Last summer, a twin-propeller plane touched down on the gray-cratered terrain of Nuuk, the capital of Greenland. A 28-year-old deboarded, ready to march into the Nordic parliament building with a bold proposition: “I went to Greenland to try to buy it,” Praxis founder Dryden Brown wrote in a viral tweet later.
On the phone with TechCrunch last week, he filed down his edgelord bluster. “Obviously they have a sort of sense of pride that makes the idea of being bought — it’s almost, like, condescending,” he said. “But they would actually like to be independent.”
So, rather than buying Greenland, he wondered whether he could work with the government to create a new city, purposefully built on uninhabitable land. “What if we can sort of build a prototype of Terminus?” he said, referencing Elon Musk’s preferred name for a city on Mars.
A member of the Danish parliament was not amused. “Greenlandic independence requires approval by the Danish parliament and a change of our constitution,” politician Rasmus Jarlov tweeted. “I can guarantee you that there is no way we would approve independence so that you could buy Greenland.”
But, if building a new city in Greenland were just a question of financials, Brown has the resources to do it — kind of. For the last five years, Brown, along with co-founder Charlie Callinan, has been at the helm of Praxis, a network state startup with the explicit goal of creating a city. He emphasized Praxis as an internet-first ideology — one that has courted controversy, like when a Praxis member guide reportedly said that “traditional, European/Western beauty standards on which the civilized world, at its best points, has always found success.”
Despite the controversy, the Peter Thiel-backed project recently raised $525 million, with a major asterisk: The startup has the ability to draw down the money as it hits specific milestones in its city-building project.
So for now, Praxis is an internet ideology in search of a physical home. The group hosted 250 Praxis-supporters in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, earlier this month, where attendees like Bedrock’s Geoff Lewis and Mamuka Bakhtadze, former prime minister of Georgia, were presented with different location options for Praxis.
Praxis is one of the prominent examples of a “network state,” a term defined by former a16z investor Balaji Srinivasan, as an internet community that acquires a physical home and “gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states,” he wrote. Marc Andreessen has praised the concept, and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin created his own network state experiment.
But, while most current network state projects so far have been short-term, Brown wants to take it to a greater extreme. For years now, he’s traveled from country to country, cold-emailing politicians and inquiring about the potential for a techno-optimist city. “In my early 20s, I didn’t know anyone, and I flew to Nigeria, in sort of the same way that I flew to Greenland,” he told TechCrunch. He pinged politicians on LinkedIn and said he managed to get meetings with top level politicians, like Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, vice president of Ghana.
He’s since traveled to dozens of countries with the same proposal: “It’s basically finding a sort of opportunity for mutual benefit between a group of founders who want to build something new and exciting, and a country that would benefit from that.”
In Greenland, between a polar plunge and some light marathon training, Brown met with government officials, mining tycoons, and local entrepreneurs. Brown’s main takeaway was that many residents would like Greenland to be free from Denmark, but the government feels bound by the roughly $500 million that Denmark gives to the country every year.
“If we could replace the $500M with another revenue source — taxes from a new city, mining, and tourism post-terraforming — we could derisk accession, and get Greenlanders get their long-sought independence — and with it vast wealth,” Brown tweeted.
Brown wants the potential Greenland city to be a bastion of technological experimentation, specifically drawing on the community of young male hardtech founders that have gathered in El Segundo. Imagine, he said, a city that can create rain on demand using Rainmaker technology, a cloud-seeding startup, or a community powered by nuclear technology from Valar Atomics.
You’d think convincing Praxis members to move to a desolate, freezing country, rather than, say, the Dominican Republic, would be a tough sell. Brown insisted it’s the opposite. “That is the thing about Praxis members,” he said. “A bunch of people that actually would move to Greenland because it’s hardcore.”
To hear Brown tell it, the Praxis community is a return to an old Americana sensibility, where there’s land to be conquered and a hegemonic international structure 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, who feels like he embodies a new-age manifest destiny. “My ancestors came to America from Ireland in the early 18th century. They took this voyage on ships across the Atlantic, landed, built a town and a fort and a farm, fought in the Revolutionary War,” he said. “I think it’s important to build things that honor your ancestors and sacrifices they’ve made.”
He believes that Americans have an impulse for “heroism and courage,” and, well, expansion. “It feels like that sort of fire was at least temporarily extinguished,” he continued. “It was like, you just couldn’t really do that stuff in the U.S. — or at least it was like, super hard. It was basically impossible. You can’t build any cities. There’s nowhere new to go.”
In Brown’s story, President-elect Donald Trump appears like a deus ex machina, a balm to a rowdy America chafing against its own borders. “Trump wants to do that, building new cities,” he said. Trump is “reviving classical aesthetics” and ushering in a culture shift for Americans to be “undaunted” by ambitious proposals, like, say, building a prototype of Terminus.
Between the support for a potential Greenland city, and the red wave washing over America, Brown feels vindicated. Several years ago, Brown said he faced “an insane number of people trying to ostracize us — or lightly cancel us or whatever — for having these sort of right-coded aesthetics and big ambitions,” he said. “And now they’re tweeting about all these things incessantly.”