PHD SCHOOL IN SOCIAL SCIENCES AND ECONOMICS

Thesis title: Laptop by the beach: Digital Nomadism and the reproduction of Global Inequality in the age of remote work

This doctoral thesis examines the phenomenon of digital nomadism and analyzes its socio economic, cultural, and political implications beyond idealized representations. While digital nomadism is often portrayed as a liberating lifestyle enabled by digital technologies and the flexibilization of work, this study argues that it simultaneously reproduces systems of global inequality, spatial privilege, and postcolonial power asymmetries. Using a mixed-methods research design that incorporates surveys, semi-structured interviews, and network-based fieldwork, the study examines the motivations, demographic profiles, economic practices, and narratives of digital nomads. Given the complexity of the phenomenon, the study develops an integrated theoretical framework that combines Domenico De Masi's theory of creative leisure, Zygmunt Bauman's liquid modernity, and postcolonial critique. The paper introduces the concept of "privileged precarity" to conceptualize the paradox of digital nomads working under precarious economic conditions while benefiting from systemic advantages such as Western citizenship, digital literacy, and class privilege. The second theoretical contribution, "digital coloniality," describes how digital technologies disrupt and reproduce colonial patterns of mobility and exploitation through infrastructural selectivity, platform mediation, and technological enclosure. The research critically examines digital nomadism as a socio economic phenomenon situated at the intersection of technology-mediated professionalization of labor, accelerated mobility of privileged populations, and global dynamics of inequality. It analyzes how digital nomadism is reproduced within the historical framework of unequal development that characterizes contemporary capitalism.