly, Josh, the Singaporean on his way to Silicon Valley, was on a quite different track
when I spoke to him two years later. I found he had gone from a company to try to help women
report sexual harassment, to a digital (or virtual) assistant company. “Everyone in the U.S. could
have their own human assistant to deal with the smaller tasks that take up valuable time”
(Interview with Josh, Medellin 2018, Zoom 2020). He pitched his idea to an initiative for the
Singaporean government, and found a business partner, an Australian he knew from university,
who already had workers in the Philippines and the logistical apparatus to start this business. It
mimics Facebook and other tech outsourcing practices that have picked the Philippines for their
service work.
Conclusion: Identity as Safety Net
Taking on risks is easier for those who have a safety net, whether financial, the state, or
familial. In this sense, what these location-independent workers have is their nationalities,
networks, ethnicity, and the cultural capital that comes from the intersection of these as a safety
net that can come with them: as I stated in the introduction, it is what they carry with them.
Additionally, they have the safety net of being able to return “home” whenever they want. As I
spoke to an Accenture executive, he told me that many Colombian programmers are also earning
dollars by working online. When I asked why they would then accept the Colombian modulated
salary that this traditional multinational arrangement would give them, he said “a career path.”
There are no guarantees with that online work. The re-intermediation of work, or the need for the
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cultural capital to successfully work in import/export to profit from foreign labor is indeed not
new. However, as Josh’s new enterprise shows, what it is allowing for is to be done at the
individual level. What it also shows though, is a new negotiation for their work. It also shows the
temporality of it: if their clients know or figure out where they are located, will their rates have
to come down to meet standard of living? Jeremy also told me he could no longer access UK
jobs on Upwork from Colombia. Even if he had not depended on them, the safety net of going
there in case of desperate times was gone.

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Chapter 5: Informal Relationships

While the remote workers I met wanted purposefully to not act or relate to this “ugly
tourist,” the grouping or default assumptions and separations between “guests” and “hosts” tends
to place them there in the eyes of many locals. The harder part of this dissertation has been to try
not to generalize, given how these simplifications can aid in perpetuating the same stereotypes
that my subjects dealt with. The process becomes increasingly harder with the “blurred lines”
discussed in the dissertation so far, which mean foreigners are not limited to a specific part of
the city, nor to interaction solely with locals in the tourism or service sector.
Traditional anthropology of tourism studies focused on the dichotomy of “guests” vs
“hosts,” starting in 1977’s Valene Smith edited book Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of
Tourism. (V. L. Smith, 1989)The general agreement was of instrumental relationships, social
distance, and stereotyping as the norm; Theron Nuñez (1963) states that relationships between
the two camps is “almost always marked by degrees of social distance and stereotyping” (p.212)
Other descriptors include relationships between them as transient, manipulative and exploitative
dehumanized (Crick, 1992), (van den Berghe, 1980) or as Cohen states, “staged as personalized”
leading to “the commoditization of hospitality” (Cohen, 2013).
In contrast, more empirical research shows the nuance of relationships through tourism,
which “cannot be reduced to a necessarily transient, impersonal, and commoditized affair.”
(Simoni p. 9) We often make the generalizations of a relationship between ‘real’ (i.e.,
residential) hosts and visitors, which “has become problematic in several respects” (p.6). In his
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study of tourism in Cuba, Simoni (2016) cites scholar Callon (1998) to suggest that the
“centrality and contentious character”…of relationships in tourism can be considered a ‘hot’
situation” (Callon, 1998) in which everything…is susceptible to controversy. These controversial
situations ‘“indicate the absence of a stabilized knowledge base’” Callon (1998a: 260), which,
Simoni argues, is highly likely in encounters of people from across the world. Therefore, this
situation is rife for controversy, not only because of the current iteration of what it is, but
because of the pre-existing, flattening knowledge that people have of each other. Callon explains
that in hot situations, actors find it awfully hard to arrive at a consensus on how the situation
should be described (Callon, 1998, p. 263).
Furthermore, the usual remedy for ‘cooling down’ these controversial conditions –
namely, to make ‘more and more elements of the situation explicit’ (Strathern 2002: 254)
– risks increasing the array of potentially contentious issues and can make it even harder
to close the debate.
In his study, Simoni found that “the protagonists of touristic encounters in Cuba struggled with
the potential overdetermination of their identifications as (gullible) tourists on the one hand, and
as (deceitful) hustlers on the other” (p.3). However, in the current case the separation between
“guests” and “hosts” are easily muddled by the same in-betweenness specified in other chapters.
For example, are they tourists or expats? Is an Airbnb a hotel or a short-term rental? Are all
Paisas enrolled in being good hosts and representatives of Medellin? Should they be charged like
a local or like a gringo? For example, is a Medellin-born Colombian/American citizen who
moved to Medellin from the U.S to be with family during COVID, but still provides therapeutic
services back in the U.S a guest or a host?
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The hospitality industry has formalized a lot of this intermediation. Simoni’s work is
relevant because, due to hugely different social circumstances, also does not have a robust tourist
industry developed and much of the “homestays” happened in informality. The commoditization
of hospitality may create more social distance, but at least it aids to “cools down” tensions by
making each participant’s role explicit. If a concierge is polite and good, it is established to be
part of the job for which he is paid. Stereotyping may take place but is likely less visible due to
social distancing.
Explicitness is a social norm. In fact, even in informal economies, the explicitness of
money for a service or product remains the bottom line. It is the implicit that often creates
suspicion or misunderstandings. For example, the legalization of prostitution in Colombia means
that foreigners do not consider what they are doing to be morally reprehensible, yet this ignores
the larger problems with child prostitution in the country and the debates about whether to
delegalize it. Talking about it with Colombians not in the trade is a breaking of a social norm of a
very Catholic country, and one that has a bad international reputation to beat, and one that angers
at the white foreigner who feels entitled to local women. What breaks the norm is not so much
the engaging in sex work, but rather the reduction of the promotion of Colombia as a destination
for it which angers locals. It detracts from the biodiversity, beauty, and rich culture. It is a way of
devaluating the country.
While those who stayed longer developed some deeper relationships with locals and
better understanding of the culture, they still had to, as Simoni noted, “struggle with the potential
overdetermination of their identifications” as hypersexualized, or scamming locals, to
exploitative, drug-seeking foreigners. The blurred lines create more opportunities for genuine
connections. However, given the de facto separation between foreigners and locals, the
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subgroups of tourists, expats, remote-workers, and retirees are often conflated. I found that most
of my remote-worker interviewees often wanted nothing to do with the “bad” tourists they saw
and knew about, who more closely resembled Nuñez’s description of the consumption of locals
as instrumental. I did, however, encounter and interview some. I also saw it vice versa, with
locals who did not relate to the “type” of Colombian that sells drugs or hunts the bars in Poblado
for foreign men. I did, however, meet some, who became more visible to me once I was in public
spaces with foreigners. Not only this: when I met a male to interview at a hotel cafe or bar, I
would get disapproving looks from the staff, and many questions about where I was from, why I
spoke English, and other which would, under any circumstances, be considered probing, even if
not asking anything directly. I quickly realized their assumption that I was a sex worker and that
they did not want their establishment to attract this type of business.
In this chapter I wish to give more nuance to the situation of overdetermination, but also
how they are mediated. I chose interviews with people I found to be in the middle, either
negotiating the issue or pushing back against it. While not focused on romantic relationships, this
chapter depicts different examples of the personal as it mixes with the economic. I do this to
bring nuance to the discussion instead of continuing the simplification and bifurcation between
“guests” and “hosts”, particularly in the example of Medellin, where locals are not so easily
differentiated from foreigners, there are only recently arising “touristy” spots, and many service
transactions and contacts are made via word of mouth. Part of dealing with the
“overdetermination” means the already-made assumption of who is viable for which role. While
in explicit economic encounters, the roles are defined, such as a hotel in provision of services, or
a sex worker, in many other types of relationships the exchange is blurrier.
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In economic sociology, Zelizer (2000) insists that there has never been a real separation
between the economy and intimacy, since people in families and other intimate relations
exchange both money and goods, individuals in such relations actively define their interactions
in terms that clearly differentiate them from commercial transactions. To remove the economic
aspect between romantic relationships because they are “too sacred” leads to default hierarchies
of power, which places the wage earner at the top of decision making.
In her discussion of identity for global supply chains, Tsing demonstrates how people use
their identity-related traits to find a niche within the chain. While “global flows” appear
economistic and unrelated to culture, they are indeed part of it. Individual workers will take on
the “role” in intercultural or interpersonal economic encounters which is likely to help in the
exchange. For example, with his concept of “relational work in market economies” (Block,
2012) argues that in relational work, even if not intentionally, “individuals routinely take
advantage of existing social hierarchies of race, ethnicity, gender, level of education, and
citizenship status” to organize and maintain working relationships and order. He emphasizes how
men have historically used gender roles “to get their wives to provide various forms of care
without adequate compensation.” In Performance Circuits in the Marketplace (Wherry, 2012)
gives the example of a “usually quite sensitive Chinese shopkeeper” who deliberately enacts his
more intimidating Chinese ethnic identity at the time of collecting crops from Malay farmers.
Based on this, I argue that locals who see the money willing to be spent by “guests” will often
adapt to “what they came here for.” In this sense, if location-independent workers can choose
where it is best to work from, the relative welcome and privilege they receive is bound to
ingratiate them toward the city. As previously explained, the Paisa pride extends to its citizens.
What that pride means can manifest in diverse ways, however, whether wanting to push back
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against the representation of Colombia as a destination for drugs and women, or if you accept
fate and cash in on it.
While within the encounter of location-independent workers with locals I saw a focus on
work and cultural interaction, a glimpse into this “other world” was often lingering. For example,
the official tour guide Laura said she had befriended many of the remote-working foreigners,
mostly because she traveled a lot and even her business partner is Australian. However, at many
of these promoted events around the “digital nomad” tag, the men showed up with dates. “They
are never alone,” she said. (Interview with Laura, Zoom, 2020). She could not tell if the girls
were sex workers or women they had met at bars or on Tinder. Lina, who met her partner on
Tinder, is a successful businessperson, and he moved from the U.S. to live in Medellin
permanently with her while working remotely. She herself often attends these Meetups, but she
sees how locals rarely speak to each other. The idea of meeting “strangers” in Medellin without
formal introductions, commonality or networks is too alien. However, they all jump to welcome
the foreigners, “make them feel welcome” , she said. The patterns of locals not buying into the
open events to meet “anyone” I saw repeated in the co-working space, as the locals who had their
offices there never attended the after-work hour events created to mingle. The juxtaposition is a
common one in the country: that is the general welcomeness and kindness of strangers as well as
the focus on family and friends, but rarely the meeting that comes from “affinity spaces.” While
not my focus, my experience has been it is due both to classicism but also general fear of
insecurity. The cultural context partly explains the prevalence of hiring via personal
recommendations: an open event cannot, by design, be de confianza (trustworthy).
This chapter takes a larger umbrella to this dichotomy, meaning the “tourist gaze” which
is both broader and not-applying to all remote workers. I particularly interviewed many female
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location-independent workers who loved Medellin because of its fun, beauty , culture, and
nature, meaning unrelated to this issue. What I did meet were single women taking on this
lifestyle, and who complained that the men only wanted to date Colombian women, while it was
not too often the opposite. While the internet may be facilitating this type of interaction, it is also
allowing spaces for locals to push back on flattening assumptions. The individuals in this chapter
I did not find as service providers for remote workers, but rather snowball sampling from other
tourism providers, since their services occasionally intersect.
Simoni introduces the term “informal encounters” to “shift the focus from
entrepreneurship and economic occupation to the qualities of encounters and relationships”
(p.10). As explained in chapter 1, this modality of work blurs the lines of work/home for
individual workers. In the context of “hosts,” it can shift it also from work/leisure. Simoni’s
concept of “informal encounter” highlights how these boundaries are contextual, while also
questioning what can be categorized as “social” vs “economic.” With it he hopes to be able to
“ensure that people’s own understandings and definitions of encounters and relationships,
including those interpretations which explicitly refute economic considerations, take precedence
over the researcher’s assumptions” (p.10).
My research observes the use of different social media in mediating these
oversimplifications, or in trying to make the aspect of it “more and more explicit.” While Simoni
focuses more on the role that these play in the interpersonal, I focus on how these “hot”
situations play out once they scale up. For example, Erve Chambers (1997 p. 6) focuses on the
“mediated” character of tourism, since it is often “dependent on the intervention of others who
serve as neither hosts nor guests in any conventional manner”. Identifications of “tourist” and
“local,” of “host” and “guest,” are themselves the result of processes in which a range of actors
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intervene. While traditionally these were service providers, agencies, travel writers, concierges,
and other professionals within the hospitality industry, with social media they get more dissolved
and informalized, while also allowing for pushback on representations.
In his book The Tourist Gaze John Urry examined how the tourism industry and the
tourist co-construct the parts of the world deemed worthy of seeing, while curating and
managing the rest to create authentic-enough experiences. He uses Foucault, to explain the
power dynamics engaged in “gazing”: ‘the “discursive determinations,” of socially constructed
seeing or “scopic regimes’’. Ways of seeing are culturally constructed, and individualizing it
means we naturalize how our views and determinations are embedded with power dynamics.
As explained by Burawoy in the extended case method
7
I searched not to find data to
support my field hypothesis, but instead instances that refute it or push back. My specific
position as a Colombian immigrant to the United States means that I had the benefit of standing
in an in-between space, where locals assumed I understood their circumstances, but also did not
feel obligated to present the version of the truth they may present to a foreigner. Anthropology of
tourism does not fully apply to these location-independent workers, but I chose it because this is
how local authorities see them, and it is the usual visa they use for coming in. In practice, the
lack of dependence on local structures means they enter the city independently, without formal
intermediation by industry as an “expat” may if working with government, diplomacy, or a large
corporation. Additionally, because to locals, the oversimplification of their identity to tourists
puts them there, and that takes precedence over my own understanding of their differences.
In this chapter I argue that the increased informality between foreigners and locals allows
for the “hot” situations to occur. While the transactional aspect of tourism used to be limited to

