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You can’t throw a USB stick in Canggu without hitting a “digital nomad” — or whatever your preferred term is for someone working remotely from an exotic location. Westerners on their laptops are everywhere, taking up table space in coffee shops or set up in one of the six separate co-working spaces inside a two-mile radius.

They might be a small segment of the more than 5 million people who visit Bali each year, but they’re overrepresented in Canggu. There are programmers, entrepreneurs, marketers, scam artists, and, of course, writers like me. If a job can be done on the internet, someone is doing it here.

Canggu, a small beachside village on the Indonesian island of Bali, currently holds the top spot on Nomad List, a website that ranks places around the world based on how easy it is for people to work remotely from them. It’s not hard to see why. The cost of living is low while the quality of life — and, crucially, the internet speeds — are high. For about $1,500 a month, you can live in a private en suite room in a villa with a swimming pool, hire a scooter to get around, surf every day, and eat out for every meal.

But this workers’ paradise in Indonesia leaves out one crucial population: Indonesians. As of 2017, Indonesia has the sixth worst income inequality in the world. A 2017 report from Oxfam says that the top 1% of the country’s population control 49% of the wealth. Meanwhile, 8% of the population lives in “extreme” poverty (less than $1.90/day); 36% in “moderate” poverty (less than $3.10/day). The country’s economy is booming overall — but not equally.

Gonan Nasution, general manager of the Taman Nauli Boutique Rooms hotel, grew up in Canggu. He’s seen the area change from sprawling rice fields to a thriving tourist destination. “First the surfers came and then the yogis came,” explains Nasution. “And after the yogis, the fitness people came.” Now it’s the digital nomads, drawn to Canggu’s still-somewhat-authentic and affordable vibe.

Since 2012 or so, new hotels, cafés, restaurants, bars, shops, and beach clubs have opened up every month. Former farmers now lease their land to businesses, the vast majority of them owned either by wealthy Indonesians (many from Jakarta, the country’s capital, some 600 miles away) or foreign investors. Rice paddy plots are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Construction is constant. People at the top are clearly doing well, though the workers under them — the ones facilitating the businesses that digital nomads frequent — may not be.

“The first four months I was like, what the fuck am I doing here?” Indonesia doesn’t have a single minimum wage. Each district’s is set independently based on its relative GDP. In Bali as a whole, it’s 2,297,967 Indonesian rupiah (IDR) per month, although it’s closer to 2.5 million IDR in Canggu. That’s less than $180 per month at today’s exchange rate. According to Nasution, the workers in the coffee shops and co-working spaces getting the minimum wage are “living on the edge.” It’s enough for them to rent a room, buy food — and not much more. They’re living month to month, paycheck to paycheck. “Most of them work their whole lives,” he says.\

Bali’s hospitality industry draws workers from all around Indonesia, including Haren Tambi, the community manager at Dojo, which is the largest co-working space and cornerstone of the digital nomad scene in Canggu. While the membership numbers fluctuate as people come and go, Dojo normally has between 200 and 400 people paying monthly. The cheapest plan costs 800,000 IDR ($55) for 30 hours per month of access to the space, while the monthly unlimited plan costs 2.9 million IDR ($205). Tambi came to Bali about two and a half years ago from Sumatra after finishing his bachelor’s degree in accounting education. Within a few days, he was working the front desk in Dojo for a little bit above the minimum wage.