(Geo)arbitraged lives: unpacking the spatio-temporal strategies of digital nomadism

Scholarly debates on digital nomadism have led to contrasting views regarding the socio-economic conditions of digital nomads. On the one hand, it is celebrated as a lifestyle that merges work and leisure through geoarbitrage, where mobile elites earn in strong economies while living in cheaper destinations, with exclusionary impacts on host cities. On the other hand, digital nomadism has also been understood as a way to cope with precarious labour conditions and economic uncertainty. Through a qualitative study of digital nomads in Lisbon, based on a longitudinal digital ethnography and semi-structured interviews, this paper seeks to challenge these contrasting perspectives by shifting the focus to the structural drivers behind digital nomadism, interrogating geoarbitrage not merely as a tool for economic optimisation, but as a complex mobility strategy shaped by personal aspirations, career opportunities, and broader socio-economic constraints. By metaphorically drawing from the concept of arbitrage in finance, the study highlights the diverse rationales behind digital nomads' mobility choices, showing how geoarbitrage is exercised as an expression of multiple differentials, these being social, economic, temporal and more. By unpacking and extending geoarbitrage, this study offers an alternative conceptualisation of digital nomadism, one that adopts a strategy-based typology to recognise the diverse motivations and structural factors driving this form of mobility to particular places and in specific temporal windows of opportunity.