7
See Appendix A for methods
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the enclaves where it takes place, the representations of what a place “is like” or the “reality of a
place” based on the limited, one-sided experience of some visitors takes a larger form online,
particularly in a country just opening to tourism and tired of misrepresentations from foreigners.
In these cases, oversimplifications draw in these tensions. I focus on these cases because they
complicate the host/guest binary, since my subjects cannot be so easily classified.
Mediating Tourism
The way he deconstructs the gaze goes in line with how Stuart Hall (2001) posited in his
Encoding/Decoding book. That is, what is on screen or written is done so by an author with
particular positionality in the world, and those who see it will interpret it from the knowledge,
experiences and understanding stemming from their own provenance. Power dynamics are
evident in the assumption that there is one way of viewing, and that is the hegemonic assumed
neutrality embedded in knowledge production. The “tourist gaze” is not a matter of individual
psychology but of socially patterned and learnt “ways of seeing” (Berger & Calabrese, 1975),
1972). It is a vision constructed through mobile images and representational technologies. Urry
highlights a “systemic and regularized” tourist gaze “which depends upon social discourses and
practices, as well as aspects of building, design and restoration that foster the necessary ‘look’ of
a place or an environment.”
The intermediators had until now mostly occurred via official tour guides, such as Lonely
Planet. The internet has allowed foreigners to gather information from each other, which adapts
to changing circumstances or includes cumulative reviews such as those on the popular
TripAdvisor. While Medellin tourism officials think and manage the image of the city at a more
institutional level, individual’s representation of a place via blogs, social media or other personal
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representations helps in the construction of the “tourist gaze” from a bottom-up perspective that
gives it a sense of authenticity (Banet-Weiser, 2012)).
Feminist scholars have made the critique of the male academic conceptualization Urry’s
“tourist gaze,” as well as Bauman’s “vagabond” (Veijola & Jokinen, 2008) that these metaphors
have a masculinist implication there is such a thing as ungrounded movement.
If these metaphors are re-coded as paparazzi, homeless drunk, sex-tourist and womanizer,
then they lose the positive valuation that they enjoyed within masculinist nomadic theory.
Indeed, the mobilities of some always presuppose the immobilities of others. The mobile
tourist gaze presupposes immobile bodies (normally female) servicing and displaying
their bodies for those who are mobile and passing by. (Urry p.39).
The traditional adventurer and explorer was male, and much of the narratives surrounding tales
of colonial times and navigation include the freedom from norms or from the rejection of one’s
native country to tame the unknown. The masculinist narratives have been explored by scholars
such as (McClintock, 2013) in imperial leather, who analyzed the various intersectional
entanglements associated with colonialism, race, and gender. Contemporary imagery attached to
postcolonial destinations such as the Caribbean or the Pacific (Opperman and McKinley, 1997)
is often a continuation of the “Other” representation of the exotic, sensual, sexually available,
and subservient female beginning in the 17th century (Hall, 1998). Jamal and Robinson say that
“a poignant intersection between these issues and tourism lies thus in the colonial and
neocolonial dimensions of sex tourism” (Jamal & Robinson, 2009). Ong explains it as the
institutionalized exploitation of women within patriarchal societies, extended by the unequal
power relationships not only between genders and members of ethnic groups, but also between
“host” and advanced capitalist societies (Ong, 1999).
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The literature leads me to the overlap of mediation –when it comes to independent travel–
and an intersectional feminist approach. Scholar Safiya Noble (2012) studied the power of search
engines in the creation and representation of identities online. After googling “black girls” Noble
interrogates the social norms that underlie the making of Google search, and how machine
learning learns and then reproduces existing inequalities. She states that this applies to all
“racialized” women in a white, American assumed default. I reluctantly searched for “Colombian
girls,” and then “Medellin girls.” I picked this over “Latinas” because that is a categorization of
women of Latin American background created in the United States as an ethnic category, but
rarely used in the continent itself. Additionally, as explained in the introduction, race is
constructed and understood differently in different contexts: Colombian women tend to
categorize themselves as such, even if within that umbrella are many shades, ancestries and races
stemming from the history of Spanish colonialism, indigenous tribes, African slavery, and
immigration.
The results were more in relationship to travel, where to “meet” them, and searches for
prostitution. In this sense, the “tourist gaze” is guiding the search engine, at least when making a
search from a Los Angeles, California, IP address. The images are mostly from bars and cam
girls.
A search for Colombian women shows more neutral images, including those from news
channels and government agencies or NGOs. The associated searches continue with this issue.
While now the search for “black girls” on Google yields resources for black girls and initiatives,
the prevalence of this issue across other women of color continues in a type of whack-a-mole
approach, or “cycles of shocks and exceptions” to ethics in platform governance (Ananny &
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Gillespie, n.d.). The web site “world dating guide” is often at the top of results for this search in
relation to cities and countries.
Figure 1.6
Google search results for Colombian women

