Drift

About this page

Between 2013 and 2019 i wrote 103 posts on this blog. They document a slow uprooting from Berlin into the life of a digital nomad — a member of a subculture that was, at the time, still defining itself.

I wrote them as a personal diary, but reading them in order reveals something else: field notes from inside a social experiment. What happens when you remove geographic anchor from a professional life? How does work, relationships, identity, and attention reorganise around mobility? The posts are primary sources.

This page reads them as such. The story is mine, but the patterns belonged to a moment and a community. All posts can be read chronologically here, with the link fonts matching the body fonts.

The beginning

I will not forget the day in 2013 when i wrote this note: it was after presenting the first Data Visualization meetup to BerlinJS. The presentation was a success and i was moved by the potential.

A year later i was still in Berlin, but something had shifted. Haskell had ruined me for JavaScript. I spent the year hunting for ways to bring Haskell’s clarity to the browser — and began to sense that the tools i wanted did not exist in the places i was looking. This dissatisfaction with the available technology stack would become a recurring pattern: the tools determined the possible.

2015

The first pull away from Berlin. I returned to Catania, chasing the Internet’s promise of freedom. The reality was harder than the ideal — isolation where i expected liberation. I came back to Berlin, but the flat no longer fit the same way. By October i was searching for Haskell work across every channel, without success. I resolved to build it myself and created this blog. The pulling away had begun, though i did not call it that yet.

This is a common entry narrative in the subculture: a mismatch between the subject’s values and the available structures (jobs, tools, places) creates a tension that mobility seems to resolve.

2016

The year the movement became visible.

On a train from Florence to Pisa i thought about digital nomadism and coworking in Catania — already projecting myself elsewhere. A week later i was back in my Berlin flat after two months in Sicily, seeing it with new eyes. I called it “a bubble of loneliness and freedom.”

I told myself that returning was not an escape. A short note on adding clear fonts to the site. Then back to Berlin, where i was torn between the city’s momentum and the awareness that disruption was unavoidable. I wondered if i was fighting giants or windmills.

A quiet moment in the apartment — the closest i came to feeling at home. In August i attended Mangrove Education, a conference on education and community. Then fading summer: i drew a balance after a year of freelancing, depleted but still writing.

September: the long internal debate about leaving Berlin, and a coworking discovery — others shared my struggles. This is a key ethnographic detail: coworking spaces functioned as a third place where the diffuse subculture became tangible. In them, the private experience of nomading was revealed as collective.

In December i felt held back but adapting, adopting a nomadic mindset. A note on video games as education. Berlin was still home, but i was no longer anchored there.

Field observation: The platform

Throughout this period, one structure shapes everything: the freelance platform. Upwork, in particular, mediated access to work, income stability, and geographic flexibility. It appears in the posts not as a tool but as an environment with its own gravity.

In Out of the Upwork pit, i try to leave it and build Abanico, my own tool. In Trying again with liquid work, i return and analyse metrics as if optimising a trading strategy. In Investing in value, i recognise that i had been “using money as a proxy for value” — a reflection that applies as much to the platform’s incentive design as to my own psychology.

The platform demanded continuous self-quantification. Time tracking, metrics, hourly logging — the posts return to these obsessively. “The tracker became the problem,” i write in August 2017. The tools of freedom became their own cage.

This is not unique to me. The digital nomad subculture was built on the infrastructure of gig platforms, and the tension between autonomy and algorithmic management was its constitutive contradiction.

2017

The year i left. Sixty-three posts — the most intense writing year. The form itself loosened: from reflective essays to daily fragments to something like a live feed of thought, while the travelling required me to be more efficient in my writings.

January — March

The year opened in the snow, suspended between excitement and uncertainty. I wanted to quit Upwork and started Abanico.

Those were my last peaceful moments in Berlin. By March i was in Madrid, Spain, full of energy for the first nomadic experiences.

