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Last summer, a twin-copter plane landed on the grey-cratered land of Nuuk, the capital of Greenland. A 28-year-old man steps off the ship, ready to walk to the Nordic Parliament building with a bold proposal: “I went to Greenland to try to buy it,” Praxis founder Dryden Brown later wrote in a viral tweet.
In a phone call with TechCrunch last week, he went public with his gossip and threats. “They clearly have a kind of sense of pride that makes the idea of buying almost condescending,” he said. “But they actually want to be independent.”
So, instead of buying Greenland, he wondered if he could work with the government to create a new city, deliberately built on uninhabitable land. “What if we could build a prototype of Terminus?” he said, referring to Elon Musk’s favorite name for a city on Mars.
One member of the Danish Parliament was not amused. “Greenland’s independence requires approval by the Danish parliament and a change in our constitution.” tweeted politician Rasmus Jarlov. “I can assure you that there is no way we will agree to independence until you can buy Greenland.”
But, if building a new city in Greenland is just a matter of finances, Brown has the resources to do it – sort of. For the past five years, Brown, along with co-founder Charlie Callinan, has been at the helm of Praxis, a state-owned startup with the clear goal of creating a city. He emphasized Praxis as an Internet-first ideology — one that sparked controversy, such as when the Praxis member guide It is said that he said That “the traditional European/Western standards of beauty in which the civilized world has always found success are at their best.”
Despite the recent controversy, the Peter Thiel-backed project has taken off $525 millionwith a major asterisk: The startup has the ability to withdraw funds when it achieves specific milestones in a city construction project.
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, where attendees such as Bedrock’s Jeff Lewis and Mamuka Bakhtadze, the former prime minister of Georgia, were offered different options for the Praxis location.
One notable example of a “network state” is the practical application, a term that former a16z investor Balaji Srinivasan has defined as an online community that gains a physical home and “gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.” books. Marc Andreessen praised the concept, and Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, created his own idea. Experience private network status.
But although most current state-of-the-grid projects so far have been short-term, Brown wants to take them to a greater level of extremes. For many years, he traveled from country to country, sending emails to politicians and inquiring about the possibility of creating a technology-optimistic city. “In my early 20s, I didn’t know anyone, and I flew to Nigeria, the same way I traveled to Greenland,” he told TechCrunch. He has connected with politicians on LinkedIn and said he has been able to set up meetings with high-level politicians, such as Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, Ghana’s vice president.
He has since traveled to dozens of countries with the same proposal: “It’s basically creating some sort of mutually beneficial opportunity between a group of founders who want to build something new and exciting, and a country that will benefit from that.”
In Greenland, between the polar plunge and some light marathon training, Brown met with government officials, mining tycoons, and local businessmen. Brown’s main takeaway was that many residents want Greenland to be free from Denmark, but the government feels bound by the nearly $500 million Denmark gives the country each year.
“If we could replace the $500 million with another source of income – taxes from a new city, mining, post-reclamation tourism – we could take the risk of joining, and gain Greenland’s long-awaited independence – and with it enormous wealth.” Brown tweeted.
Brown wants the potential Greenland city to be a hotbed of tech experimentation, drawing specifically on the community of hard-core young male tech founders who have gathered in El Segundo. Imagine a city that can produce rain on demand using Rainmaker technology, or a cloud seeding startup, or a community powered by nuclear technology from Valar Atomics, he said.
You might think that convincing Praxis members to move to a desolate, frozen country, rather than, say, the Dominican Republic, would be difficult. Brown insisted that the opposite was true. “That’s the thing about Praxis members,” he said. “A group of people who are actually going to move to Greenland because It’s hardcore.
If you hear Brown say it, the praxis society represents a return to the old American sensibility, where there is territory to conquer and a dominant international structure to control. 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 clear new-age destiny. “My ancestors came to America from Ireland in the early 1700s. They made this journey on ships across the Atlantic, landed, built a town and a fort and a farm, and participated in the Revolutionary War.” “I think it’s important to build things that honor your ancestors and the sacrifices they made.” “
He believes that Americans have a drive for “heroism, courage,” and expansion. He continued: “It appears that this type of fire has been extinguished at least temporarily.” “It was as if you couldn’t really do these things in the United States — or at least it was very difficult. It was basically impossible. You couldn’t build any cities. There was nowhere new to go.”
In Brown’s story, President-elect Donald Trump seems like a supermachine, a balm for a feisty America chafing at its borders. “Trump wants to do that, build new cities,” he said. Trump is “resurrecting classical aesthetics” and heralding a cultural shift for Americans so that they will no longer be “afraid” of ambitious proposals, such as building a prototype of the “Terminus,” for example.
Between the support for a potential city in Greenland, and the red wave sweeping America, Brown feels right. Several years ago, Brown said he encountered “a crazy amount of people trying to dismiss us — or cancel us a little bit or whatever — for having this kind of right aesthetic and big ambitions.” “And now they’re tweeting about all this stuff incessantly.”
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