Note. Google Search, 2022, [Screenshot].
The third search result down for the query “visit Medellin” the third result down is Nomadic
Matt, one of the first “Digital Nomads” to make a business out of this lifestyle. In this sense, the
city is on the map for tourists tangentially to remote workers.
While I push back against generalizations of “hosts” vs “tourists”
8
It is indeed this
classificatory struggle that needs to be revisited: the search engines are reproducing their own
type of gaze, inseparable from tourism nor the power dynamics embedded in the representation

8
Will be better explained in chapter 5
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of the country to outsiders. My interviewees often, although hesitantly, admitted to having heard
about the beautiful women of Medellin and that being a reason for wanting to be there. The
“word-of-mouth” type of content is reified and re-coded into YouTube tutorials on how to hit on
Colombian women or the best places to find them. Effectively, the remnants of the “Narco
culture” are part of this phenomenon, as its influence is also evident on the ground, often
associated with ostentatiousness. A slang way of describing something ostentatious and trashy by
making guns with their fingers and shooting into the air. The other was the impact of this on the
normalization of plastic surgery on young women (Mata-Navarro, 2013). What are known as
“narco-aesthetics” include breast and buttocks silicone prosthesis. The telenovela Sin Tetas no
hay Paraiso (without tits there is no paradise) is about a young girl who decides to get breast
surgery and become what is known as a prepago (pre-paid), a type of narco girlfriend who has
sex for money, gifts, and a way out of poverty. The term prepago is often used in relation to
prepaid cellphones, meaning those that use “minutes.” The effect of narco culture on women has
often been one of violence, whether victims of it, or their bodies as ways of attaining a piece of
the money procured from it. A running joke is that Medellin is Silicon Valley: playing on its
desire to be innovative while winking at the amount of plastic surgery present. While drugs may
be one of the stereotypical reasons for independent tourists to visit, “looking for girls” is the
other.
The stereotype of the “Global Latina” as an oversexualized, strong tempered, yet very
feminine woman embeds the narratives of Hollywood media, starting from casting calls of what
a “Latina” should look, sound and act like (Sowa, 2021). It is so known across the globe, that the
owners of Selina, the “digital nomad hotel of the future” described the character of Selina to the
Forbes reporter as a 29-year-old Latin American girlfriend who is a world traveler, “honest,
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humble, beautiful. She hosts you; she hugs you. You want to be with her” (Friedman, n.d.). Most
of the men I interviewed said that they had heard about “Colombian women” as both the ideal
wife, the exotic fling, or legal prostitution. That prostitution is legal in the country caught me by
surprise, and my Colombian lawyers friends explained that “legal prostitution” in Colombia is
not what it is in the Netherlands or Germany, meaning it was rather the state’s acceptance of an
inability to control it, but they are not organized, nor do they have much protection nor leverage.
Additionally, given the strong Catholicism of the country, they are socially marginalized. While
foreign men were told by local men who wished to provide girls for them that prostitution is
“part of Colombian culture,” many Colombians would strictly deny this, rather see it as part of
American culture and poor women who end up supplying it. The narrative, like profiting from
narcotourism, induces strong reactions from locals who know that child prostitution and sexual
tourism to be a genuine problem in the country.

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Figure 1.7
Major Colombian newspaper website coverage of the “polemic” surrounding the illustration of
“girls from Medellin” illustration

Note. Polémica por ilustración que estereotipa a las mujeres de Medellín (Translates to:
Controversy for the stereotypical illustration of women from Medellin) 2020, December 10th, El
Tiempo
Two marketing specialists I met at the co-working space told me they were working on
an “events app” for foreign men and local women (Informal interview, marketing specialists,
Medellin, 2018). They said that their Americanness and foreignness means that they are much
more attractive to women that they were back home. The issue was well exemplified by the
controversy surrounding artist Eddie White Jr, an Australian illustrator who started posting
illustrations of his travels around the country on social media. His account touches on the tension
specifically: his visual representations of what makes Colombia great, including images of the
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extensive amounts of fruits, sayings, and diversity. Colombian users share them since the art
taps into the pride of their nation depicted through a foreigner's eyes. However, in his same
account he has drawn pornographic images of women, often making the linkages between the
consumption of the fruits to that of Colombian women’s bodies. His account garnered local
media attention when controversy erupted around his image of “girls from Medellin.” While this
image was not sexually explicit, one clicks into his account could take users to his previous
work. He said to me that this experience of becoming viral and his work debated by the main
newspapers in Colombia showed him that he had inadvertently “touched a nerve.” Many local
women appreciated his account, he said, and wrote to him to say so: The country’s contradictive
norms of overt sexuality with repressive Catholicism made him a type of escape for the young
women who wrote to him on Instagram.
By the time I talked to him he had removed more of the sexually explicit images. from
his account. However, the series of “girls from…” in various parts of the country are some of his
followers’ favorites. To him, he was documenting his own travels, experiences, and appreciation
for the beautiful nation. When I asked if he had done this in Australia he said that no, political
correctness was too stifling there as opposed to Colombia, and while he had been accused of
publishing the “white male gaze” version of the country, he responded “well I am a white male
documenting his experiences… there is no way around that”.

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Figure 1.8
Illustration titled “Sabores de la Latina,” translates to “flavors of the Latina”

