Welcome to Digital Nomadland

The parish of Ponta do Sol is small and beautiful. There is a small roundabout at the center, a gas station, and a cluster of modest buildings. There are houses dotted among the hills. There are many small waterfalls that fill centuries-old irrigation canals and are surrounded by a dramatic escarpment. The words that came to his mind when he first drove through the area were: "What the fuck is this?"

The main island of the Portuguese archipelago is called Ponta do Sol. When he was a kid, Hall visited Madeira, but he didn't remember it being so wild. He said in an interview that he was seeing the place with his eyes. He came back to Funchal to help organize a conference about remote work. He asked the regional secretary of economy why he was sleeping on digital nomads after driving through the countryside.

Hall is tall and husky, with blond hair, blue eyes, and a proclivity for speaking in slogans like "life is good" or "be happy, make millions". Hall wanted to find a lifestyle where he could show up to work in flip-flops and shorts instead of the suits and ties of his family. Hall picked up his first remote contracts, including a marketing gig for a firm called Remote-how, after he and his wife moved to Indonesia.

After less than a year of living as a digital nomad, Hall was organizing conferences about remote work and digital nomadism. He chose Madeira because of its low cost of living, fast internet speeds, and beautiful beaches. He noticed something else in the pace. He was impressed by a small nomad project that he had visited in rural Spain just before he arrived in the archipelago.

The digital nomad hot spots of Thailand, for example, tend to be bubbles where wealthy and mostly white foreigners congregate at coffee shops and other businesses that cater to their needs in English. Things would be different if he built a destination for digital nomads in Madeira. Locals and remote workers could live in the same neighborhoods, eat at the same restaurants, and attend the same gatherings. The Madeiran government was willing to listen to Hall's proposal.

It wasn't hard to sell. Digital nomads were framed as the cure for the decline in tourism in the archipelago due to the Covid-19 travel ban. Madeira, less than a two-hour flight from Lisbon, was not as well known as Portugal's urban centers. Regional officials were told by Hall that high-earning professionals could put money into local businesses. They needed an inviting infrastructure and a ready made network to welcome them. They would show up if he built it.

Albuquerque said the deal was sealed after two or three beers. The coastal parish of Ponta do Sol, population 4,300, was chosen as the location for an experiment that looked a little bit like tourism, a little bit like a future- The project was part of a global expansion of digital-nomad-friendly legislation and of the private industries attending to their needs. It was ironic that the Pandemic had created financial incentives to open borders for other people.

There were a few inaugural residents of the Digital Nomad Village. After months of being grounded by Covid, the newcomers were thrilled to be in. The Village had grown to 50 by the spring, and Kokot felt he had begun to make friends. They threw him a surprise birthday party in May, then celebrated Halloween, Christmas, and New Year's Eve together. The residents of Ponta do Sol watched from their homes as the fireworks were set off on the beach. A group of new friends traveled to the Azores for a holiday at the end of June. Some came back the following winter. He told me that Madeira was the first place he could imagine living in.

The pilot project was one year old when I visited. International remote workers were staying in rentals in Ponta do Sol. The stock of rooms, apartments, and villas had been exhausted in Ponta do Sol and many had been snapped up elsewhere on the island. Many people came through town to attend the yoga classes, workshops, and other events.

You can see the ocean from the outdoor workspace, but it can be hard to see your screen in the shade.

A weekly community lunch is held at a restaurant next to the workspace. The kitchen staff at Steak & Sun learned to make vegetarian and vegan dishes for their new clientele when I joined. An order of bacalhau a bras, a non- alcoholic beverage, and an espresso for 9 was claimed by submitting a on a post. Several software developers from Germany, the UK, and one from Scotland were at the table with Hall and his wife.

The siblings from Calheta introduced themselves in English. "Would it be okay if we joined?" The people around me motioned for them to sit, and I agreed. Hall said that they were the first locals to join community lunch. The Cabrals didn't know what to think.

