One of the first modern coworking spaces, C-Base in Berlin, was launched 30 years ago by a group of computer engineers as a “hacker space” in which to share their tech and techniques. Similarly, many of the people we first encountered in our anthropological research into the emerging world of digital nomadism in the mid-2010s were hackers and computer coders.

Nearly a decade later, we returned to Chiang Mai to see what had happened to these pioneers of the borderless, desk-free life. We wondered if they had been put off by the throngs of travellers who have followed in their sandal-clad footsteps, attracted by glamorous – if often inaccurate – images of the digital nomad lifestyle.

One of the city’s nomad hotspots is Yellow Coworking, which launched in 2020 as a blockchain-oriented, collaborative escape zone from the COVID pandemic. The later stages of the pandemic were an interesting time to be in Chiang Mai: Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was followed by mass layoffs in Silicon Valley when Twitter, Meta, Coinbase and Microsoft all made significant........

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