I open the door to a bedroom with an attached bathroom and enclosed porch, sparsely furnished with allwhite side tables, dresser and bed, but no desk or television. The room's white walls lack even the desultory kitsch of hotel art, which I never thought I would miss until it was gone. My suitcase is the only sign of human life. I don't feel haunted; I feel like the ghost.

The next morning, I meet Roam's founder, Bruno Haid, a tall 40-year-old Austrian who lives out of a single black duffel bag and wears only black and white. At this stage he's fully nomadic, with no apartment of his own, preferring instead to crash with friends or at his company's residences. We'd made plans to meet the night before, but he fell asleep while working in bed in one of the other identically outfitted rooms. We convene in the courtyard and walk out the Roam gate into the neighbourhood for breakfast at a Cuban coffee stand. Haid is dressed for the heat, in canvas sneakers, a thin white T-shirt and black shorts. His eyes are a shocking pale blue, and he sports no fewer than three man-buns: two in his wiry dark hair and one in his beard.

"How's your Spanish?" Haid asks me with slight trepidation as we near the coffee stand. I tell him I stopped studying in middle school. He enunciates carefully in English: "I'll have a cor-ta-di-to." Like many people who are most at home in airports, Haid has an aura of unbelonging. It isn't just his lack of street Spanish that betrays him as a non-local, or the profuse sweat he breaks into in the sun. It's as if he isn't really occupying the same space as me. And, in a way, he isn't. Haid's entire pitch is that cities and countries can be refashioned as backdrops behind a laptop screen, to be swapped smoothly at will. Indeed, a glossy placelessness is part of Roam's core product. "You always need a sense of place and home," Haid says later in the day, as we wander through the area's blocks of rundown apartments. "The question is, does it need to be geographical?"

Though he doesn't look the part, Haid spent much of his life in the hospitality business. He grew up at his family's small inn in Obergurgl, a tiny Alpine village in Austria with 5000 inhabitants in winter and only a handful in summer. He spent most of his time alone in nature, escaping the inn's tight communal quarters. "Our living room was literally the guest room," he says. He didn't have his own bedroom, forcing an early adjustment to sharing space, something he hated as a boy.

Yet the flow of tourists through Obergurgl gave Haid a hint of the wider world, which he escaped into as soon as he was able. He learnt computer programming from print magazines and eventually, in 2005, founded a start-up that built custom search engines. By 2011, it had been folded into another company and then closed, leaving Haid, at 33, successful but directionless. He bummed around London and San Francisco for a while, using up accumulated airline points, staying with friends and feeling as if he had missed out on his youth.

As Haid was becoming more itinerant, the "digital nomad" lifestyle was emerging from the intoxicating ether of techno-utopianism into the real world. The term's commonly cited origin is a 1997 book, Digital Nomad by Tsugio Makimoto, a Japanese scientist, and David Manners, a British journalist. The book presciently predicts that advances in communication technology "will make us geographically independent of our homes and offices", leading to "cerebral nomadism" – we will travel the world hunting down information and relationships, much as our ancestors stalked the plains for prey.

It wasn't until around 2007 that a coterie of bloggers began promoting the lifestyle and its possibilities. The trend lashed together backpacker culture, monetised web presences and the happiness-optimisation schemes of Timothy Ferriss, whose influential book The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich was published that year.

With the rise of smartphones, roaming data plans and cheaper air travel, the trend has grown. Nomad hubs have been cropping up anywhere a low cost of living intersects with a high quality of life, most often in south-east Asia: Chiang Mai, Bangkok, Ubud and Ho Chi Minh City have all become popular destinations, as have cheap European cities like Lisbon and Madrid. Initially it was backpackers running down their savings, but subsequent generations of nomads emerged: first, marketing consultants; next, freelance writers and programmers. Lately, it's been full-time employees whose bosses allow them to travel and work remotely.

While living part time in a San Francisco warehouse commune he helped establish, Haid came upon the thriving Bali nomad scene during a prolonged stay in Ubud in late 2014. With the nearby tropical beaches, convenient co-working spaces and attractive nomadic crowd, "life was really, really good", he tells me, his voice tinged with more than a hint of nostalgia. "I experienced first hand that you can be just as productive in this beautiful, nice environment where you can have perfect $US9 massages each day and amazing coffee." A start-up, Haid reasoned, could offer the same experience to anyone with enough money and an appropriate passport. At first he called the business Caravanserai, the word for merchant hostels along the old Silk Road, but he simplified it after getting too many blank stares.

