The digitization of cities (and societies) is increasing. In an immense intersection of information, movements and thoughts are stored in a hyper-detailed digital footprint, feeding endless warehouses of Big Data in which decisions are made by computerized algorithms. We are witnessing the end of privacy as a fundamental right while individuality is being taken away from us in favor of a promised security.

It is urgent to rethink the cities we are leaving for future generations. Cities in which, of course, surveillance will override any human and mundane issue. Something that has accelerated after the prohibition of freedoms imposed by states in the last two years, which has triggered control practices and strategies. Fear was the perfect excuse that even justified the implementation of a digital passport that distinguishes citizenship and privileges a supposed health security to the fundamental rights of free movement and non-discrimination. With the changes came a rapid adaptation that already generated a kind of post-human, more subjected, more dominated and more supervised.

These situations show us that the so-called developed societies are formed by hierarchies of powers installed on top of more or less fragile elements. Guarantees taken for granted that, deep down, do not exist, as if they were based on glass foundations and that the slightest deviation, be it social, political, economic or health, exposes their immense fragility.

Starting from the current scenario in which control is transversal to everything, from production to communication, our movements are monitored and monitored in the most diverse ways, information stored forever, while we live oblivious to the type of society that we want to implement.

Immersed in this profound social transformation and the almost divine elevation of technology, the ideas of a New World Order gain strength in a crusade for the Fourth Industrial Revolution that proposes as progress the massive digitization, robotization of work, nanotechnology and biotechnology.

So what society do we choose to live in? What cities do we envision for the future?
Sandra Valle, 2022