I went to a coworking and started rationalising: i wanted to fix my freelance career — my skills (solutions) did not find enough of clients’ problems. I tried again with liquid work, analysing metrics.

Then came March 24 — four posts in one day. A new rhythm emerged, writing shorter and more often before leaving the capital to travel the inner regions of Spain. I wrote a plan, a success, a constraint, a conversation. Three days later i abandoned the Mur project, defended Haskell, searched for work, and cited Horace on missing the goal. The month ended with tooling fights.

The burst of micro-posts is itself significant. With mobility, the attention fragmented. Long reflection gave way to quick capture.

April — June

In April i was in Córdoba, guest of my friend Cristina. A different rhythm. I felt energised as a nomadic engineer. I planned the “Crumbs” project. I logged my whole day, and it worked. I worked from home at night, evoking the teenage feeling of staying up late — the comfort of isolation.

In May i was again in Madrid for a month; by the end of it i expressed frustration about being unable to make my nomading sustainable. The gap between the subculture’s promise and its daily reality begins to surface.

Then a few scattered reflections: chat has its own tempo, coworking makes study hard, nomading made me a better communicator. The last one is noteworthy — it claims that mobility improved a core professional skill. Whether true or aspirational, it reflects a central belief of the subculture: that displacement itself is developmental.

Some other reflections from June in Sicily: traditional workspaces and hacking, no-Googling as hacking style, the recognition that i had been using money as a proxy for value. The tools i built and the tools i needed were diverging.

July — fragments

In July i was back to Spain, and for writing it was the most fragmented month — 21 posts, some only a sentence long. As if the motion had reached a speed where only fragments could be caught.

The first notes are from Barcelona:

As i arrived in Madrid again, guest of my friend Sandra, a burst of activity:

Everyone leaving their own itinerary. The drift became the subject as much as the practice.

Summer and Autumn

I was still in Madrid collecting ideas: walking the threshold, not all those who wander are lost. Now i would like to be less aware of meta levels, i find i think about work too much.

But then i moved to a small town in Majorca, and working was a struggle. Connection problems undermined my basic operativity, time tracking looked like a disaster. I felt like the weak link. The tracker became the problem.

This moment — the infrastructure failing in a remote town — is a common stress test for the subculture. Nomadism assumes that connectivity is universal. When it is not, the entire model fractures.

My private life was destined to take that time, and it was a time of growth. On my blog it left silence for two months.

I returned to blogging when i created a #euronomads channel, at the time i thought it would get far. A crack in my story tells about how i felt disrupted that Summer; in a positive way, but still a lot of change to take in.

While i was travelling through Majorca, some friends reached my blog. I will write with them in mind from now on.

I entered Barcelona through a different door, and while my writing was trying to convey the disruption i experienced, i was desperately in love. The post is almost unintelligible as prose. Read as a field note, it captures something accurate: the disorienting collision of romantic intensity, geographic displacement, and the pressure to produce a coherent account of oneself.

Winter starts

After the magical Summer and Autumn, i came back to Sicily. It was an humble experience in comparison with Spain, but i was full of positive energy to make the best out of it.

In December i wrote Kasaputia — a bilingual project about working openly in Ragusa.

Field observation: Communication under mobility

The posts from 2017 trace a shift in how communication works when location is variable. Several observations recur:

Async becomes primary. “Chat has its own tempo,” i note — a realisation that synchronous communication cannot be assumed when participants span time zones and infrastructure qualities.

Coworking is social, not productive. “Studying in a good coworking is not easy” because the space is designed for interaction, not depth. The coworking functioned more as a social replacement for the office than as a productivity tool.

Self-quantification intensifies. Time tracking, metrics analysis, and the constant attempt to optimise working conditions become a meta-occupation. The nomad does not just work — they work on their capacity to work.

