I’m currently attending a conference in Sweden, from the comfort of my own home office in Norway, with my daughter gooing and gaaing by my side. The current conference speaker is sitting in what looks like his living room, somewhere in Finland. It’s a bit unclear where, but he needs to place his mike better and should invest in some better lights. Presentation matters after all.
The conference is the Nordic Game conference, which I last year attended in Malmö and which was a great experience and a chance to talk shop with people from all over Europe and the World. It was pure networking bliss and The birth of my children in the start of february initially made it impossible for me to attend the conference this year, but then COVID-19 turned the world into a tribe of digital nomads.
Thus a wast international group of people have taken to watching a streamed conference on Vimeo while chatting and doing business in Discord. There is the chitchat while having a coffee in a designated area and even an event about coffee; its not the same as waiting in-line in meatspace and striking up a conversation, but it’ll do. The coffee was better at the coffee bar, but the lines are shorter at home. Most of the time.
I’m used to being a digital nomad these days. I flow from platform to platform, tending work relations and networks; I participate in projects and I lay the foundations for new ones; I enjoy some sparetime in Minecraft and I stream on Twitch; I work in cloud based software that I jack into from wherever I find myself.
This isn’t the cyberpunk future nor the apocalypse we were promised, but that doesn’t matter; we still have Netflix so we will survive. And for when Netflix isn’t enough, we have Crunchyroll. Let’s not speak about youtube.
Working digitally isn’t anything new, by no means. We’ve all been working digitally for years, to varying degrees. But now we’re all digital nomads; we live and breathe in cyberspace; we conduct our business in cyberspace; we tend our relations in cyberspace. We take breaks from cyberspace and return to meatspace, and, at least for me, these breaks have become much more important than they were before.
Reading a book while having a cup of tea and a pipe has become even more of a bliss than it was earlier. Granted, I usually do my reading on a Kindle, but in the perspective of the digital nomad a Kindle is as analog as you can get. Especially mine, which is one of the older models. Been thinking about upgrading to a newer model that is waterproof so that I can read worry-free in the tub.
The life of the digital nomad isn’t difficult and it isn’t scary, but it is different. We all need to change our habits and expectations. There are different challenges to be faced, and we need to find new strategies for them. Both in productivity and in social life.
Though I am still waiting for the brain-port so that I can actually jack directly into cyberspace.
Thankfully, Cyberspace 2049 isn’t too far away from release.