Both Cabrals were working from home. Hall told them about the lunch while they were at the space. There was a time whenMelissa was hesitant. She said that the word "digital nomad" made people think it was not for them. She decided to come because she could network with entrepreneurs and people with international connections. She asked if it was important to connect with locals. Hall replied quickly and firmly. He said that the next phase was the next one. He said that covid had made it difficult.

The siblings said they were floored by the reception. A group of travelers surrounded them after lunch, asking questions, and inviting them to use the workspace. They said yes. If she and her brother were the first locals to join, it was clear something wasn't working that well.

The digital nomad village is not a village at all. It is a marketing pitch and a virtual infrastructure that facilitates the mutual interaction of international remote workers. The John Dos Passos Cultural Center is one of the few modern buildings in town and is home to the free coworking space. Film screenings, dance rehearsals, and photo exhibitions can be found downstairs. Foreign remote workers are looking at their laptops and taking meetings in the courtyard upstairs. The ocean views from the outdoor workspace are stunning, but even in the shade, it's too bright to see your screen.

People in the Village didn't embrace the term "digital nomad." Those who make their money off of it are the most enthusiastic users of the label. Digital nomads are people who don't have to pay taxes because they don't stay long enough for taxes to be paid. Portuguese officials don't hide their desire to transform this particular class of wanderers into settlers.

The national government doesn't have a lot of information about how many remote workers pass through the country each year, where they come from, what they do, how long they stay, or what measurable impact they have on the economy or social life. StartUp Madeira counted the number of remote workers who have arrived in the archipelago so far, but that is still a low estimate. The numbers are based on how many people register for StartUp Madeira.

Ponta do Sol is marketed as a place where you can call home, but also as a place where people will be displaced.

The Madeira Islands Slack is an awkward, dull, and chaotic part of the nomad village. People who work as coaches often offer circles, paid workshops, and breath work. There were ads for a photo-hiking workshop to shoot models in the forest, a combination photoshoot-therapy session in the mountains, and an NFT-themed connection retreat for women. Every week a new flyer is released announcing the DJ lineup for Purple Friday, a party at a cliffside hotel that has separate invite lists for international and local guests. The first place for me to have party social fatigue wasMadeira.

After the community lunch I attended, the Scotsman wrote a note asking who was up for a coffee and invited an intercontinental pile-on. The few pinned posts were outdated and left a gaping blank where documentation or collective memory should have gone. For the first year and a half after the central FAQ was posted, the same questions were posted again and again. There is a bus to Funchal. Is there a place to rent a car? How do I get a desk at the workspace? Is there any advice for vegan food? I'm looking for an apartment. There is a bus to Funchal.

Several of the temporary residents of Ponta do Sol told me that they were disappointed by how little interaction there was with Madeirans, and that they had looked forward to the potential for small-town community. They tried to find their own way to connect with locals, such as volunteering at the dog shelter, learning Portuguese, and riding public transportation. Some people contemplated moving to Madeira for a long time. Madeiran social entrepreneurs were started by a few of them. These were not normal.

Despite Hall's stated intentions, the design of the Village, the nomadic core of its lifestyle, and the consequences of bringing in so many people so quickly have made the promised "community" difficult to deliver. The promotional video for the project by StartUp Madeira depicts Ponta do Sol as a place you can call home, but it also depicts the displacement of the people who have called it home for generations before you arrived. Guests don't owe their hosts anything It's a story that has been repeated many times.

In the 15th century, when the Portuguese first landed on Madeira, the island was covered with forest and abundant with life. Madeira wasn't named after what the conquistadors saw growing there. It was named after the wood, timber, lumber, and madeira trees that were to be destroyed. The legend says that fires were set to clear land for farming and burning for seven years.

Many of Ponta do Sol's residents still work in agriculture, despite the dominance of bananas. The people of this island are poorer than the rest of the island and the rest of Portugal. There is an exhibition at the John Dos Passos Cultural Center featuring photos taken during the miserable four-decade-long dictatorship. After the fall of the fascist regime, 60 percent of the archipelago's population was uneducated.

