In 2017, British journalist David Goodhart offered an enlightening read of Western politics. In The Road to Somewhere, he split our societies into two broad groups. The “Anywheres,” about a quarter of the population, were university-educated, urban and mobile. Their identity relied on degrees and successful careers. The “Somewheres,” more numerous, were less educated. They had strong roots in one place and believed in nation and family. For Goodhart, being an Anywhere meant being on the winning side of globalization, often progressive, open to change and comfortable with diversity. Therefore the Somewheres felt left behind. That’s why Brexit and Donald Trump’s first election were read as the Somewheres’ revenge. Goodhart’s framework quickly became popular with academics, consultants and politicians.
Almost ten years later, however, the framework seems somewhat dated. I’m someone who has lived much of her working life thinking of herself as an Anywhere, between Paris, London and Munich. Now I am struck by how much the balance of advantages seems to have shifted. And this has huge implications for how we organize work and think about the future.
1. The loudest Anywheres changed sides
The most visible Anywheres are the people who sell the tools of placelessness: Silicon Valley founders, AI evangelists, crypto believers, and the whole work-from-anywhere industry. Many of them have now moved sharply to the right. They now reject progressivism, DEI programs and workers’ rights, resent taxes, dismiss climate concerns and treat governments as obstacles. Marc Andreessen published a Techno-Optimist Manifesto in 2023 casting regulators and critics of technology as enemies of progress, then backed Trump in 2024, calling a proposed tax on unrealized capital gains “the final straw.” Peter Thiel, who obtained New Zealand citizenship after spending just 12 days there, put $15 million into J.D. Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign and helped launch the career of America First’s most prominent young voice. What a paradox! For two decades, these men sold the cultural values of the Anywheres along with their software: mobility, openness, networks without borders, the idea that where you come from matters less than what you build. Now they fund nationalist movements built on the opposite belief.
In their new book, End Times Fascism, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor describe these tech billionaires who plan their escape to bunkers, floating cities or Mars, instead of repairing the world they live in. Anywhere but here, they seem to say. Klein and Taylor recall that in 2021, Jeff Bezos sent William Shatner, Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, into space aboard Blue Origin who later drew a thoroughly Somewhere lesson: “the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here.”
True, the rightward drift belongs to a very rich minority that owns the digital tools we use. But that minority sets the tone of the digital economy a lot of us find ourselves in. They no longer pretend that mobility and openness go together. Their mobility is only an escape from the rest of us.
2. The ordinary Anywhere lifestyle has lost some of its shine
Digital platforms were first sold as networks. They promised you could make friends anywhere, stay in touch with relatives across the globe and reach any professional directly (which was true of Twitter at some point). But these platforms have since turned into social media, entertainment feeds optimized for clicks and designed to capture your attention and your wallet, with very strong and debilitating geographic targeting. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and even LinkedIn have followed the path Cory Doctorow calls enshittification.
The lifestyle has also become harder to afford. In large global cities, housing costs have risen faster than incomes, and mobile people pay the steepest price because they are always the newcomers on the market. You can retreat to cheaper places for part of the year, but rarely all of it. Covid, the war in Ukraine, inflation and the war with Iran pushed up the price of everything an Anywhere relies on: restaurants, transportation, housing, healthcare, international schools, health coverage, travel. Only the very rich can still live this way painlessly. Meanwhile, insiders anchored in one place pay less for the same life. They have support networks, housing bought or rented years ago at older prices, subscriptions locked in at old rates, and enough local knowledge to find cheaper options.
I lived this shift. When I moved from Paris to London in the mid-2010s, it felt glorious: I was mobile, connected, a Eurostar ride away from my friends. Brexit changed all of that. Today I would need a visa to work there, there are border controls, and housing and everyday costs have soared. The same move would be far harder now, and I’m not sure I would want to make it, because many of us heard the message that foreigners were no longer welcome. Moving to Munich during Covid then taught me a similar lesson: the city was expensive and offered fewer services because of the pandemic, and the energy-driven inflation since the war in Ukraine, made worse by the war with Iran, has put the “good life” out of reach for all but a few.
Covid also exposed the loneliness of mobile remote workers. Loose, far-flung networks work well in good times and poorly in bad ones, and many digital nomads say they feel isolated.