White, Eddie [@EddieWhitejr]. (2019, October 15th). Sabores de la Latina, [Tweet]. Twitter.
The account oscillated between representations of the women, to colloquialisms and
depictions of typical food and quirks. The re-telling of a country or land to be “discovered” is
reminiscent of tales of the colonial narratives prominent in travel writing (Fletcher, 2014; Mar 12
et al., 2020). The difference being while more established, formal guides such as Lonely Planet
had dominated the representation and mediation for independent travelers, now blogs, search
engines, TripAdvisor and social media have the potential for increased reach.
His image of “girls from Medellin” garnered backlash from on Twitter mostly, he said,
“from feminists” as they decried him for promoting sexual tourism to the country. Mainstream
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media picked up and reported the controversy. He said that is not what he is doing, it was not his
intention, but when I asked him what he thought sexual tourism was he thought of prostitution.
He obtained most of his current followers after that incident, he said, so the controversy had the
effect of making him better known. In Australia he was an average illustrator. The elevated voice
allotted to him due to his relative identity-based power served as a specific voice for this one
tension. When he said that he had “hit a nerve” and did not see how his individual post had
anything to do with systemic sexual tourism, it revealed the purposeful ignorance of his relative
positioning.
Beautiful women, as opposed to the reputation of narcotics, are part of local pride.
Tourists discussed in Facebook groups how taxi drivers had “offered them girls” during the long
ride from the airport into the city, explaining and boasting of the beauty of Colombian women.
At a national level, winning the Miss Universe pageant is a source of pride, and Ms. Colombia
for the year is usually a “household name.” The appreciation for the renowned beauty of women
surfaces in many cultural artifacts, including song lyrics and other representations. Paisa women
embody the type of miscegenation that the nation considers the ideal beauty: white or paler skin,
straightened and light-colored hair, yet maintaining the curves of a black woman. One of the
most famous Instagram accounts from Paisas is Las Cardachans, where two queer men engage
in “remix” by doing voice overs of Kardashian videos with accent, slang, and funny interactions
to be expected of the equivalent of a “basic” woman from Medellin.
A Guide or a Friend?
The on-the ground narratives display the tension occurring at the ground level with the
bigger narratives about the country and Medellin in particular, as explained in chapter 2. While
the government and tourism officials are pushing back against the image, Colombia is still one of
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the world's top cocaine providers. Like the U.S. fighting it on two fronts, many Colombians
believe as long as Americans and Europeans are willing to pay for it, there will be criminal gangs
that will convince or coerce farmers to grow it. The illegality renders it violent by definition.
While the peace agreement with the FARC was signed in 2016, guerilla dissidents from the
agreement and non-political criminal gangs took over the growth and distribution channels.
While during the eighties the drugs were not so available locally, as Escobar famously said: “eso
es para los gringos,” the now smaller producers who do not have the access to the international
trafficking routes have flooded the city with products.
In this sense, there is indeed, like sex work, locals who will provide it. Santiago, a 28-
year-old who used to work in the hospitality industry as a cook, started giving free tours via
freetour.com (Interview with Santiago, WhatsApp video, 2020). He quickly found himself
earning much more on these via tips than in his day job, so he decided to quit and start giving
tours as his main income. His clients find him mostly via word-of-mouth and contact him on
WhatsApp. While he mostly gives tours to traditional tourists, he has done so to location-
independent workers of whom he has later befriended quite a few. Santiago personalized his
tours, being aware and conscious about who he is showing around. He doesn’t have a company,
i.e., he is an independent tour guide, but he also does not have the required official certification,
as the other tour guide I spoke to does. Therefore, he is straddling this line of cool, local friend
who will show you and drive you around the city, and a professional guide. His people skills are
his strength, he says. From the time he worked in the kitchen, tourists would wait for him to
finish work, or alternatively get up early before his shift to hire him as a guide.
Santiago looks, dresses and acts like a peer: his English is fluent with a strong Paisa
accent. He has lived abroad and wishes to do so again. I can see how for foreigners, speaking to
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him can feel as if speaking to a friend rather than a hired subordinate. By taking them in he is
showing them the beautiful parts of Colombia, he takes them to have the best food and fruits. “I
learned hostessing from my grandmother…she was the ultimate matrona Paisa.” He adapts to
the type of person taking the tour. If they want to go to fancy restaurants? He knows them and
will get them in. If they want to see the local fondas Antionqueñas (traditional bars, which
resemble Mexican cantinas) , he can provide that as well. The most important thing is to show
them the “vibe” in Medellin: how people take care of each other, the joy of life, the appreciation
for food and nature. His goal is to make them feel at home. What Santiago is hoping to do is
work specifically in wellness tourism, focusing on meditation and spiritual curation. He wants to
open his own place someday, which would indeed be a formal hotel in Medellin. During COVID
he struggled as vacation tourism disappeared, however, location-independent workers who
stayed kept him afloat since they were those who stayed working from the city, or who were still
coming to get away from their homes.
As opposed to other locals I interviewed, he told me he has the phone number of a drug
dealer and a friend who works with sex workers, which is where he refers them to. He says that
he would rather have them go somewhere where he knows the workers, since so many sex
workers could drug them and steal from them. His concerns mirrored the warnings posted on
Facebook groups, together with Tinder dates or “hookups” designed to rob them. Santiago says
he… “looks out for their safety” by re-directing them to good places, which is better than not
doing anything at all/letting them go off on their own. “I don’t judge” he said to me more than
once, assuming either I, or that I had spoken to Colombians who would not approve of what he is
doing. To him, this was asking to be lied to, as in whether people like it or not, “this is why they
are here.” By accepting this reality and trying to manage it, he is providing what foreigners want
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while still educating them on the history and consequences of their choices. “I stay neutral. I do
not take sides.”
I interpret his desire and actions of remaining “neutral” as a way to cool down the
situation. For this, he explains the history of Escobar and the drug trade. Santiago’s explanations
include the narcos and the effects they had, both good and bad, given how Escobar used some of
this drug money to provide soccer fields and other services not provided by the state in the
poorest neighborhoods. He provides the information, he said, and allows the guests to make up
their own mind about the conflict.
The same with drugs and whores. They tell me look; I want to do drugs. And I say look
parcero I'll be honest, I smoke marihuana. If you want to smoke a joint with me, I will
gladly offer you one. We can smoke it, I have no problem. Yes, if you want drugs, go
ahead, I don’t do that. Then I prefer to tell them ‘I will get them for you.’ Why? Because
there are a lot of drugs here…and it is preferable that consumers get something good
right? Rather than turning up fucked up in the ER… So that's what I tell people. I tell
them everything with a conscience... are you going to get a prostitute? A whore of 20,000
pesos ($10.00) parcero, why don’t you get yourself a good whore? You wear a condom,
do you understand? I have had very good energy from people, because people see that I
am not judging -- Santiago, 28, Unofficial Tour Guide
In his experience these are the reasons foreigners are here, and to reject them or tell them
off does nothing to dissuade them, and they will go off on their own to try to find it anyway.
Platform Intermediaries: Informalizing or Formalizing?
Rosario is a 42-year-old woman who has a bike touring company. Since she has worked
in tourism for a while, she found the need for short-term rentals about 10 years ago, before the
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widespread use of Airbnb in Medellin, for those foreign friends or clients who asked for it
(Interview with Rosario, Zoom, 2020). Currently her father and herself together own a few
apartments in the same building, which according to her, helps with its popularity because there
are no other residents in the building who would mind.
Since then, her father and herself started buying apartments for this purpose. The only
restriction tends to be in buildings themselves, as in neighbors complaining about the number of
strangers being let in and out of a building. They solved this issue by buying an entire building.
However, the issue of renting apartments increasingly takes up her time even though it is not her
main job. She says tourists come for sex, she rarely gets a couple who wants to stay, and even
though they have signage against underage sexual tourism it is something they cannot control.
Airbnb no longer allows hosts to not accept a request (Medvedeva, 2021), if it were for her, she
said, she would only take foreigners as people from Bogota are nitpicky and try to find ways to
get out of paying. Liability, however, is something that falls back on her. She had an instance of
locals creating a fake, foreign profile to sell drugs from the apartment, given its prime location in
Parque Lleras. She saw it through the security cameras they have, and they asked them to vacate
and asked the police to oversee it. Her guests, however, are mostly tourists, she thinks. Many
older, European men ``looking for girls.” She knew of a couple of instances where people
arrived there to search for something more permanent. Airbnb is straddling regulations between a
short-term rental apartment and the department of tourism asking for a registry. The certificate
against child prostitution must be visible, yet how to properly enforce it becomes an issue i.e.,
she has not called the police in this sense. She did call them once when she saw via security
cameras that her guests were locals who had created a fake profile and were selling drugs from
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the apartment, which is located near Parque Lleras, the center of partying and where most
foreigners gather in the city.
According to all my interviewees, Parque Lleras has changed drastically. It used to be
the place for more affluent Paisas to go to restaurants and go out, but due to increasing tourism,
the park is now filled with sex workers. The tour-guides I spoke to told me that the prostitutes
have become a tourist attraction in themselves, as in foreigners ask to see them.
The foreigner asks: does the building have a doorman? What kind of security does the
apartment have? They want it to be safe, but they are not interested in other types of
security such as the security guard, etc., because the people who want to enter and do
what they want to do will not be able to, like in urbanizations, because they could not
bring a friend or come in drunk. And so on…. This is a very complex thing. So for some
of them it works, for others it doesn't…. The bulk of the foreigners who come to
Medellín come to have fun and to get girls… There's no other way to spin that. I would
say it is about 80% of the guests I get - Rosario, 42, Airbnb owner.
When Assumed Identities Crash: A Market View
The consumption of the local becomes explicit in this case. The Colombian teacher
married to the French translator told me they met at a park. The fact that he could look Paisa and
spoke perfect Spanish meant that her preconceptions of the foreign men she dislikes was not in
the way. She mentioned that as she met more of his friends, they had told her that Colombian
women were “fake, plastic, wanting money” and the rest. She said well, that’s because you are
where the tourists are. “Most of us, as it always happens with stereotypes, are not like that.” As
explained by Napoli in his book of informal encounters in Cuba, both foreigners and locals
“struggled with the potential overdetermination of their identifications as (gullible) tourists on
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the one hand, and as (deceitful) hustlers on the other” . I met quite a few married couples of
foreign men with Colombian women, and they were mostly well-educated, smart local women,
who had their own reservations and ambivalences surrounding the rise of tourism and the
exotification they encountered.
Figure 1.9
Culturally specific meme about sexual tourism

Note. cainpress [cainpress]. (n.d) Tip of the Day [Image] Instagram. Retrieved from:
https://www.instagram.com/cainpress_/?hl=en
The meme from the popular account cainpress mocks the desire to leave Latin America,
and the rise of tourists coming to find a potential partner. It translates to: “download Tinder, go
to the hotel zone, set your range to 1 kilometer and age preferences starting at 40. There, your
escape from Latin America.” The implication is that Tinder allows for connections that would
not happen otherwise. It is also reifying the over-determined assumption of the reason the
travelers would be at the hotels to begin with. The blurriness or introduction of foreigners to the
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local via platform-mediated convenings creates that type of market. Online media platforms are
even allowing people to set their location elsewhere where they assume they will either “will be
going soon” or are considering going to.
Due to these diverse ways that are not mediated through the hospitality industry, the
flattened assumptions and encounters take place. Daniela is a Colombian immigrant to the
United States who works as a speech therapist there (Interview with Daniela, Zoom, 2020). At
the beginning of the COVID pandemic, she decided to move back to Medellin to stay with her
family, given that she lives alone in the United States. She missed Medellin, she told me, and
with this chance to go back, even if temporarily, she sure would. Like many medical or other
state-licensed professionals during the pandemic, she was aware that there are regulatory hurdles,
although the U.S. federal government relaxed regulations due to the emergency during the
pandemic. Insurance was the harder loophole to jump through, although if her patients were
physically located within the state, she was compliant.
However, like many of these remote workers, who and how could enforce this remained
unlikely to be answered. Due to her many years abroad, she immersed herself within the affinity
space to meet people from outside the city. She met her partner, a French physical therapist, on
one of the dating apps. I chose her as an example of the flattening of relationships between
“guests” and “tourists.” As someone who stands between the two worlds, she suddenly got a
glimpse into a world in Medellin to which she is not usually privy. She pushed back on the
“economic determinations,” as done by Simoni. Due to the “openness” of events, she and her
partner decided to join a group that posted a trip to the WeWork Facebook group, which she had
joined and had through which she had met “very interesting people.” In the following post she
summarized the encounter she had over the weekend, breaking the norm of assumption.
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Figure 1.10
A Facebook interaction when perceived flattened identities collapse

