I have a huge crush on this desk. It is disturbing me.

Over the past year or so, and very definitely in the past six months, I’ve been subscribing to the cult of the minimalist glocal: own little but the best, travel light, stay ahead. A good summary might be the end of Bruce Sterling’s talk at Reboot 11, which itself is based on Sterling’s own Last Viridian Note. He writes:

You need to re-think your relationship to material possessions in terms of things that occupy your time. The things that are physically closest to you. Time and space…many of these objects can damage you personally. The hours you waste stumbling over your piled debris, picking, washing, storing, re-storing, those are hours and spaces that you will never get back in a mortal lifetime. Basically, you have to curate these goods: heat them, cool them, protect them from humidity and vermin. Every moment you devote to them is lost to your children, your friends, your society, yourself.

It’s a philosophy that is appearing in many guises. There’s Sterling, there’s the 100 Things Challenge (pah, easy), and the philosophy and economics of the Early Retirement Extreme book, featured in this weekend’s Guardian.. There’s downshifting, and minimalism, and decluttering, and simplification, from everyone from Oprah on up. Combine it with GTD, throwing everything into the cloud, and an emphasis on networks over hierarchies, and that, right there, is pretty much my life at the moment. I’m writing this in a cafe in Barcelona – I’m lecturing here tonight and tomorrow – and being here is functionally, purposefully, designedly no different from writing it at ‘home’ in London, or in a hotel in Beirut, a tent in Afghanistan, or my favourite diners in New York or San Francisco. I’ve spent a lot of effort making this to be the case. It’s not a Monocle style pose, or a How To Spend It affectation, but a hard-fought-for way of life, and it has not been without its dark doubting moments.

The socio-political aspect of this is, of course, entirely self-involved and Pseud’s-cornerist. Patriotism and civic service aside (for the moment, anyway), why does not having much physical stuff make me think I’m some sort of transnational Bourne-like entity, complete with non-ironic personal soundtrack, where for others it means they’re itinerant migrants, or just plain poor? Owning fewer than 100 objects is either a matter of hipster pride, or just, well, poverty. It’s a First World Problem written so large as to be shameful.

I think this is a key issue, and I’m still working through it, if only to save myself from that very shame. There are issues of privilege, certainly, but also of complexity: my affairs are physical simple, as you’ll see if you look through my London apartment’s kitchen cupboards, but of deep complexity in other ways – I have bank accounts in three countries, mailing addresses in two, and have worked so far this year in eight different territories, with at least two more in the diary.

It’s perhaps this shift in complexity, from the physical to the intangible, that marks the new modernity, and this sort of lifestyle reifies that. I don’t know. I’m working on it, as it marks a growing class of people that my clients, business and governments alike, need to deal with. The pan-national migratory digital elite are opting out of a lot of the stuff that makes them governable. That is a problem for a nation state. As Sterling writes:

The 400-year-old Westphalian System doesn’t approve of my lifestyle, although it’s increasingly common, especially among people half my age. It’s stressful to live glocally. Not that I myself feel stressed by this. As long as I’ve got broadband, I’m perfectly at ease with the fact that my position on the planet’s surface is arbitrary. It’s the nation-state system that is visibly stressed by these changes – it’s freaking out over currency flows, migration through airports, offshoring, and similar phenomena.

Freaking out is an understatement.

And yet. And yet, despite my pride in being able to work from anywhere, free from the drag of pointless stuff, I see that desk trunk, and I covet it very badly. Custom made by Louis Vuitton for the conductor Leopold Stokowski, it allowed him to set up his office where-ever he went. You can’t buy it – you have to go to Louis Vuitton and have them make one to your own design. It would be a thing, would it not?