Post-smart cities as digital authoritarian polities: The aesthetic politics of the Praxis Network State

With proliferating proposals for blockchain, cryptocurrency or AI-driven post-smart cities, this short piece focuses on the Praxis Network State (PNS). The PNS presents a coherent but dangerous rationale for such post-smart urbanism: a vision of a planet and people in crisis that is to be survived and ultimately abandoned in order to catalyze a posthuman future in the stars. It argues that an examination of its aesthetic politics and rhetoric can help us identify the outlines of this urban version of digital authoritarianism, in order to resist and ultimately overturn it.