I am getting close to hitting the pandemic wall. Like many of you, I have been trying to be safe, following the rules, limiting my social contacts. Not getting on planes, going to any f2f meetings or even driving very much. I think last year my wife and I put a grand total of 6,000 miles on our car. So here is my current fantasy: becoming a digital nomad and living in some foreign country.

It is very ironic, this fantasy, because to some extent I already am a digital nomad, just without any of the nomadic travels. I have had my own freelance writing and speaking business now for several decades, but always have had a nearby office. (Mine is across the street from my home, but it could be anywhere in the world). Yet all my work is done for clients remotely. In some cases, I haven’t ever met some of them f2f. I was talking about this with my accountant, who lives just a few miles away. She and I have worked together for more than a decade but have never physically met.

In years past, I was semi-nomadic: I did a fair amount of travel to industry events, to speak at conferences, or to work with my clients at their offices. But now, thanks to the pandemic, that is all off the table. There is also an upside to the pandemic though: some companies have loosened their remote work restrictions and no longer care where in the world you work, just as long as you have the connectivity, the tools, and the time zones that you consider part of your workday firmly in place. This last issue is important: if your employer expects to find you at your desk or online at a certain time, you need to structure your day accordingly, wherever in the world you might be.

If you are considering becoming a digital nomad, you might want to study up on how to make the transition, as well as to figure out where in the world the Global You HQ will set up shop. Now is certainly the time to think about this, especially as many countries are trying to make it easier for nomads to settle – in some cases for years or more. Here are two resources that have the most current info on which countries are offering this arrangement, one from GodSaveThePoints and one from TravelOffPath. The list is somewhat fluid, as countries are changing the rules and evolving their Covid restrictions often at the same time. You can see some countries have placed income requirements: they want to attract nomads who have resources and income to come, and who will continue to work and earn their livings there. If you are just starting to think about becoming a digital nomad, there are dozens of blogs that describe the process, such as this one on TwoWanderingSoles.

In the past, pre-pandemic, nomads usually worked in a country under the radar, using 90-day tourist visas. You can still do this, if you understand that when the time is up, you literally must pack your bags and get out of Dodge. You can then find your next post and take up another 90-day residency. But that can get tiresome. And it could be risky: in these Covid times, you might not be able to get on any flights and then you would be in trouble when you try to leave on an expired visa. So that is where the digital nomad visa comes into play. Actually, the name is somewhat misleading, because it really is a temporary residency permit for an extended period of time.

I spoke to Bryan Cooley, who is a serial tech entrepreneur that I met when he was living in St. Louis. He has lived in various places around the world and now spends half the year in Manila as a permanent resident. He has spent at least a week in more than 130 countries and dozens where he has lived at least a month. I asked Bryan about his Internet connectivity, and he told me it has never been an issue. “I have had better connectivity than back in the US, even in some very remote areas.” Certainly, Covid has disrupted his travel plans: for example, even though he is a permanent resident in the Philippines, under current rules he can’t return if he leaves during the pandemic. He is looking into getting residency in Australia. He feels the digital nomad visas are mostly marketing efforts: “There are so many people traveling and going where they want to live. It has been going on for a long time. These programs are very limited in terms of numbers.”

A tech writer colleague of mine, Sharon Fisher, decided to go nomadic last fall, and has been to both Aruba (from October to January) and is now in Bermuda with her partner. I asked her how she ended up in these two places. She said that first she examined if Americans could enter the country, how their Covid cases were being handled, and what kind of broadband internet was available. Part of her Covid research was in understanding how onerous their quarantine protocols were. “We didn’t mind testing and staying home for a while, but we didn’t want to have to each pay $5000 to be sequestered for 14 days in a specific hotel on arrival.”

Next, they looked at the AirBnB situation, and so far they have had great experiences with the hosts they stayed at. They also need to have a close time zone to US operations: “we looked at Saipan (an island in the middle of the South Pacific) but that meant having to work in the middle of their night,” she told me.

Her biggest issues so far were groceries, transportation and bandwidth. “Food is more expensive than we anticipated, milk and produce in particular. Rental cars in Aruba were expensive but necessary. There are no rental cars in Bermuda, so we take the bus. Internet has been fine in the AirBnBs, including streaming video, with two people using the Internet just about constantly.” They also have T-Mobile cellular coverage which enables international data roaming but they eventually bought local SIM cards in Aruba.

What about her travel in the time of the Covid? “Ironically, it’s actually kind of been easier because Covid has reduced the number of choices we’ve had to make, and everyplace is less crowded. But the hardest part about traveling now is the existential question of ‘should we be doing this?’ The people in Aruba were very appreciative that some travelers were still coming, because of how dependent their economy is on tourism. Also, both countries have had much lower incidences of Covid than where we were in the US, and people seem to take it far more seriously. We personally have been much safer in these countries than we would have been in the US, and we have taken all the steps we can to ensure that the people in the other countries are safe as well. We realize what a privilege we have, and we appreciate it.”

If you are thinking about becoming a nomad, here are a few more points that I want to make. First, learn as much about the expat culture of your target destination. There is a difference between expats – people from elsewhere who intend to live there for the long haul – and nomads, who might not want to stick around or who want to travel as part of their newfound freedom. Bryan mentioned these communities might not be everyone’s cup of tea: “there are a lot of nomads who don’t really know what they are doing.”