Note. (anonymized) (2020, May 24th) My name is – and I just wanted to stop by to leave a
friendly piece of advice. If a local asks you… [General post to Facebook group of tourists and
foreigners in Medellin] Facebook. Retrieved September 7th, 2021.
I reached out to Daniela, who narrated the incident. More than that, she had been shocked
by the type of people in the trip she had suddenly been thrusted into. It was a mix of people,
including older white men with teen local girls, other remote workers, and open drug
consumption. She tried “not to judge” and when speaking to the young sex workers, she wanted
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to “show them it is possible to have another life,” meaning they assumed that because she was
also a local with a foreigner, she must have the same life experience.
The interaction that truly infuriated her, as she described, was with an American tourist in
his twenties. Her surprise was due to the lack of shame attached to his response, and even his
antagonistic response to her indignation. To him, she was in denial, and yelled at her to accept
the “Reality of [her] country.” The interaction shook her: the American man approached her
partner to say he was sorry for upsetting her, but that locals were going to have to learn to have a
better sense of humor to foreigners’ jokes. While she appreciated her partner’s mediation, he also
did not understand why she was so upset, which “is a problem in itself” she told me.
What caught my attention about this interaction was the aforementioned “hot” situation:
that is there was no common level of understanding of the historical harm that locals have
suffered from narcotrafficking, nor the potential problematics of sexual tourism and exploitation.
Daniela’s example demonstrates the potential clashes with the blurred lines. The American likely
encountered a Colombia that was, indeed, drugs and women, given that this is the assumption
locals have of “what they are here for”. The self-fulfilling prophecy is a common occurrence in
tourism-dependent economies. The “escape from women-dominated societies” as I saw
explained various times either to me or to local media shows an assumption by the travelers that
what they are doing is “acceptable” where they are, based on the small bubble and the locals that
are willing to provide those services. These more open encounters that blur the lines between
residents, tourists, remote workers, their recorded experiences, and their publishing of such
brings many more actors into the debate and equation to counter back on the limited view and
assumptions by the “guests.”
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In Daniela’s case, the remote-worker paradigm, as well as her identity of Colombian
American, meant she bridged this step and posted on that Facebook group as a local. The
hostility of many comments surfaced the class comparison, as in assuming she held this view
because she was a “woke American” and believed herself to be “better” than the local sex
workers. They told her she went to the US for money so why not accept that the “product”
offered locally is this.
While in other localities these groups of people may not have met, the informality and
online convening of gatherings makes these tensions common. The argument for legality as
therefore morally acceptable appeared as a common response among foreigners and sexual
tourists, although again, rarely those I encountered said it so directly to me. The debate is
ongoing, with the flooding of sex workers from other parts of the country into the city. English
speaking publications often touch on these topics. The following quote well explains the
rationalizing logic of global capital as that “reality.”
Like many goods and services in a global economy, sexual satisfaction is being
outsourced to places with the best product and service, at the lowest possible price. You
may have to come to terms with the fact that work you are unwilling to do will be done
by others for far less than you demand, (“The Other Side of the Debate; Colombia’s Sex
Tourists Get a Say,” 2014)
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Conclusion
While the terms “host” and “guest” are reductive in the analysis of tourism, people on the
ground still both reproduce the identities, or must grapple and push back against them. While
most of the location-independent workers I spoke separated themselves from the consumption-
focused tourist, the blurred lines of who classifies where means they are likely to cross paths or
locals will flatten their identity and place them there. Given the avoidance of the traditional
hospitality industry by word-of-mouth recommendations, meeting of locals via platforms, Airbnb
and other short-term rentals, the explicitness of roles must be renegotiated in each encounter. In
this sense, the role of individual travelers and the voice they have in the representation of the
nation for international consumption avoids the scrutiny of official channels yet is visible and
prevalent online. Informality allows for peer-to-peer encounters and communication about
Medellin, but like with any unregulated affair, the responsibility, term setting, and risk is taken
on by the individual. By straddling these in-between identities, Paisas who interact with
foreigners, who are not fully dependent on the money provided by them, negotiate, and push
back against the oversimplifications and overgeneralization.
The truth is, Medellin is what Colombians call un buen vividero (a good place to live).
The knowledge that life in the US or Europe is not better qualitatively is an ordinary
understanding. The knowledge that it is better than in Bogota is as well. In a way, the
simplification is less about the money to be made in the US, but the “opportunities” that come
with it, meaning the money that exists in science, the arts, technology, in a way that does not
exist there. The things that matter for a good life, however, joy, community, music, pride, social
connections, dancing, family, good sense of humor, delicious, fresh food, are all better there. The
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understanding of the “productive labor” at the “center” while life happens in the cheaper
“peripheries” is replicated in this instance.

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Conclusion: Outsourcing the home
What this dissertation aimed to show was, like Katz’s said, an instance of “vagabond
capitalism.” Nonetheless, as she states, work happens somewhere. As expensive cities such as
New York temporarily lost residents and income due to the COVID 19 pandemic, who gains it?
US citizenship requires income tax to be declared notwithstanding of the country or place of
income. Florida, where there is no income tax, saw a big surge of people coming in. This has
traditionally been one of the reasons retirees have also chosen it in the past. The redistribution of
wealth and the effects on the urban are a topic of study for urban studies scholars. Nonetheless
what we see is individuals acting like corporations, in using arbitrage to avoid both taxation and
regulation. American retirees are also moving to Medellin for similar reasons, of course knowing
their lifestyle will improve once they get there.
As the dissertation demonstrated, social reproductive work, which is much cheaper in
Medellin, makes it a good place to work from. The cultural appeal, warmth of culture, dance and
joy of living, and green lined streets and mountains, and spring-like weather make it another.
Nonetheless, entering a country with less social structures means an increased risk for
protections they may take for granted. Once COVID hit, for example, while many of my
interviewees remained comfortably working from home in Medellin, those who had ventured
into local entrepreneurship suffered the way locals did. Without resources like government aid
for lost income, plus much stricter COVID mandates which kept people at home by law, few
recovered. The infrastructure of state-provided health pulled some of them back to their
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countries. When I spoke to Jeremy, he had flown back to the UK quickly before airports shut
down. He was concerned about being away from his family, particularly without knowing when
international travel would resume. His main reason, he said, were hospitals. While elective
health and surgery in Colombia is exemplary and cheap, the UK’s National Health Service has
little equal in the world. Colombia’s hospitals were overwhelmed by COVID patients quickly:
skill sets are there, but the relative availability of health infrastructure and labor showed its
shortcomings quite quickly.
Even before COVID, the lack of commitment to place means a continuous defunding or
devaluation of social reproductive work. The temporality of this lifestyle reveals itself in the
rhythms of modern life. While I began my study in 2018, I re-interviewed four of my participants
in 2020. Stephan returned to Europe even before COVID hit, because of the social reproduction
given by the state: that is, they wanted his wife to gain Dutch citizenship, and his child to attend
a Dutch school. The habitus their child would acquire as both parents are aware, the child would
have more work opportunities, both there and abroad, with the Dutch language, citizenship,
education and connections. Anita’s boutique hotel failed due to COVID, but even before then,
she and her partner had had a challenging time with contractors and local processes. She sensed
sexism from the construction workers, who seemed to resent a young woman giving them orders.
A few months after we spoke, she posted that she had had a break-in and belongings stolen. She
returned to Belgium.
The dissertation reconstructed Anna Tsing’s theory of diversity as not only part of, but
required for, labor supply chains. My contribution included how it happens in an informal way:
first, with location-independent workers entering the online-only economy, they are suddenly in
competition with the rest of the world. To avoid the “race-to-the-bottom” they carve out a niche,
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depending on agencies back in their native countries, clients procured before leaving, or even
word of mouth among them. Their main advantage is having the cultural capital required to
collaborate well with companies and clients in the “center.” This adds to studies such as
(Amrute, 2016), which, although offline in Berlin, shows how Indian software contract workers
are limited to repetitive and non-creative work, and are contingent on visas. The study also
triangulates with Galperin’s findings on geographical discrimination in online labor platforms,
as clients filter workers based on countries of origin to decide on wages but also on assumed
quality of work. My study evidences how the main justifications for paying “others” less, such
as assumed lower cost of living, are more closely tied instead to lack of “cultural fit” and even
English requirements.
Additionally, the dissertation demonstrated how, even if wanting to make itself a Latin
American Silicon Valley, the structural failings of the city and country remain. Tech and
company workers told me the lack of English knowledge remains a large obstacle for hiring
locals: Medellin lacks enough talented programmers. I wondered about this, given Venezuelan
immigrant Jess’ challenging time getting work, but her ease at becoming a yoga retreat
instructor. She has both perfect English and an engineering degree. She exemplifies the openness
that the location-independent community allows for in terms of networking, vs what she
described as closed-off and xenophobic paisa culture. Her experience differs from the American
and European engineers mainly due to her identity as a refugee from Venezuela: assumed to be
poor. While the openness of Meetups and the warmth of locals makes Medellin appear “open,”
the inequalities and closed-offness of the city when it comes to foreigners opening businesses or
taking local jobs shows the importance of strong ties, and the parochialism of important families
as the local elite.
232
Lastly, telework did not “take off” in the past, in big part because of the strong pull of in-
person “water cooler” conversations. Traditional companies have increased the number of full-
time workers who are there as contractors, freelancers, or other designations while an upper tier
retains the benefits that come with full-time employment. The designated “mommy track” may
become more popular, but as COVID showed, almost 100% of the jobs lost were women’s,
partly because it is still the household’s second income, and because caring for children and
housework, meaning reproductive work, remains their domain. The traditional consequences for
work flexibility are the lack of facetime, which biases managers toward promoting employees
they see more often to equate being “more committed.” Lastly, COVID also brought up the
issues of sociality: while many were able to continue their relationships with colleagues, they
were riding on the already existing offline relationships. Like most of my interviewees who had
procured their clients before leaving, doing so online may be harder.
While these location-independent workers could go anywhere, they are clustering in
specific places. They are also crowdsourcing the logistics of life, not only mobility and tactics,
but recommendations of where to live, eat and go. They fear and sometimes suffer from
isolation, which is why they go to co-working spaces or Meetups.
The questions that remain go hand in hand with the cycle of informality to regulation
typical of the market but also, technological “disruption.” Life happens somewhere. At the time
of writing, Medellin is negotiating a Digital Nomad Visa, which would find a way of formalizing
the phenomenon. Nonetheless, would this result in an income requirement, or an inclusion of
local tax? COVID made what appeared like a countercultural or marginal practice a much more
viable possibility for many with online work and strong passports. Will companies re-adjust
salaries depending on their workers location, and if so, how would they know? At the moment,
233
saving money, and buying real estate as investment are some of the ways that foreigners are
accruing capital in Medellin. The traditional perils of gentrification are already happening. IF
cost-of-living increases significantly rises in Medellin, where to run to next?
234

