"When the world shut down in 2020, Sam Anthony lost the freewheeling life she'd built - full-time house-sitting, stringing together gigs while moving from country to country and city to city. She ended up in Buffalo, New York, a place where she'd gone to high school and sworn never to return. There, despite her initial reluctance, she regrouped, crashing in a student apartment and finding a remote writing job for a travel site."
"As more Americans look abroad for relief from high housing costs, political rancor, and burnout, demand for visas and remote work is surging, but so are the obstacles. Anthony sees a bottleneck now, in part because the very jobs that once allowed for location independence - content writing, editing, website maintenance, other freelance digital work - are being squeezed by AI."
"The online economy of website traffic has been shaken by AI, too, making it harder to earn a living from small online businesses. At the same time, many of the countries that built "nomad visa" programs are quietly tightening their rules, while employers that tolerated far-flung teams are pulling people closer. Borderless work is running into borders, from the economic to the legal."
Sam Anthony lost her location-independent lifestyle when the 2020 shutdown disrupted house-sitting and gig work, then saw a remote writing job evaporate amid algorithm changes and AI. Jobs that enabled geographic freedom—content writing, editing, website maintenance and other freelance digital work—are increasingly threatened by AI automation. The online advertising and website-traffic economy has weakened, reducing income for small online businesses. Several countries with nomad visa programs are tightening eligibility, and many employers are reversing remote policies in favor of returning to the office. Demand for visas and remote work is rising even as legal, economic, and corporate barriers make leaving harder.
Read at Quartz
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]