Last summer, a twin-engine propeller plane landed in the gray, cratered landscape of Greenland's capital Nuuk. The 28-year-old man disembarked and planned to march on the Nordic parliament building with a bold proposal. “I went looking to buy Greenland,” Praxis founder Dryden Brown later wrote in a viral tweet.
On a call with TechCrunch last week, he penned down an edgelord rant. “They obviously take some sort of pride in the idea of being acquired, and it's almost condescending,” he says. “But they really want to be independent.”
So instead of buying Greenland, he wondered if he could work with the government to create new cities purposefully built on uninhabitable land. “What if we could build a prototype of Terminus?” he said, referring to Elon Musk's favorite name for the Martian city.
Danish MPs were not amused. Politician Rasmus Jarlov tweeted: “Greenland's independence requires approval by the Danish parliament and constitutional amendments.” “I assure you there is no way you would approve independence to buy Greenland.”
But if building a new city in Greenland is simply a matter of finances, then Brown has the resources to do it — sort of. For the past five years, Mr. Brown, along with co-founder Charlie Cullinan, has been at the helm of Praxis, a network nation startup with a clear goal of creating cities. He emphasized that Praxis is an internet-first ideology. This is a controversial ideology, with the Praxis membership guide reportedly saying, “The traditional European/Western standard of beauty that the civilized world has always succeeded in at best.”
Despite the controversy, the Peter Thiel-backed project recently raised $525 million with a big asterisk. The startup has the ability to withdraw funds when certain milestones are reached on city construction projects.
So for now, Praxis is an internet ideology looking for a physical home. The group hosted 250 Praxis supporters in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic earlier this month, presenting attendees including Bedrock's Jeff Lewis and former Georgia Prime Minister Mamuka Bakhtadze with options for different Praxis locations. It was done.
Praxis is one prominent example of a “network state,” defined by former A16Z investor Balaji Srinivasan as an Internet community that acquires a physical presence and “obtains diplomatic recognition from an existing state.” He writes that it is a term that Marc Andreessen praised the concept, and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin created his own network state experiment.
But while most of the current network nation projects so far have been short-term, Brown wants to take them even more extreme. For years, he has traveled from country to country, cold emailing politicians and asking about the possibility of a techno-optimist city. “In my early 20s, I didn't know anyone, so I flew to Nigeria the same way I flew to Greenland,” he told TechCrunch. He messaged politicians on LinkedIn and said he had succeeded in meeting top-level politicians such as Ghana's Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia.
Since then, he has visited dozens of countries with the same proposal. “It's basically finding a kind of opportunity for mutual benefit between a group of founders who want to build something new and exciting and a country that can benefit from it.”
In Greenland, in between polar plunges and light marathon training, Brown met with government officials, mining magnates and local entrepreneurs. Brown's main argument is that many residents want Greenland to be freed from Denmark, but the government feels tied to the roughly $500 million that Denmark donates to the country each year. It was said that there was.
“If we can replace the $500 million with another source of revenue, namely taxes from new cities, mines, and post-terraforming tourism taxes, we can avoid the dangers of accession and gain the independence that Greenlanders have long desired.” , and there will be tremendous wealth to be gained from that,” Brown said. he tweeted.
Brown wants to turn Greenland's potential city into a bastion of technology experimentation, and in particular hopes to tap into El Segundo's community of young male hard-tech founders. Imagine a city that can make rain on demand using Rainmaker technology, a cloud-seeding startup, or a community leveraging Valar Atomics' nuclear technology, he said.
You might find it difficult to convince members of Praxis to move to a desolate, frigid country rather than, say, the Dominican Republic. Mr Brown argued that it was the opposite. “That's the thing about Praxis members,” he said. “There are a lot of people who actually try to move to Greenland because they are hardcore.”
In Brown's words, the Praxis community is a return to an older sense of Americana, where there were lands to conquer and hegemonic international structures to dominate. You can see it in El Segundo, where hardware startups compete for the biggest American flag, and you can see it in Brown, which feels like the embodiment of a new era's manifest destiny. “My ancestors came to America from Ireland in the early 18th century. They sailed across the Atlantic, landed, built towns, forts and farms, and fought in the Revolutionary War,” he said. . “I think it’s important to create something that honors our ancestors and the sacrifices they made.”
He believes Americans have “heroism and courage” and an urge for expansion. “I feel like that kind of fire has been extinguished, at least temporarily,” he continued. “I was like, you can't really do that in America, or at least it's super hard. It's basically impossible. You can't build cities. There's nothing new anywhere.”
In Brown's story, President-elect Donald Trump appears to be a deus ex machina, a painkiller for an unruly America frustrated by its own borders. “Trump wants to build new cities,” he said. President Trump is leading a cultural shift to “bring back classic aesthetics” and ensure Americans “don't flinch” from ambitious proposals like building a prototype Terminus.
Between his support for Greenland's city candidates and the red wave sweeping through America, Brown feels vindicated. A few years ago, Mr. Brown said, “There are an insane number of people who try to ostracize us or casually cancel us because we have this kind of well-defined aesthetic and big ambitions.” He said he faced it. “And now they're constantly tweeting about all these things.”