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244

Appendix A

Methods: Extended Case Method and Multi-sited Ethnography
I start this methodological appendix by foregrounding the interpretive principles in participant
observation, and how via the extended case method I approached my field notes, interview
coding, findings via interpretation and the use of theory throughout to add to this theory in
particular. The second section focuses on the canons of online ethnography, and how I see my
work as adding to that literature as I combined the different methodologies of offline participant
observation, online ethnography, and semi-structured interviews.
Burawoy introduces the extended case method as a way of doing interpretive work
within the confines of social science. That is, he does not believe qualitative, sociological work
fully dismisses positivist traits, as some fully, postmodern approaches might. Yet it is indeed
distinct from the positivist in the principles that define it: reactivity vs intervention, reliability vs
process, replicability vs structuration, and representativeness vs reconstruction. I chose the
extended case method because of a few reasons. First, I had already used it during my sociology
methods class, and the study I conducted for that class was my first solo-authored paper. After
going through that process, I realized the specificity of the method helped when trying to untie
“affinity spaces,” given their porosity, openness, lack of explicit structure and lack of attachment
to a larger goal or institution. Secondly, in any critical project, there is the potential to fall into
binaries of the structural inequalities we know exist, and that have been named and established
245
by the different big theorists and many scholars since then. While we don’t exist outside of
discourse, I chose the extended case method because it focuses on the terms used by the
participants themselves as opposed to imposing mine on them. As Burawoy highlights this as a
virtue of the method, stating that it “is able to dig beneath the political binaries of colonizer and
colonized, white and black, metropolis and periphery, capital and labor to discover multiple
processes, interests, and identities.” (Burawoy, p. 6)

1. Extension of Observer to Participant
In this my positionality in the field meant a few different things. When I was physically
in Medellin, my participant observation in a co-working space meant that I was in a
private/public space, but also that many of the participants did not know each other. I received
permission from the establishment’s owners, but the rotating use of the hot desks meant different
patrons daily. I disclosed my identity and purpose to any patron I did speak to, and I interviewed
6 people I met there, both local and foreign. I took notes on more informal conversations and
events during my summer. Given that many of them were strangers to each other, I was not
particularly looking at existing group dynamics nor pre-established hierarchies. My disruption
246
often came when, as part of the guest/host dynamic, I did clearly fit either one or the other. Some
of the foreigners assumed I was local because I look, dress and act like a local. My American
accent in English is what would give away my double citizenship status. What did put me in a
similar foot to theirs was my situation as also a foreigner to the city of Medellin. While I am
indeed Colombian, I was born and raised in Bogota. This is an obvious characteristic to Medellin
locals once I speak in Spanish, that is, my Bogota accent lets them know I was also a visitor.
These are all the minutiae of symbolic interactionism that I noticed while in the field.
People’s assumptions and positioning of me in under one of the assumed categories, to later must
be confronted by the more complex reality. I got to know the community manager of the co-
working space, and after some time he started to ask me for advice. As I explained in the
dissertation, there is always the hope that in association with members of a group one wishes to
belong to, chances of making that jump via an opportunity provided by a personal connection.
The advice was how to better get experience in the U.S for work reasons, or to perfect his
English. He was looking into guest worker programs and internships in various parts of the U.S,
many of which I had never been to. I told him indeed many of these places are not the big hubs
that he knows, but that his English was more likely than not to be improved somewhere like rural
Michigan than in New York or Miami, given the tendencies we must socialize with our own.
When it came to the foreigners I interviewed, my interventions occurred when as I asked
questions, I was making them self-reflect on their choices. This was, as I explained in chapter 1,
not relatively unfamiliar territory for them, given the many times they had told this narrative to
family members and other people they knew. I left the more delicate questions for the end,
including if they had done drugs, procured sex work, and if the reason they had come was
because they had heard of Medellin as the place to find both. This strategy allowed me to come
247
in with compassion to ask personal questions that did not appear accusatory, judgmental, nor
journalistic. In this, the assumption of them wanting to change their answer to me due to my
identity as a Colombian appeared clear. I would reiterate the anonymity of the questions.
As Burawoy explains, reflexive science not only permits but also “embraces
participation as intervention precisely because it distorts and disturbs. A social order reveals
itself in the way it responds to pressure. Even the most passive observer produces ripples worthy
of examination.” (Burawoy, p. 16- 17). The ripples are harder to gage, at least at this moment.
For example, during the Accenture party, I was introduced to the current mayor. Given the
context of the celebration of Medellin as a hub for innovation, the mayor was very curious about
my dissertation topic. The contact that brought me in had already told him a part of it, and I
realized quickly that if I was interviewing part of this particular local elite, some would indeed
know what I was doing. I was just beginning fieldwork at that point, so my answer was vague
because my research questions were as well. The mayor was surprised he didn’t know about it,
as in, he knew tourism has increased, but with existing numbers, there is no telling who is in the
city for what purpose. What the mayor wanted to know, from his mayoral standpoint, was how
he could capitalize the fact that Medellin was becoming a hub for remote work. At that point all I
knew is that none of the people I had talked to were there on a work visa: only student visas,
student visas, health visas, and then the ones who chose to stay, partner visas or investor visas.
Last year an effort began to pass a digital nomad visa in Medellin. The mayor I met is no longer
in office, and I could not find anyone to specifically comment on this “proyecto de ley.” I know I
was not the only researcher who knew this, nor the only person who may have mentioned it to
the mayor. If that law passes and this visa is created, it means they can be officially categorized
in the state where they are. This formalization may come with embedded taxes or not, but what it
248
will likely do, like other digital nomad visas have done, is require a certain level of income to
obtain it, meaning those who don’t meet it will either be left out, or continue to do so under the
other visas.
In terms of power effects, bringing it to the light may indeed create some sort of
formalization to a process that has so far remained partially visible, partially invisible. Some
countries are becoming stricter about the incoming foreigners who visit often, and who do not
appear to be on vacation as they jump from one country to the next. A topic I saw evolve in the
WhatsApp group was that of the increasing strictness of Mexican border officials, and the
requirements of documentation that they had not had to provide before. Burawoy discusses
“domination” meaning how my interpretation could take precedence over others. 1. Domination
The intervening social scientist cannot avoid domination; both dominating and being dominated.
Entry is often a prolonged and surreptitious power struggle between the intrusive outsider and
the resisting insider.1
2. Extending Observations over Space and Time: process