Reliability becomes a value. The post on reliability vs presence articulates a tension specific to this mode: clients value reliability, but the nomadic condition strains it. The subculture’s answer is to make a virtue of responsiveness — to be always reachable, always online.

2018

Sixteen posts. The writing changed — less frequent, more reflective, more Italian. The drift was no longer accelerating. It was deepening.

I wrote the first posts still in Ragusa: Giorgio, Claudia, and our way out: blogs as the best medium. “Stacks” as a thinking tool. Pride in Italian public administration through free software. Different: transformation, fragmentation.

Then i started feeling like i should change again, move again: leaving a house in Ragusa (Italian), the wave is rising (Italian), Ibla or Catania: solitude or people. Disappointed by the nomad community. Over control — a short poem.

“Disappointed by the nomad community” is a revealing title. It signals a shift: the subculture that once seemed like a solution now appears as a social formation with its own inadequacies. The community that shared my struggles in 2016 became, by 2018, something i needed distance from.

In the end i decided for Catania, but only a few raw notes are left from that experience. Fragmented diary — capitalism, fear, struggle. Domestic violence in Catania. A bottom — writing as lifeline. Then back up.

After Catania i started nomading again, but my routines were completely disrupted.

July in Barcelona: Multiversum is already incomprehensible (Italian) — the old posts felt dated.

August in Sicily: confronting prejudice (Italian) — racism, sexism, a lost summer.

October in Berlin: thoughts about the next months — scarce resources, considering Pisa, Berlin, Sicily.

Field observation: The return problem

A pattern emerges across the subculture: the attempt to return.

After extended mobility, subjects try to reintegrate into a fixed location — family home, a partner’s city, a familiar region. The posts from 2018 document this attempt in Sicily. But something has changed. The old places no longer fit. The author is “different,” fragmented. The house in Ragusa must be left. The nomad community disappoints.

The movement becomes restless not just geographically but existentially. Mobility, once adopted, is hard to reverse. The skills it builds — adaptation, detachment, self-reliance — are also the skills that make settling difficult. The drift, it turns out, has an inertia of its own.

2019

I decided to move to Barcelona, there my blog died after two posts.

Deleting remote work notes: old Upwork files gone, attitude changed.

Watershed: A comprehensive research note — task management, Vue vs React, IPFS, the multiversum concept. It was like a core dump before giving up, the last post for years to come.

The silence after March 2019 is not a failure of the subculture or of the individual. It is what happens when the tension that drove the documentation resolves — or when it stops producing intelligible language. The field notes end because the observer stopped being able to observe from inside the experience.

Findings

Reading these 103 posts as a single corpus, several patterns surface that may be characteristic of the digital nomad subculture between 2015 and 2019:

1. Freedom and quantification are entangled. The pursuit of geographic freedom produces a parallel need for self-measurement. Time tracking, income logging, metrics analysis — these are not external impositions but internal responses to the loss of external structure. The nomad manages the self as a remote asset.

2. Mobility accelerates fragmentation. The post form itself changes under mobility: long essays in 2015-2016, daily fragments by mid-2017, silence by 2019. Attention span, like location, becomes temporary. The medium tracks the condition.

3. The platform is inescapable. Upwork and similar platforms are the hidden infrastructure of the lifestyle. Every attempt to leave them fails. The freedom of nomadism is, in practice, a more intense relationship with algorithmic management — just experienced as autonomy.

4. Coworking replaces community. In the absence of geographic community, coworking spaces become the primary site of social reproduction for the subculture. They are not productive spaces. They are belonging spaces.

5. The return is not possible. Once the geographic anchor is lifted, it cannot be easily restored. The drift has inertia. The attempt to return home in 2018 produces some of the most raw and fragmented writing — and ultimately, more movement.

6. The blog was the field site. The act of writing was not separate from the experience. It was the method by which the experience became intelligible. When the writing stopped, it was not because the experience ended, but because it could no longer be translated into this form.

The blog did not end. It became a document of its own limits.