Shelton and Lodato’s article argues that the fashionable shift from smart cities to smart citizens does not automatically democratise urban governance; rather, it often reproduces the same technocratic and neoliberal exclusions that critical urban scholars associate with smart-city agendas. Using Atlanta, Georgia, as a case study, the authors show that citizens are frequently invoked rhetorically as the supposed beneficiaries of digital urban initiatives, yet actual residents are rarely granted substantive power in planning or decision-making. They develop two key figures: the “general citizen”, an abstract and undifferentiated public used to legitimise policy, and the “absent citizen”, the real urban resident who remains excluded from elite workshops, expert meetings and institutional smart-city networks. The article is especially persuasive because it moves beyond broad critique and examines how smart citizenship is produced in practice through meetings, panels and policy discussions. Atlanta’s smart-city initiatives reveal that participation is often limited to experts, consultants, municipal officials, entrepreneurs and institutional actors, while marginalised communities are treated as objects of improvement rather than political agents. Even when community-led data projects emerge, they remain peripheral to official governance structures. The authors therefore conclude that smart citizenship should not be celebrated merely because it sounds participatory; meaningful democratic urbanism requires redistributing power, not simply adding citizens to technological narratives.