Burawoy utilizes field hypotheses, that is, each day one enters the field, prepared to test
the hypotheses generated from the previous day’s “intervention.” “Situations involve relations of
copresence, providing the conditions for practices that reproduce relations” (p.18) Additionally, “
a social situation becomes a social process because social action presupposes and reproduces its
regime of power.” (p.18) This is particularly important, given the pushing back against flattened
identities that I encountered. While individuals did not wish to be part of this, they carried the
ambivalence of knowing they were part of the reproduction of “the regime of power.” However,
the goal of many in entering these situations was to push back on the assumptions brought into a
249
situation. Even though I am, in my dissertation, trying to not reproduce, or give nuanced
understandings of the situation, I am aware that by writing this I am likely to reproduce them.
This is an ethical issue with which I am still grappling.
As stated in his chart, the potential problem with this is silencing, which is inevitable.
“We must be on the lookout for repressed or new voices to dislodge and challenge our artificially
frozen configurations and be ready to reframe our theories to include new voices but without
dissolving into a babble.” I found this challenge to be particularly hard, and I am not sure if, due
to COVID, I was able to find enough of the repressed or new voices.
3. Extension from process to force: structuration
Instead of picking larger forces I wished to study, I began with a case where I had some
idea of what I would find but did not know what theory I would be contributing to. The principle
of “structuration” in reflexive social science is “locating social processes at the site of research in
a relation of mutual determination with an external field of social forces.” (Burawoy, p. 20)
In this sense I wanted to look at the process of location-independent working to the larger force
of super-exploitation supply in value chains. In this sense, these independent workers are fitting
and reacting to larger forces of capital and globalization, but also the role that identity plays in
how they adapt or take over those niches.
In this, users of the extended case method use a comparative approach. However, instead
of “seeking out common patterns among diverse cases, so that context can be discounted” the
extended case method “deploys a different comparative strategy, tracing the source of small
difference to external forces.” While not a comparative work, I did base my study purposefully
well-embedded in the larger contextual structures. For example, Woldoff’s study in Bali shows a
big “community” where the interaction with locals is mostly for service purposes. When I first
250
began this inquiry and had not settled in Medellin I started with Bali and did see this clear
differentiation. To me then, the generalizations between the two cases seemed less relevant than
the minor differences,
To me, the obvious pattern that could not be taken away from context is what each place
“is known for” and the histories, actors, and mediators who create that tourism identity. In that
sense, while the same people doing location-independent work may visit both places, the
interaction with locals, experience and effect differ. The potential power risk is objectification:
“hypostatizing social forces as external and natural.” In the process of structuration, we often
reduce agency and take away what happens in “lifeworlds” which “are themselves traversed by
power, generating needs that escape into the social sphere.” While the forces of whiteness,
capital, and the exploitative nature of tourism are at play, I was specifically talking about the
informality of it and its encounters, meaning their constant negotiation in lifeworlds.

4. Extension of Theory
While the first three extensions, intervention, process, and structuration tend to call for
prior theory. Burawoy explains that his method’s relationship to theory “is kamikaze” as in
during fieldwork “we do not look for confirmations but for theory’s refutations. We need first
the courage of our convictions, then the courage to challenge our convictions, and finally the
imagination to sustain our courage with theoretical reconstruction.” (p.21). My use of theory has
been re-iterative, and even though I finally landed on what theory I am reconstructing, this is the
one part of the dissertation that could still change as it becomes a book. As I learned during my
doctorate, I went out of my way to find participants that pushed back against my early
assumptions, or the most visible interactions from a superficial level. This included interviewing
251
women of color and joining a WhatsApp group meant only for foreign women. It also included
asking with curiosity and suspending judgment, so I could empathize with every person I spoke
to.
While I looked at a specific interaction of the global, I aimed to find the nuance and the
illumination of a specific process, that could more easily be swept under the bigger umbrellas of
“globalization,” “cosmopolitanism” “neocolonial” and “exploitation.” By not holding on to any
of these literatures nor theory from the get-go, I did not have that much at stake in terms of a
particular allegiance or an expectation as to what theory I would be employing. I did, however,
continue to read it as I went along, and although occasionally frustrating, I followed the process I
learned, which was to not dive into the literature I thought I would be using too early in the
process, but rather read some, earmark others, and continue to learn as my argument was taking
shape. Burawoy explains that even in the “kamikaze” approach, theory is “essential” to the
process: “It guides interventions, it constitutes situated knowledge into social processes, and it
locates those social processes in their wider context of determination. Moreover, theory is not
something stored up in the academy but itself becomes an intervention into the world it seeks to
comprehend.” p.21 The last part is what I am still missing in this dissertation which I hope to
eventually achieve with the help of my committee.
The problematic in this one is normalization. “Finally, reconstructing theory is itself a
coercive process of double fitting. On the one side, complex situations are tailored to fit a theory.
…On the other side, theory is then tailored to the case, recomposed to digest the anomaly. This
mutual fashioning creates an apparatus for reducing the world to categories that can be
investigated, sites that can be evaluated, people that can be controlled.” The unease that my
interlocutors displayed with the term digital nomad is the fact that it is normalizing, both in
252
popular understanding, but also by law. By writing about it and showing this as an iteration of
when beautiful, welcoming locales provide the reproductive labor for workers from richer
economies is creating a new type of value supply chain that relies on existing identities and
hierarchies.
Online Ethnography
While the extended case method is a sociological approach, much of what exists in online,
qualitative study stems from anthropological ethnography. Multi-sited ethnography has, in the
past decade or so, become the approach preferred and articulated by ethnographers of the regular
user to the internet. What (Burrell, 2012)) called network ethnography, for example, looked at
different internet cafes in Ghana and how youth moved across both physical and online spaces.
The prevalence of studies of cyber cafes in ICTD scholarship showed the contextual, politico-
economic differentiations of how, who and for what purpose people wished to access the
internet. Another good example of this was David Nemer’s study of the use of online media in
the favelas of Brazil, from the online cafes to the selfies to show one is safe (Nemer, 2016).
Leander and McKim’s (2003) mobile tracing of adolescent activities for example focused
on the growing and more present way much of the world connects to the internet: their mobile
phones (Donner).In the series “How the world changed social media'', scholars from different
parts of the world contributed their studies of how instead of a more deterministic approach of
the technology changing social interaction or culture, they instead tend to reify or serve as ways
to expressing well-embedded social norms. For example, in her study of Hospiceños, Haynes
finds how their regionalist pride and ways of posting on Facebook reify “good” behavior within
heteronormative familial roles. They also aim to take photos of the “ordinary”: as opposed to the
high-quality photos often associated with Instagram, that “flashiness” and fakeness is associated
253
with the capital Santiago. “Haynes finds that by posting day-to-day, mundane experiences in
contrast to special events or accounts of luxury by people in urban areas, Hospiceños are
strengthening their own sense of community.” (Alarcon, 2020)
My online ethnography started in 2017. Like Hine (2011), who used the search engine as
a tool to identify sites for an online ethnography of television watching, I used Facebook to
search and map out Digital Nomad groups. At that point I had already, like many users now,
become a more passive Facebook user than I have in the past. I had unrelatedly to my field work
stopped posting since my practice of content sharing moved to Instagram and WhatsApp instead.
In this sense, my Facebook account opened in 2005 became mostly used for this dissertation’s
fieldwork. What I began to see was how the platform's suggestions and advertising shifted me to
a potential “consumer.” For a class I first became part of Digital Nomads Bali group, as the
largest one, since when I first started thinking of this, I did not know Medellin was a hub, nor
that it would be my field site. I interviewed four people I found through the group: the
commonalities I found with my later interviewees were what I described in chapter 1. Through
there I got access to different resources that were being shared by members or advertised to me
via the platform. Geiger and Ribes (2011) think through ethnographic activities via online traces.
Given that access to these sites and communities is no longer so specific, like Baym explained,
my search moved across sites via hyperlinks but also the needs of the sites.
Marcus’(1995, 1998, 2012) highlights the multi-sited ethnography “that exhorts
researchers to follow phenomena of interest across sites in order to develop an understanding of
the myriad forms of complex and indeterminate connection that characterize contemporary life.”
The series What We Post made a call to study other non-American or non-Western popular
platforms such as QQ, WeChat and WhatsApp. Spyer’s contribution to the study of WhatsApp
254
showed its affordances within this cultural space. The commonality of multigenerational
families at home creates a different type of relationship to privacy. However, given the
“peripheral” location of his study, many must leave or commute to larger cities, and social media
allows to continue that density of relationships endemic to the region. (2017). He introduces the
concept of lights on/lights off, with “lights on” referring to “online spaces that are constantly
being scrutinized and monitored collectively,” while “lights-off” includes “content related to sex,
humor, violence and gossip” that is more embedded in private messaging platforms such as
WhatsApp (p.60). He finds that in his site, privacy is related to class: while Balduinos, who are
lower class, “may see social media as a chance to expand horizons and networks in order to have
greater economic opportunity, wealthier Brazilians, the author posits, may have other needs and
concepts of privacy.”
The crossing of both, and the creation of an event of a field site through the internet is
facilitated by Meetups. The site was created to bring back locality as the center for community
and sociality by its creators after the September 11th, 2001, terrorist attack on the United States.
I used the site to find these remote workers around the city, given this is a way in which they also
find each other. From my interviews I gathered that the type of people attending had shifted. I
met a local woman who works in international business during one of these events in Laureles.
The organizer was a foreigner who stayed, and hosting the event allowed him to “keep in touch”
with those remote workers who came through town. When I interviewed her later, she said she
liked them more before, because they were more professionally centered.