Second, look at places that are specifically focusing on startups, such as Madeira.  Their website offers links to coworking places, long-term housing rentals, and other aspects of their support for digital nomads. Yes, the number of people that will be accepted to this program is small, and Americans can’t yet travel there — but it represents an interesting step in the nomad field. Next, don’t forget about your digital entertainment. If you expect your streaming services to deliver the same programming you have gotten in the US you might want to experiment with various VPNs. Also, understand the Covid vaccination program at your destination. Sharon mentioned that her “current plan is to stay in Bermuda through March, return to the US, get vaccinated, then see what options we have. If we aren’t yet able to get vaccinated, we will likely stay in Bermuda until we can. So far as I know we can stay for up to a year.”

Finally, learn about the changes that the EU has in store for its visa requirements in the near future. That could influence how your plans evolve once we are finally out of the pandemic.

A new report from the Anti-Defamation League has reviewed the stated hate speech policies of nine different social media platforms. Unlike other studies, it also tests their responsiveness to user reports of violations of those policies. The ADL is an organization that has been operating for more than 100 years trolling (literally) these waters. They were specifically interested in how social media propagated posts made by Holocaust deniers across their networks. They scored each platform in terms of intentions and how they performed in terms of preventing hate speech on such issues such as:

• Did the platform investigate the report and promptly respond (defined as within 24 hours) to the complaint?
• Do users of each platform understand why it has made a certain content decision based on its stated policies?
• Did the platform take any actual action once something was reported?

You can see a part of their report card above. Before I get to the grades given for answering these and other questions, I want to talk about my own personal experience with Holocaust denial. About four years ago, my sister and I went to Poland to see the places where our mom’s family came from. One of our cousins did some genealogy research and found an ancestor who lived in a small town in northeast Poland who was a rabbinical judge back in the 1870s. One of the stops on our trip was to visit Auschwitz, and you can read my thoughts about that day here.

One of the exhibits at the site was about the German engineering firm that designed the mass extermination equipment. For years, the copies of the original drawings used to build this gear were kept from public view by the denier network. But eventually they were sold to someone who flipped from being a denier to someone who realized the legitimacy of these plans, and that’s how we were able to finally see them.

Several years ago I attended a lecture by Jan Grabowski, a history professor from Ottawa. He has done extensive research into Polish Holocaust history, despite the current denier political climate where he and his research associates and colleagues have been threatened and in some cases jailed for their work. Grabowski is affiliated with the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw which is attempting to find primary source records to document what happened during those dark times. Add to this a recent survey of millennials that found that 56% of the respondents could not even identify what Auschwitz was about.

From these two personal moments, I realize that we need more evidence-based approaches and to disseminate facts rather than fiction or misdirection. That is where the social networks come into play, because they have become the superhighway of these fictions. Let’s not even glorify them by using the term “alternative facts.”

Let’s return to the report card. Sadly, only Twitter and Twitch acted against the Holocaust denial content reported. No network got any A grades across the ADL’s rubric, to no surprise. Twitch, the gaming social network, scored B’s. Twitter and You Tube got C’s. Facebook and others received grades of D.

Based on its research, the ADL has some recommendations:

• Tech companies must make changes to their products to prioritize users’ safety over engagement and reduce hateful content on their platforms.
• All the platforms need to do a better job on transparency. They should provide users with more information on how they make their decisions regarding content moderation. This is especially urgent, given the recent decisions to terminate several high-profile accounts.

You can read others at the link above. My final point: yes, censoring hate speech — whether it about the Holocaust or whatever — is destructive to our society. Just look at the mob that swarmed across our Capitol earlier this month. The social networks have to decide whether they can step up to the task. And while it bothers me that we have to censor the most dangerous of hate speakers, we do have to recognize their danger.

I have written before about my love affair with telephone central offices. This past week, we all now know where Nashville’s CO is located, and we mourn for the people of that city. Nashville is a city that I have been to numerous times, for fun and for business. Little did I realize as I walked among the honky tonk bars and restaurants on Second Street that I was passing by its main CO, which offers a wide range of communication services.

Like the CO that was buried by the collapse of the World Trade Center back in 2001, there was a lot of water damage from the firefighters, and the Nashville repairs were hampered by having to work around the crime scene investigators. But still, within a few days AT&T was able to get various services back up and running, including 911 and airport communications, along with wired and cellular services. The company deployed a series of portable cell towers around the region. The lines that went through this CO connected not just Nashville but areas that were in adjoining states.

This is the conundrum of the CO: in the early days of telephony, they had to be located in densely populated areas, because stringing copper lines from each termination point cost money. To shorten the lines, they had to put them near the people and businesses that they were connecting. This means that you can’t easily protect them with physical barricades a la Fort Knox (or other government buildings). Plus, there are more than 20,000 COs in the US by some estimates. That is a lot of real estate to protect or potentially relocate.

COs are also relatively easy to find, even though many of them are located in nondescript building in major urban areas. My own CO sits like Nashville’s across from a similar collection of restaurants and commercial businesses. There are websites lovingly constructed by other fans of telecom, such as this one or this one that show photos of the actual buildings (although you will have to work a bit to find their street addresses). In my blog post from 2018, I posted pictures of several COs that I have been to, including one on Long Island where I brought my high school networking class on a field trip back in 2001.

Whether or not the bomber was intentionally targeting AT&T’s CO or not, one thing is pretty clear to me: these COs are the weak points in any terror campaign. I don’t have any real solutions to offer up here, just an aching spot in my heart for the men and women that have built them and keep them running.

N.B. This is the last day of a horrible year, a year punctuated with my own personal health story that had nothing to do with Covid. I want to send out a note of thanks to all of you that took the time to send me your support, and hope that you found your own support team to help you along as well. Here is my wish that 2021 will be better for all of us, and that we can support and care for each other to make it so.