Madeira has a strong tourism industry. Private homes called "Alojamento Local" are where most of the bookable beds in Ponta do Sol are located. Hall says he wants 100 beds in the area to be secured exclusively for digital nomad rentals, and he and his business partner Dave Williams are trying to encourage property owners to join them.

Williams started the business with help from StartUp Lisbon and now works with Flatio. One of the Flatio info sessions Hall and Williams cohosted for prospective landlords was about the demographic profile of these medium-term tenants: young, high-paid, and fit. He persuaded Funchal's community manager to perform a series of burps. Ponta do Sol has the highest density of Alojamento Local homes on the island, tripling in recent years, and the intense demand from remote workers is driving residents to either reallocate existing rental and tourism properties to this market, or build more

On a tour through town, I saw a lot of construction. Platinum Villas VIII, all glass and sharp angles, is the final form of a build site on a steep road that has become known as "Nomad Street" by foreigners. I chatted with a man who was working on a sloped garden. He told me he came from his job in construction and put down the banana plant. A wealthy American ordered the fruit plantation next to his house to be torn down to make way for new apartments. He replanted as many trees as he could on his own plot.

Madeiran residents pay more on rent than anyone else in Portugal.

When I talked to Joo Campanrio, Ponta do Sol's parish council president, he said he had never met one of the young workers. Hall didn't stop by to introduce himself before he opened a workspace across the street. He said that they want them to stay here.

The head of Ponta do Sol's municipal council described the arrival of digital nomads as a kind of sunshine in the middle of a cloudy day. There was joy in seeing young people in backpacks and sandals walking through the village after the streets had been so quiet.

The regional president, Albuquerque, was praised by Hall as a politician who sees opportunities for investment. Hall described his relationship with Pessegueiro as friendly, but he was disappointed that she didn't think the same way. He felt that the municipal and parish governments weren't supporting him. He asked Pessegueiro to put equipment by the beach. She said there was no room.

She paused and chose her words carefully when I brought this up. She said that the place is ready to receive visitors. I want them to feel like they are going to live in a place with people they already know. I don't want people from here to feel like they're out of place.

exclusion has been felt strongly in housing In the past year, the price of homes in Ponta do Sol has increased by 30 percent, while the rental stock in Madeira has dropped by 42 percent. In a region where the minimum wage is 723, nearly two-thirds of the apartments were priced over 1,000. Funchal is second only to Lisbon in its lack of affordability. Residents of Madeira pay the highest percentage of their salary on rent.

Madeira has the highest density of social housing in the country. Five thousand families are on the waiting list for housing support and the regional government has announced the construction of housing units that are even more affordable. The city's working-class heart is being gutted according to an opposition politician. He blasted what he called a perverse mechanism of social segregation, as price increases push more and more locals to the fringes.

During his recent visit to Lisbon, Pessegueiro noticed how the most famous neighborhoods had been emptied of their residents. Supporting families with renovations of old properties, the recuperation of abandoned houses, and building homes on inherited land are some of the solutions outlined by her. She told me that the question of housing support is important to keep people here. It's the balance.

A sweeping invitation to the world, at least, to the parts of the world with money and relaxed visa agreements, can look like a rousing success and a catastrophe at the same time. The Golden Visa program was introduced in 2012 after Portugal introduced the Non-Habitual Resident (NHR) tax scheme in 2009. Portuguese people pay some of the highest income taxes in Europe while earning the lowest salaries. A local who earns the average monthly wage of 1,500 loses almost a third of it to tax, with the sliding scale topping out at 48 percent for annual salaries above 75,000. A foreigner who qualifies for the NHR scheme pays a flat tax of 20 percent for 10 years. The Golden Visa program was supposed to be a path to job creation and fast-track citizenship in exchange for an investment of at least 250,000. More than 90 percent of visas issued in the past nine years were for real estate purchases, according to an audit.