3. The Somewheres (and the Anywheres) are more diverse than we thought
The image of a homogeneous, resentful, rural Somewhere does not hold up. The French countryside, for example, contains the same class divisions as cities: a single village can house a food-processing worker, a large grain farmer and a corporate executive. Farmers now account for less than 10% of the French rural workforce, while blue-collar and clerical workers make up the majority. What separates cities from the countryside is mostly density and access to services.
American data point the same way. Farming accounted for about 6% of rural employment in 2015, manufacturing for 11%. In 2024, health care and social assistance had the largest share of nonmetro employment (14.1%), followed by manufacturing… A rural American is more likely to work in a hospital, a nursing home or a factory than on a farm. Rural America is also less white than its image: between 2010 and 2020, Hispanics grew to 9% of rural residents and Black Americans to 7.7%, and nearly a third of rural children now belong to a minority. A rural county in Mississippi and one in Montana have little in common beyond low density. It’s true that denser areas tend to lean more progressive. But even when they don’t vote alike, people lead lives that aren’t necessar dissimilar.
The Anywheres were never a single class. Most people who cross borders do not belong to the laptop class. In London, where I lived before Brexit among hundreds of thousands of French people, most of the French expats were restaurant workers (only a few were finance people in the city). The IOM’s World Migration Report 2026 counts about 304 million international migrants in mid-2024, 3.7% of the world’s population. In 2022, migrant workers made up nearly 60% of that population. To them we should add 41.6 million refugees and 9 million asylum-seekers at the end of 2025. These are the most mobile people on the planet, and among the least privileged. They did not choose placelessness as a lifestyle, and in the United States ICE agents now pursue a lot of them on farms, in factories and on construction sites.
Treating mobility as a marker of privilege may be the most misleading idea in the whole Somewheres/Anywheres framework, and the most dangerous one. It erases the economic value created by the movement of millions of people who are not rich. Migrants sustain the places they left: remittances are projected to reach $905 billion, $685 billion of which go to low- and middle-income countries, and India alone received more than $137 billion in 2024. Mobility itself is not the privilege. What the laptop class enjoys is the right to move safely and legally, which most migrants are denied.
The return of “here”
Klein and Taylor offer a counter-idea they call “hereness,” borrowed from the Jewish Labour Bund, a socialist movement founded in the 19th century: a commitment to a place and to the people who live there, wherever they come from. Their main example is Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor of New York. He won by celebrating neighborhoods, bodegas, subway rides and the immigrant workers who keep the city running, while promising concrete things like lower rents and universal childcare.
The example is interesting because New York used to be described as the ultimate Anywhere city. Mamdani showed that people can be cosmopolitan and rooted at once. The Anywhere/Somewhere opposition does not take this into account.
Local is also where people find support when national institutions falter. Governments in France keep collapsing. American politics is in turmoil. Where the welfare state frays, neighbors, local associations and mutual aid networks fill some of the gaps.
And local is where resistance happens. Across the United States, communities have blocked or delayed data center projects over water use, electricity prices and noise. For an investor, a data center is infrastructure for a placeless economy. But for the local people, it is a series of costs and negative externalities.
So who’s winning now? The ultra-rich Anywhere is more powerful than ever. But the middle-class Anywhere, with a good degree and a laptop, is more exposed: living costs are rising, networks are thinner, and AI threatens a large share of knowledge work. Meanwhile, the well-anchored Somewhere has something that has become scarce, namely people nearby who will show up when national politics and the economy fail.
Lessons for business and politics
#1 Place is an asset again. Companies that treat locations as interchangeable, whether offices, plants or data centers, will run into local opposition. Engaging communities early and sharing the benefits (jobs, tax revenue, lower energy bills) is now part of the cost of building anything.
#2 Remote work needs anchors. Distributed companies should invest in local hubs, coworking options and regular in-person time. Employee loneliness is also a retention and productivity problem.
#3 Look beyond the stereotypes when hiring. Rural and small-town labor markets are more varied than the “left behind” narrative suggests. Firms that recruit there, or let people stay there while working remotely, gain access to talent their competitors overlook.
#4 Politics starts close to home. Today’s most successful campaigns combine pride of place with concrete economic promises. For companies, that means local governments, mayors and community groups deserve as much attention as national capitals.
Ten years ago, being from somewhere looked like weakness. Today, not so much.
