Digital nomads: Putting ideas into practice in a Portuguese village | Economy and Business

Today’s digital nomads require special treatment. That is the conclusion reached by Dave Cook, a British anthropologist and writer who has spent the last seven years documenting the evolution of this peculiar urban tribe, to which Cook once felt he belonged.

In 2015, Cook went to Bangkok, Thailand, to attend one of the first international summits of the then-new breed of nomads. There, he came into contact with a collective of open-minded, restless and shrewd millennials who were determined to take the world by storm. They were mostly men who “dressed in Bermuda shorts and nautical polo shirts” and always toted their laptops around in backpacks. They looked like the young attendees at a Silicon Valley corporate meeting in the lobby of a Florida hotel and had nothing of the hippie aesthetics usually associated with backpackers.

Listening to presentations by the incipient…