Lisbon has been ranked the third most financially unliveable city in the world.

Golden Visa residential real estate purchases in Lisbon, Porto, and Portugal's coastal region were restricted this year. In Madeira, there are no restrictions. A highly competitive 5 percent corporate rate is what Madeira has to offer. Madeira's tax cuts were found to be in violation of EU rules, with no clear contribution to Madeirans who have the highest unemployment rate. Many of the jobs these companies claimed to create were based outside the region or outside the EU.

Portugal has launched an aggressive tourism campaign. The country brought in more money from tourism than it had before. The electric tram 28 became useless as a public transportation due to the long lines of tourists. The reality is that the majority of the new service-oriented jobs are precarious.

There is an evictions crisis in the capital due to the tourism boom and rampant real estate speculation. After a wave of evictions in which more than five households were evicted per day, the National Rental Desk reports that evictions are on the rise once more. The number of illegal evictions made the crisis much larger, according to some activist groups. In Santa Maria Maior, where the historic neighborhoods of Alfama and Mouraria are located, 61 percent of homes are now registered as AL properties, meaning the majority of what were once family homes have been emptied. In an extraordinary ruling, the country's Supreme Court voted to restrict short- and medium-term rentals in residential buildings. Real estate speculation is still damaging. Lisbon has been ranked the third most financially unliveable city in the world in the past year, behind London and Mexico City.

Antonio Gori is a member of the housing rights collective Habita. It wasn't a storm, but it wasn't a storm. It's the result of political decisions.

For the past seven years, the country's secretary of state for tourism and now its minister of labor, solidarity, and social security has set her sights on attracting foreign remote workers to Portugal. The relocation of Web Summit, a massive annual technology conference, to Lisbon in 2016 was a turning point according to Godinho. She expanded a financial incentive program to encourage relocation to the interior of the country to remote workers of any nationality, as well as opened dozens of coworking spaces in the area. At last year's Web Summit, she promised to personally reply to emails from remote workers who were interested, and in the weeks leading up to the 2022. The amount of time needed to become eligible for citizenship is the same as for the visa. Godinho told me that the perfect time for digital nomads to choose Portugal was now.

The narratives used by foreign remote workers are that Portugal needs people. The brain drain was caused by the economic crisis when the highest educated generation in Portuguese history left the country in droves. They argue that remote work could solve all of the problems in both instances. First, draw the digital nomads, then entice the ones who will buy houses and settle. One of the first sites dedicated to nomad hubs has launched a residency-consulting business for remote workers in Portugal. He painted a picture of a country in dire need of foreigners to live, work, and spend money there to recover, and then listed the ways you wouldn't spend money there.

StartUp Madeira claims that remote workers inject 1.5 million into the region every month. The country's social security fund received 1.3 billion from immigrants last year. Many of the foreign-born workers are not received the same way. The differences between who is welcome and who is not can be stark. The private and public hype around "digital nomad" makes it easy to prop up a hierarchy of migration.

Madeira has seen a rise in popularity among remote work visitors and settlers. The island is small. Everyone seems to know someone who worked for the government or in tourism, and the uneasy memory of Portugal's long dictatorship still persists here. Most asked that I keep their comments, even innocuous ones, off the record, or protect their identity: the teachers on their smoke break who objected to the nearly 1,700 rent foreigners were willing to pay at a new digital nomad hotel, and the farmer who pointed out various foreign owned

One resident of a small town near Ponta do Sol said that people said they only wanted to rent to digital nomads. It may be the worst thing about this project. An American friend who had fled California because of the yearly wildfires was renting a rustic apartment in the hills above Ponta do Sol for 800, two or three times higher than it would have cost a few years ago, according to another. She said that many of them are running away from something. She said that young Madeirans had nowhere left to flee, not Venezuela, not the UK, and not the mainland.