Haid sought investors in 2015, when you could still practically stumble into venture capital, especially with a pitch that went something like "Uber for international housing". He brought on two co-founders, Dane Andrews and Flo Lauber, and raised $US3.4 million to open Roam's first spaces, at the Miami compound and a converted boutique hotel in Ubud, which features a polished-cement communal kitchen and a courtyard pool. Roam Tokyo is in Akasaka, with blindingly minimalist rooms and a vintage-furnished communal kitchen. The London location is a plush Victorian in upscale Chelsea, attracting human rights lawyers commuting to The Hague as well as start-up developers.

Roam has evolved into a miniature global corporation, with a dozen staff members, most of them digital nomads themselves, living among its locations, communicating through the chat platform Slack, checking in over weekly conference calls and scanning any print mail that comes in for online dispersal. Roam has no offices and no headquarters except its locations. For its clients and employees alike, the start-up provides a comprehensive structure for a post-place life.

Later that day, Haid and I tour the Roam Miami grounds, passing the koi pond and outdoor tables under the palms, and a lone hammock in a circle of white sand next to the co-working space. Each of the four houses features shared amenities, like a yoga room or an art studio. We settle in the communal kitchen attached to one house, where Roamies constantly flow in and out. They come through to get coffee from the forever-brewing pot, grab a gluten-free artisanal cookie from the honour-system pantry or just for a chat. It feels like an office kitchen, which in a sense it also is.

My conversations with Haid wander from mundane details of design – choosing the right fixtures in the kitchen – to the philosophical roots of nomadism. A surprising thing about Haid is the range of leftist flourishes he adds to any discussion, referencing everything from radical economists and British filmmaker Adam Curtis to Verso Books and the state of "late capitalism". In his mouth, they seem less a coherent political philosophy than a business plan, a means of predicting and profiting from the incipient future. Traditional careers began disintegrating after the financial crisis, Haid theorises, and soon advances in artificial intelligence and robotics will cause further disruption.

"There is not necessarily work there for everyone," he says. If jobs are no longer static or stable, then the notion of a permanent home must also be rethought. Nomadism, Haid argues, allows the discontented or disenfranchised to design new, sustainable lifestyles in the global marketplace. It's a means of letting human capital find the path of least resistance, wherever it may be.

There is a vicious plausibility to Haid's vision. The macroeconomic pressures he describes in the urbanised West – a lack of affordable housing and linear careers – are particularly tough on Millennials, who are also, incidentally or not, a historically unattached generation, with low rates of marriage, home ownership and childbearing. If the usual trappings of adulthood don't seem attainable, and a permanent sense of precariousness seems unavoidable, why not embrace impermanence instead? Already there are partial nomads all around you; you just might not think of them that way yet. There's the writer who spends a few months of every year in Berlin, making up for diminishing freelance wages with cheap Neukölln rent; the curator bouncing between New York and Los Angeles; the artist jumping from Tokyo residency to Istanbul fellowship. In the competitive freelance economy, geographic mobility has become a superficial sign of both success and creative freedom: the ability to do anything, anywhere, at any time.

Those in less arty careers who chase that same sort of freedom may find it illusory. The new technologies that have liberated us from place have also made employers more comfortable with remote workers, but only because we can be so easily monitored. Combine this interconnectivity with an increasing population of freelancers and you have the makings of a nomad boom. Haid estimates his target customer base to be around 1.2 million people who make more than $US80,000 a year and could live anywhere. Pieter Levels, creator of the social network Nomad List, believes there to be a nomad population in the high hundreds of thousands.

Haid claims Roam is already profitable. In crowded cities, it's not hard to keep rooms occupied – empty spaces are also listed on Airbnb – and the company has a clever business model that limits its risk: property developers work with Roam to format and furnish buildings, then Roam leases and operates them, much as a hotel does. (The Miami compound is on a five-year lease.) Roam's largest cost is scouting new locations, which can be difficult. The company started Roam Madrid in a former convent, but it closed it after finding the conditions too austere, even for nomads.

The major selling point of Roam is its community, in which no one is supposed to feel strange or isolated, as Haid once did, for leading an itinerant life. The Miami crowd is surprisingly diverse in age and race, though like the tech industry the nomad scene came from, its adherents skew young, white, Western and male. Over the course of a week, I hang out with South American software developers, two entrepreneurs from Switzerland, a middle-aged American contractor who works for IBM on international events, an Israeli machine-learning expert and a 75-year-old retired real estate agent, Lino Darchun, who seems to recognise in Roam an opportunity to counteract loneliness.

"My wife passed away," he tells me. "I wanted to just make a lifestyle change. I can afford something pricier than Roam, but I had such a good time here." And the community does seem like a better place than most to redefine yourself. Another Roamie, a 48-year-old named Stacie Harrison, is also grieving. She lost her boyfriend, a pilot, to a plane crash in 2016 and moved to Roam Miami from Phoenix, her home town.

