Nomadic life dates back to the pre-agriculture days of nomadic hunter-gatherers. Without farming humans were often forced to move around to find food.

Before digital nomadism even existed, it was widely predicted for decades.

1964

In 1964, Arthur C. Clarke, a futurist and writer of the film "2001: A Space Odyssey", predicted digital nomads working from Bali in 2014, an eerily accurate prediction up to the specific year:

1983

In 1983, Robert Noyce, the founder of processor-maker Intel, predicted the end of commuting, the rise of remote workers and people living "where it's conducive to live, not where it's conducive to work":

That same year, Steve Roberts, a technology hacker from Columbus, OH in the U.S., quit his job, put a solar panel on his bicycle, packed up one of the first laptops ever built, the Tandy 100 and started a 27,000 kilometer (or 17,000 mile) journey while using the predecessor of the internet, ARPANET, to stay connected. By any record he was the first digital nomad ever. He presented about it in 1989 at the legendary Xerox PARC:

1990

The nineties saw the term "telecommuting" on the rise and a failed push by networking companies like Bell Atlantic to get people to work from home:

1997

Then in 1997, Tsugio Makimoto, one of Japan's most famous semiconductor innovators, was the first to coin the term "Digital Nomad" in a book with the same name. He predicted the rise of portable internet connected devices which would allow people to travel and live wherever they want as their work could be done on their devices, wherever they are. In the years after, telecommuting as a term became popular and increasingly people started working from home.

In the same year, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg wrote The Sovereign Individual, a very influential book making big predictions for the next decades, amongst them location independent individuals with online businesses using cyber currency (crypto?) while countries and cities compete for them by attracting them with benefits:

"The computer revolution, in the authors' dire scenario, will subvert and destroy the nation-state as globalized cybercommerce, lubricated by cybercurrency, drastically limits governments' powers to tax. They further predict that the next millennium will see an enormous decline in the influence of politicians, lobbyists, labor unions and regulated professions as new information technologies democratize talent and innovation and decentralize the workplace. In their forecast, citizenship will become obsolete; new forms of sovereignty reminiscent of medieval merchant republics will spring up; electronic plebiscites will decide legislative proposals; mafias, renegade covert agencies and criminal gangs will exercise much more behind-the-scenes power. Davidson and Rees-Mogg, who publish Strategic Investment, a financial newsletter, present an apocalyptic exercise that is unconvincing. Appendices offer advice to "Sovereign Individuals" (members of the information elite) on how to invest, find tax shelters, avoid criminals and list one's business on the World Wide Web." — Publishers Weekly

2007 - 2013 - The first wave: vigilante pioneers

In 2007, Tim Ferriss wrote the 4-Hour Work Week. It described people building online businesses and using economic arbitrage (e.g. living in cheaper places while making money in expensive places). With internet connectivity rising everywhere, the technology was now just about ready for people to actually nomad and his book started the first wave of people doing it.

In 2008, the Economist dedicated a special report to digital nomads called "nomads at last" describing "our nomadic future". It didn't get much attention back then but The Economist was maybe a decade ahead of its time reporting and predicting it so early and accurately, even its negative consequences:

"Will it be a better life? In some ways, yes. Digital nomadism will liberate ever more knowledge workers from the cubicle prisons of Dilbert cartoons. But the old tyranny of place could become a new tyranny of time, as nomads who are “always on” all too often end up—mentally—anywhere but here (wherever here may be). As for friends and family, permanent mobile connectivity could have the same effect as nomadism: it might bring you much closer to family and friends, but it may make it harder to bring in outsiders. It might isolate cliques. Sociologists fret about constant e-mailers and texters losing the everyday connections to casual acquaintances or strangers who may be sitting next to them in the café or on the bus." — The Economist

The first wave of digital nomadism received some criticism for incentivizing people "to escape the 9 to 5" as fast as possible by chasing short-term profits with low-value products, shady business models like multi-level marketing, get-rich-quick schemes, spamdexing, selling illegal drugs from abroad, and blackhat affiliate marketing, while living in cheap places like Thailand. Nonetheless, those first nomads where the pioneers of a movement.

The first wave of nomadism transformed it from a theoretical concept written about for decades by futurists, into a real life activity that people tried out. But it was still a niche fringe, far from the mainstream, and the scene was too dodgy for regular people to join.

2014 - 2020 - The second wave: tech workers

After 2007's first wave of nomadism, it had been stagnant for quite awhile from 2010 on. At the same time though, telecommuting had transformed into remote work and had started to be adopted by many startups. It made working from home normal for millions of tech workers around the world, but especially in Silicon Valley. This created the perfect environment for the second wave of nomadism starting with the launch of Nomad List in 2014.

"Digital nomadism became recognised as a mainstream phenomenon in 2014–15 when dedicated online communities emerged (e.g. Nomad List)"
— Daniel Schlagwein of the University of Sydney writes in "The History of Digital Nomadism"

Nomad List launched in July 2014 and went to the top of Product Hunt, Hacker News, hit Reddit's frontpage, and was continously covered by the New York Times, CNN, BBC, The Guardian, CNBC and most other major media outlets.

