Daily Balajisms - Longitudinal arbitrage

Digital nomadism in the age of remote work and Starlink

Balaji Srinivasan says that Starlink will reprice the real estate around the world and enable longitudinal arbitrage. Suddenly you can run an online business from a lodge or a ranch in the middle of nowhere.

And suddenly even remote areas of Northern Europe and Southern Africa are close to each other, because fast satellite internet erases the distance, but time zones’ proximity remains important.

This empowers not just individuals, but will help also sovereign collectives to crowdfund territories, build startup towns with off-grid and prefab houses, and thus launch new network archipelagos.  

While Starlink is an important technological innovation, remote work is an important cultural and moral innovation that might endure and become the norm in many workplaces also after the Covid-19 pandemics.

Balaji talks about how social progress in the past was accompanied by technological progress and vice versa. Campaigns to promote better hygiene, with slogans like “cleanliness is next to godliness” were accompanied by a roll-out of modern sewage systems.

But in the last 50 years the rate of technological progress in atoms stagnated and most of progress happened in bits, as Peter Thiel famously said: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”

Balaji has a bit different view. He sees the progress in bits as vital to enable individual or collective exit (see Exit, Voice and Loyalty) and cut the obligate ties to the land, one by one. Social networks helped us gain voice and stay in touch with our friends, who often don’t know where are we currently based. Balaji says, that even the question “Where are you?” is a very modern question, and made sense only after the invention of mobile telephones.

Starlink is a technological innovation that gradually opens the map for online business everywhere. I remember back in 2012 how internet was relatively fast(er) in Kenyan towns like Voi, but super slow in villages.

Some villages lacked mobile signal. Outside the villages, in ranches and lodges, the signal was sporadic. We were organizing school competitions and video calls between rural schools in Slovakia and Kenya. And the internet connection, with frequent power blackouts, was very sketchy and frustrating.  

Earlier this year Starlink has received a lot of media coverage. Soon after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, SpaceX deployed Starlink satellite internet service in a few hours after the company made the decision. And physical devices were delivered within 48 hours. SpaceX supported Ukraine with $80m worth of services and equipment, helping Ukrainians to stay connected and share their message.   

The last decade of populism was about nationalist “people from somewhere” versus cosmopolitan and globalist “people from anywhere”. This “anywhere” usually meant some Western-aligned financial hub, like London or Tokyo.

But Starlink can enable a third group of people - digital nomads and protopians. Or as Alexander Bard calls them: “people from everywhere”.