My addition to one of the larger WhatsApp groups came via an invitation by one of my
participants. I contacted the owners/managers of the group and arranged for a semi-structured
255
interview with him. While WhatsApp is mostly a private messaging service, the prevalence of
“groups” makes it into a hybrid of private/public space. Like Facebook groups, it has the settings
of who can invite people to join, or whether they can do so via a public link. It also has a limit of
users (). In 2022 someone complained that their friend was unable to join because of the limit,
and one of the owners volunteered to “purge” the group from inactive users. What attachment to
a phone number has been a bit of identity verification: bots on WhatsApp are much harder to
create. Unlike the Facebook groups, WhatsApp groups have the temporality associated with
traditional chat rooms, which is that it moves down to the most recent interaction and not the
algorithmically curated timelines of Facebook and Twitter. It also moved fast. The reason the
chat appeared as an important part of a site with this demographic was due to the many day-to-
day queries made to the group, the lack of long, rambling messages or comments as a thread, but
the fact that I read it every day starting in 2020. There was never a day that had zero messages.
COVID fully changed my field work plans to be in Medellin. I entered the group during
that time, and the information shared was about the day-to-day changes on restrictions. Colombia
had much more formalized “toque de queda” rules than Los Angeles, where I stayed, and I was
able to see via their questions how it materialized for them. To attempt a smaller group dynamic
with specific type of contents, the digital groups I belonged to often used the terms “Gringos in
Medellin” or “Medellin expats.” By using the term as a search keyword, it means anyone can
find it, although there are some guidelines and requirements that are asked before being admitted
to the Facebook groups in terms of spam and conduct. This chapter will focus on what platforms
are used for, and how this digital word of mouth aids in a type of travel specific to this affinity
group. This works like traditional diasporas in a few senses: 1. sharing of practical information
256
that is relevant, accessible, and specific to them. 2. the commonality and explicit bond of being
outsiders from similar backgrounds 3. immediate cultural understanding and needs.
It is common for businesses in Colombia to have their own WhatsApp accounts. It is also
common to contact someone for a service via WhatsApp. In this sense, phone numbers are
shared in this pseudo-public space. In my three years in these online spaces, I have found more
casual conversation occurring on WhatsApp, and larger announcements on Facebook. WhatsApp
has messages every day, and I have been reading them every day since COVID began. There is
little success of on-demand platforms to provide specific services fully mediated online except
for the Rappi delivery app. Recommendations, therefore, often return to word-of-mouth.
Questions of: “has anyone worked with this guy, is he legit?” were often posted. Attempting to
avoid scams was another topic often discussed.
Adding participant observation online was necessary due to my inability to be in the field
during the pandemic, but also remained fruitful given the restrictions that participants themselves
had during this time. I am part of two chats, one that is active daily, and another one that is active
only maybe a couple of times a month. What I witnessed was a shift from more personal
accounts of events or goings-on to a more advertised-based environment where members post
their specific advertisements for their ventures. As in, at the beginning I became more familiar
with the administrators, and with the most avid users’ details of their personal lives as they
shared them. As the group grew, I saw less of this and more of what was present in the Facebook
groups.

257
Appendix B

Anonymized interview list

Pseudonym Description Date Recruitment via Nationality
Mike
PhD student in
Medellin university 2018 Facebook group USA
Alfredo (interview
1)
Programmer
automating design
work on Fivver 2018 co-working space Colombia
Alfredo (interview
2) idem 2020 idem idem
Peter
online marketing
specialist 2018 co-working space Ireland
Alex freelance writer 2018 Facebook group UK
Josh (interview 1)
entrepreneur/digital
assistants project 2018 Facebook group
Singapore/Aust
ralia
Josh (interview 2) idem 2020 idem -idem
Emily
content
creator/budding
entrepreneur 2018 Facebook group USA
Ryan
Programmer,
enrolled in Remote
Year 2020 snowball USA
Remote year official
(interview 1)
Remote year
employee 2018 Snowball, Colombia Colombia
Remote year official
(Interview 2)
Remote year
employee 2020 Snowball, Colombia Colombia
Anita Belgian hotel owner 2020 Snowball Belgium
258
Jeremy (interview 1)
Search Engine
Optimization
Professional 2018 Facebook group UK
Jeremy (interview 2) idem 2020 idem -idem
Madeleine
Stayed with a
domestic
partnership with her
roommate 2018 Facebook group American
Henry
Started his own
business with
crowdfunding 2018 Meetup American
Cody
Programmer and
adventure traveler 2018 co-working space American
25-year-old German
Started his own non-
alcoholic beverage
company, moved to
online management
during COVID 2020 FB group post Germany
Sophia
artist/designer hired
by NGO 2020 FB group post American
Life coach British life coach 2018 FB group post UK
Stephan (interview
1)
Web producer: six
years in Medellin,
clients remain in the
Netherlands 2018 Meetup Netherlands
Stephan 2 (interview
2) idem 2020 idem Netherlands
Meta
Mumbai artist who
spent time in NYC 2020
saw on a digital
nomad panel,
contacted her via
LinkedIn India
259
Lawyer
Previously in
Medellin, now in
Seoul, part of
creating more
exclusive groups for
real professionals 2018 Facebook Group UK
Adriana
Colombian residing
in NYC, talked
when planning to
return to Medellin to
work remotely 2020 Facebook group
USA/
Colombia
Michel
translator, married
Colombian teacher 2020 snowball (via Louis) France
American restaurant
owner
American veteran
who opened
restaurant 2020 WhatsApp group American
friend traveler 1
own branding for
music festivals 2018
Meetup and co-
working USA
friend traveler 2
online content
creator 2018
Meetup and co-
working Australia
Austin
he is the "mayor of
poblado" 2021 WhatsApp Group USA
Mariana
Colombian who
posted the message 2021 Facebook group USA/Colombia
Marketing guy lunch in poblado 2018 Co-working space USA
Marketing guy lunch in poblado 2018 Co-working space USA
Leila
In Bali, considering
Medellín 2017 Facebook UK
Tom
In Bali, on his way
to Medellín 2017 Facebook Australia
260
Raj
In Bali, on his way
to Medellín 2017 Facebook India/Canada
Daniella
health professional
working online
during COVID 2021 Facebook USA/Colombia
Accenture executive
why they chose
Medellin 2020 snowball Venezuelan
Camila
Investment
promotion 2020 offline connections Colombian
Accenture
innovation lab
executive
More specifics of
local workforce 2020 offline connections Colombian
Jess Yoga instructor 2020 WhatsApp group Venezuelan
Medellin teacher
(Michel’s wife)
teacher 2020 snowball Colombian
Isabel Tourism official 2021 offline connections Colombian
Andreina Domestic worker 2021
Recommended in
WhatsApp group Venezuelan
City branding expert
Worked with
Medellin in the past,
but now positioning
other smaller cities
for health tourism 2021 Snowball Belgian

Lina

Learned about drop
shipping via Digital
Nomads Meetup

2021

Meetup

Colombian
Valentina
Works in Australian
marketing firm
based in Medellin 2021 WhatsApp group Venezuelan
261
Santiago
Unofficial tour
Guide 2021 Snowball Colombian
Laura Official tour guide 2021 WhatsApp group Colombian
Rosario Airbnb host 2021 Snowball Colombian
Cristobal Co-living host 2021 Snowball Colombian
Pepe
College student and
part-time realtor 2021 Snowball
Gonzalo
Co-working
community manager 2018 Co-working space Colombian

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Abolitionists in the university: student activism, institutional change, and the role of alternative media

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Creator Alarcon, Andrea (author)

Core Title Outsourcing the home: the role of identity in remote work arrangements

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Degree Conferral Date 2022-08

Publication Date 07/31/2024

Defense Date 04/27/2022

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Tag anthropology of tourism,arbitrage,city branding,Colombia,communication,digital divide,digital nomads,economic sociology,emotional labor,ethnography,feminist theory,flexibility,freelancers,future of work,global capitalism,Global Communication,identity,informality,innovation,internet studies,intersectionality,Latin American studies,location-independence,Medellin,media studies,mobile communication,mobilities,OAI-PMH Harvest,on-demand economy,online communities,online labor,platforms,precarity,remote work,representation,reproductive labor,search engines,social media,tourist gaze,transnational communication,WhatsApp

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