Daily routines around the compound vary in proportions of work and socialising. The Israeli, Uri Wolfovitz, commutes to a nearby WeWork to collaborate with his start-up co-founder, who actually lives in Miami. Wolfovitz has no long-term plans to stay, because, as he explains, the start-up will thrive or die within a year. Miami is decidedly second-rate as a tech hub, so he was stuck in a limbo that made Roam useful, if not ideal. "It's no place to start a company," he tells me with characteristic bluntness in the kitchen one afternoon. "This city is [expletive]."

Becoming a digital nomad has some personal appeal, especially given that Roam was made for people like me. I'm a freelance writer by trade; I live in a rented apartment in Brooklyn, New York, and I already work from a co-working space. My Millennial precariousness is balanced, if that's the word, by an ability to make rash decisions that renders my situation more bearable: I could theoretically bail at any time and become a vegan surfer in Ubud, filing dispatches to editors still marooned behind their Manhattan desks. The option is always there, and in the back of my mind, I think of Miami as a trial run for true escape: Bali sounds nice.

At Roam, I find an instant routine, with morning yoga classes on the lawn in the company of a stray black cat ("Roamy"), nightly beers at the outdoor picnic table and a weekly email newsletter listing special events and new-member introductions ("Brent and Michael, married for 25 years, sold their home in Seattle last year and are now planning several years of travel"). On Wednesdays, there's a "family dinner." For the one I attend, Hanna Boethius, half of the couple from Switzerland and a freelance nutritionist, leads the charge with a low-carb, gluten-free meal.

As Hanna and her husband, Sebastian, founder of a remote software agency, hustle about the kitchen, I perch in the corner with Harrison, whose enthusiasm never flags. "It's like a hybrid between a summer camp for adults and a reality-TV show without the cameras," she cheerfully warns me about life at the compound. More than the younger members, Harrison seems to struggle with the consequences of her newly unbounded lifestyle. "I feel like all of my old belief systems say I should get a job and find a regular apartment, and my new, emerging belief systems are saying maybe there's another way," she tells me as she shows me around her sunny, spotless room later in the week. "I needed a fresh start. I'm all about doing what makes me happy – I just want to be by the beach."

The environment encourages a fast, confessional intimacy. Remote freelance work is one of the few things we all have in common, so it's a constant topic of discussion: how to stay motivated, entrepreneurial, sane. Sebastian tries to sell me, to no avail, on the benefits of "keto-clarity," or the enlightened mental state that comes from a low-carb, high-fat diet.

Sometimes Roam feels more like immersive group therapy than tourism, because I'm not leaving the compound that much anyway. I don't have a rental car, and dense Miami traffic makes even Uber a hassle. More than anything else, it reminds me of attending high school in the suburbs without a driver's licence. In this closed social system, roles and hierarchies develop much as they do on reality shows. Longterm residents like Gregg Albert, the gregarious IBM contractor, and a Bloomberg journalist named Nathan Crooks, who have been living here for six months or more, act out an earned authority, introducing new guests into the routine. Roam's live-in community managers play camp counsellors, urging on social activity in a pleasant, albeit intermittently patronising way.

Can you imagine a pair of noise-cancelling headphones for geography? That's how I start to think of Roam. When you want to, you can block out your sense of place entirely and exist in a hazy, calm, featureless space that could be anywhere. This nomadic bubble goes beyond a hotel in that it stretches around the world and is built to encompass your entire life; it promises to become your post-geographical home. Yet I find there to also be an anxiety to this hermetic placelessness, no matter how beautifully unburdened or minimalist it appears. Living anywhere is a lot like living nowhere.

Haid sees nomadism as a solution to our technologised, globalised lives, but it seems less like a fix than an extension or intensification of the same condition. You travel in order to work, or vice versa, but the work becomes all-consuming. For better or worse, Roam has a way of removing the factors that make travel travel: culture shock, surprises and even loneliness, that feeling of being somewhere no one can find you.

I came to Miami anticipating a lifestyle shift. I can lie on the beaches the city was built to provide access to, get things done and explore a different place while being supported in my esoteric freelancer habits by a like-minded group. But the last of these goals is the only one I seem able to advance. I occupy most of my time at the bamboo Ikea desks of the co-working space, sweating over a coffee mug, trying to write – just as I do in Brooklyn. On my last morning at Roam, I realise I've barely even seen the ocean, so I take a car from Little Havana to Crandon Park Beach, an island nature preserve that used to be a coconut plantation. I leave my bag on the sand and wade out into the warm, shallow water.

It's comforting to float there alone, moving with the gentle waves. It feels like what I should have been doing all along – embracing freedom, warm weather, the open horizon – but I've spent so much time being a nomad that I've forgotten to do the actual travelling. It's not much of a solution to the predations of capitalism: you can go anywhere, as long as you never stop working.

Edited version of a story first published in The New York Times Magazine.

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