The Rise of the Digital Nomad

"IT WAS A grueling three-hour commute to my Colorado office this morning. I left Telluride with a yellow day pack strapped to my back, and climbed north into the mountains through the golden glow of early-October aspens," wrote Steven K. Roberts in his 1988 book, Computing Across America.

- FIONA HARRIGAN

Roberts made his way through the remnants of a mining camp before settling at the desk he'd cobbled out of industrial junk the day before. “My chair is an old dynamite crate; my computer a Hewlett-Packard Portable. I flipped open the display, fired up Microsoft WORD, and here I am at work—pattering into a mountainside text file,” he wrote. “No, I’m not on vacation. I am a high-tech nomad—pedaling a recumbent bicycle around the United States with a portable computer while funding the journey with a sporadic outpouring of words.”

A year and a half earlier, Roberts had decided to leave behind his stationary life in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio. He built a bicycle that doubled as a mobile office—“an eight-foot-long machine bedecked with solar panels and enough state-of-the-art gizmology to start an engineering school”—and embarked on a yearslong 17,000-mile journey throughout the United States. Roberts worked as a computer consultant and freelance writer from the road, filing articles via pay phone.

Roberts’ lifestyle was completely foreign in the 1980s. People were fascinated by the pioneering digital nomad, whose story landed him on The Phil Donahue Show and the front page of The Wall Street Journal. And it raised big questions about the future of work.

Before email, Zoom, and Slack became fixtures of everyday work life, the vast majority of the world’s white-collar workers were bound to physical offices. Truly remote jobs were scarce. Slowly but surely, technological innovations allowed more people to work from an entirely different city or state than their coworkers. Then the COVID-19 pandemic showed that millions could work remotely and effectively, thanks to increasingly accessible and functional digital services. From 2019 to 2021, the number of Americans primarily working from home tripled from 9 million to 27.6 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.