Beverly Yuen Thompson describes these workers as canaries in the coal mine. Thompson writes that the lifestyle is undergirded by uncertainty, inequality, and abandonment by both governments and employers. She says that digital nomads don't have enough to live as comfortably in their own land as in someone else's.

The failure of the global leaders in the digital nomad space to consider the losses of host communities is amazing. Living communities don't matter beyond the role they play as a backdrop. It's not trees that are lumber. In April, a video of 50 police officers with their batons out in the streets of Beato, a rapidly gentrifying parish in eastern Lisbon, grabbed and struck a group of women and children who were protesting a mass eviction. The Creative Hub of Beato on the waterfront hosted a Hackathon to find innovative solutions to the capital's housing crisis. The winner was the one who said "Blockchain."

When I spoke to some of the local architects of Portugal's digital nomad boom, they were either unwilling or unable to acknowledge the impact. Public criticism has become impossible to ignore. The Portuguese press documented a shortage of student housing this fall, with many undergraduates dropping out or sleeping in the pantry because they couldn't find a place to stay. The secretary of state for tourism in Portugal admitted in November that they had been the victims of their own success.

500 years ago, Portugal discovered the world by sea, and now we're being discovered in the digital world.

Hall insists that the payoff will be worth it, even though he admits there is some short-term pain for locals. The Digital Nomad Village model was pitched to governments in Portugal, Cape Verde, and Brazil after the launch in Madeira. He purchased the NomadX brand from Williams to act as an umbrella for his rapidly expanding roster of projects, and this summer he launched a nonprofit with his wife and their friends. He was elected president immediately. He thinks he can fix what is wrong with each of these places using his model and maybe 10 years.

In Ponta do Sol, she went back to the Digital nomad village. She was offered a part-time job as community manager by StartUp Madeira after the group lunch. She was the first Madeirense to help orient new arrivals, organize events, and facilitate day-to-day functioning in Ponta do Sol. Only one person remained when she started in July.

Cabral reached out to her friends and contacts on the island, inviting them to events, but soon found that many of them weren't interested. Her brother didn't like working from home and wouldn't ride her offer of a ride to the workspace. She wondered if it was the fact that the digital nomads weren't really at home that appealed to them. She has been working with international visitors in Ponta do Sol for the past few months, but her perspective on bringing more locals into the village has changed. She said that they have different lifestyles.

Pessegueiro had told me about a public garden in the village. Plants purchased from a greenhouse were quickly withered because they weren't acclimatized to the local environment. She said that people began giving them plants from their gardens. The garden grew. Pessegueiro said it couldn't be prepared and made beautiful for the eyes and photos of tourists.

One of the oldest irrigation canals in the area was visited by me on my last day in Ponta do Sol. We stopped at the top of the hill in the shadow of the Esmeraldo house after climbing a colorful parade of bright painted houses. The sugar baron Joo Esmeraldo oversaw a huge plantation of cane.

The country's current popularity is often compared to its past glories. The version of history they present is completely different from reality. Madeira can become a gateway for development, for business on a global scale, according to the secretary of economy. Godinho called it another time of discovery when we talked on the phone. She said that 500 years ago, Portugal discovered the world by sea.

Madeira, the world's most spectacular cash crop boom in the 15th century, was followed by an epic crash a few decades later as its sugar economy collapsed. The pilot project was cosmopolitan from the beginning. People from mainland Portugal hauled timber and planted cane while enslaved people from the Canary Islands and the African coast built irrigation canals in the mountains. Christopher Columbus was a dear friend of Joo Esmeraldo and he was involved in maritime exploration during his time in the archipelago.

The birthplace of global racial capitalism is believed to be Madeira, an early testing ground for the slavery based island plantation economy. I did not see any evidence of this role in history. I didn't find a single use of the words "enslaved," "slavery," or "slaveation" at the sugar museum in Funchal. There is a replica of the Santa Maria in the harbor near the southern coast. For 35, the tour company will show you how this great discoverer felt as he traveled around the world.

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