Nomad List was targeted at a different audience than the first wave of nomadism, it was for the people who could already work remotely: the web developers and designers working for companies with real customers, but who were still working from home.

Starting with a simple list of cities with their internet speed and cost of living, Nomad List was able to give people who could already work remotely the realization that they could now start working from anywhere in the world. Data on nomad hubs already existed before, but it was dispersed over thousands of blogs that varied in quality.

Nomad List steadily became the most popular website related to digital nomads and location independent remote workers in the world. Since its launch, Nomad List has received 151,670,660 visits, gets 5,187,396 visits per year and has become a multi-million dollar business.

The rise of nomad hubs and multi-city living

The top places on Nomad List became overnight nomad hubs. Chiang Mai was the original nomad hub from the first wave of nomadism, but from just tens of nomads there back in 2013, it grew to thousands of nomads by 2016.

New nomad hubs also sprung up after Chiang Mai: first Ubud in Bali in 2015, which before that was a hippie spot (e.g. Eat, Pray, Love) but with the founding of Hubud Coworking started attracting nomads.

Meanwhile another place in Bali few had heard of called Canggu, an hour's drive from Ubud, had just turned from a fishing village into a surfer's hotspot. "Canggu is still relatively underdeveloped" the owner of a popular surfer's bar said in 2014:

But as the internet speed in Canggu started improving, it started to rank as a really attractive place for nomads on Nomad List:

And within a few years it turned into one of the most most popular remote work hubs in the world and rapidly developed:

For Americans, Medellin sprung up as the first real nomad hub near them in 2015, but then Mexico City surpassed as the most popular nomad hotspot in the Americas in 2018. Meanwhile in Europe, Budapest became a popular hub in 2016, due to its low cost, especially for European standards.

More recently Ko Pha Ngan in Thailand, Lisbon in Portugal and many places in Mexico are seeing a surge of nomads.

What the next nomad spot will be is hard to predict. You can study the trends page, to get a rough idea. Nomads seek affordability, mild to warm climates, and above all fast internet, clicking that link might show you the next hotspot.

The rise of an ecosystem

2014's second wave of nomadism also sprung up many more businesses targeting location independent remote workers. Hacker Paradise was the first company organizing group travels for nomads. Soon after Remote Year started offering a similar product. Besides coworking spaces, now coliving spaces also started around the world. In 2015, companies like Selina started offering shared housing with other remote workers in hotspots around the world and Coworker.com started indexing coworking spaces everywhere for remote workers to find spaces to work within cities. In 2016, the first documentary about the rise of digital nomads came out called One Way Ticket. With regular travel and health insurance companies not wanting to insure nomads, in 2017, SafetyWing became the first company to start offering health insurance specifically for nomads.

As with any new market, most companies failed, but a few succesful ones remained and now an ecosystem of companies targeting location independent remote workers is flourishing.

The second wave of nomadism transformed it from a niche fringe enabled by early technology to a socio-cultural movement participated in by hundreds of thousands of people in hundreds of nomad hubs and made it well-known in the mainstream.

2021 - 2028: The third wave: the mainstream

In 2020, the sudden Coronavirus pandemic forced people and companies to adopt and embrace remote work, as the virus caused lockdowns of entire societies for billions of people around the world. This might start the next wave of nomadism as people working from home for the first time will realize they can work from anywhere, and many won't want to return back to the traditional work setup. The effects of this, we are starting to see in 2021 as traveling recovers and masses of people are starting to live nomadically.

Location independence is a direct consequence of the enabling of remote work, and as remote work becomes mainstream in the next decade, it will closely follow in adoption. The prediction is that it will push it into the mainstream permanently starting in high-income regions like US, Canada, Europe and Australia from 2021.

What we're seeing now is the greatest migration in human history. Companies like Airbnb are seeing it happen in their data now too:

Nomadism as a term will become less relevant and instead we will see the migration to and movement between multiple cities as remote work hubs, which will be places with high quality of life, great affordability and active social ecosystems for remote workers. Different places will cater to different niches and subcultures of remote workers. Not everyone will want to live in the typical hubs like Bali. Think of people living in places where they can work remotely and at the same time actively pursue their sports or hobbies. Ski resorts, cabins in nature or maybe Burning Man-style off-grid villages.

In 2024, Nomad List celebrated its 10 years anniversary and renamed to Nomads.com. It represents the millions of nomads now living and working remotely from around the world, not tied to a single place but making the entire globe their home.

2028 - 2035 - The fourth wave

The prediction is that by 2035 there will be a billion people working remotely around the world away from their home countries at least part of the year.

Where until now it's been mostly people from high-income countries working remotely and going nomad, the most interesting part of the fourth wave ironically might be how it can enable people from South and South East Asia, Africa and other currently low and middle-income countries to work remotely around the world and make it accessible for everyone.