Future Cities
NL
The digital city

Smart, but not watching you

A smart city is a surveillance machine by default. We turn that around. The same technology that makes the city efficient must never reduce you to a resident made of glass.

The founding principle

The city transparent, the resident private

The city itself, its budget, its rules and its algorithms, is a glass house, fully visible to its residents. The resident is not, the resident is private. That is the exact inversion of a surveillance state, where the citizen is transparent and power is opaque. Here it is the other way around.

One thing is deliberately public: the credit ledger. Every credit transaction is recorded openly, with a name attached, like a crypto ledger but not anonymous. Anyone can verify that awards and housing allocation went fairly.

Public here means findable, not paraded. You consult the ledger the way you consult a land registry: when you want to check something. There are no boards with names anywhere and no rankings, because contributing is not a contest. And the line stays sharp: what you contribute can be looked up, who you are cannot. Your money, your health, your location and your behaviour stay strictly private in your own data vault.

Someone calmly checking the public city ledger on a tablet at the kitchen table
Your data

You own your records, not the city

Instead of one big database hoovering everything up, every resident has a personal data vault, in the spirit of a self-hosted cloud. The city asks for access for a stated purpose, rather than grabbing everything by default.

And the city plans on aggregated, anonymous figures, such as how many people travel from one ring to the centre in the morning, never on who exactly. It knows the minimum about the individual and the maximum about itself.

The limit on AI

May inform, never decide

AI analyses, spots patterns and makes suggestions, but decisions about people and their rights are made by people or by rules you can read. An AI deciding how many credits your work is worth, or who gets a house, is forbidden ground. The pods and refuse vehicles are a different matter: driving is not a judgement but responsive, rule-based programming, deterministic and testable. The forbidden zone is the black box that judges people, not the software that makes a vehicle brake.

Digital sovereignty

Its own backbone, under its own control

The city runs its own digital backbone: open source, self-hosted, under its own management. No Google or Amazon owning the nervous system, or you get a company town with a server instead of a boss. The city owns its land, its infrastructure and its code.

There is a maintained base layer that simply works, which nobody needs to be a technician for. Want more, your own server, your own automation? Go ahead, on top of it and at your own risk, as long as the shared network stays safe. A base for everyone, freedom for those who want it.

The trap avoided

No second Google, no surveillance state

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No second Google

The service is community-owned, non-profit, open source and free of lock-in. Your data is yours and portable, so you can walk away. That makes it a utility, not a monopolist.

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No surveillance state

Maintenance does not mean looking inside. With encryption whose key you hold, the service keeps your system running without being able to read its contents. The plumber without a key to your diary.

Technology that serves people.

And care, education and safety that prevent rather than cure.

To Community