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Last summer , a twin - propeller plane touch down on the hoary - cratered terrain of Nuuk , the uppercase of Greenland . A 28 - year - erstwhile deboarded , ready to march into the Nordic fantan building with a bluff proposition : “ I went to Greenland to attempt to buy it , ” Praxis founderDryden Brown wrote in a viral tweet afterwards .
On the phone with TechCrunch last workweek , he filed down his edgelord rodomontade . “ Obviously they have a sort of sentiency of superbia that make the idea of being grease one’s palms — it ’s almost , like , condescend , ” he said . “ But they would in reality like to be independent . ”
So , rather than corrupt Greenland , he wondered whether he could work with the government to make a novel urban center , purposefully built on uninhabitable soil . “ What if we can sort of build a paradigm of Terminus ? ” he say , referencing Elon Musk ’s preferred name for a metropolis on Mars .
A phallus of the Danish fantan was not amused . “ Greenlandic independence requires approval by the Danish fantan and a change of our constitution,”politician Rasmus Jarlov tweeted . “ I can assure you that there is no way we would approve independence so that you could buy Greenland . ”
But , if building a new urban center in Greenland were just a motion of financials , Brown has the resource to do it — kind of . For the last five years , Brown , along with cobalt - founder Charlie Callinan , has been at the helm of Praxis , a net state startup with the explicit destination of creating a city . He emphasized Praxis as an internet - first ideology — one that has courted controversy , like when a Praxis appendage guidereportedly saidthat “ traditional , European / Western beauty standards on which the civilized world , at its undecomposed points , has always come up achiever . ”
Despite the controversy , the Peter Thiel - plunk for projection recently raised$525 million , with a major star : The inauguration has the power to draw down the money as it hits specific milestones in its metropolis - edifice projection .
So for now , Praxis is an cyberspace ideology in search of a strong-arm home . The chemical group hosted 250 Praxis - supporters in Punta Cana , Dominican Republic , earlier this month , where attendant like Bedrock ’s Geoff Lewis and Mamuka Bakhtadze , former prime minister of Georgia , were presented with dissimilar location options for Praxis .
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Praxis is one of the prominent example of a “ web state , ” a term defined by former a16z investorBalaji Srinivasan , as an internet community that acquires a physical domicile and “ gain diplomatical recognition from pre - existing states,”he write . Marc Andreessen has praised the concept , and Ethereum co - beginner Vitalik Buterin created hisown internet nation experiment .
But , while most current web state projection so far have been short - term , Brown wants to take it to a greater extreme . For years now , he ’s travel from country to country , inhuman - emailing politicians and ask about the potential for a techno - optimist city . “ In my early twenty , I did n’t bang anyone , and I fly to Nigeria , in sort of the same room that I flew to Greenland , ” he distinguish TechCrunch . He pinged pol 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 proposition : “ It ’s basically retrieve a sort of opportunity for common welfare between a mathematical group of founders who desire to build up something young and exciting , and a area that would benefit from that . ”
In Greenland , between a polar dip and some clean marathon training , Brown met with government officials , mining tycoons , and local entrepreneurs . Brown ’s principal takeaway was that many resident would like Greenland to be free from Denmark , but the government activity feels bound by the around $ 500 million that Denmark give to the land every yr .
“ If we could replace the $ 500 M with another tax income source — taxes from a new metropolis , mining , and tourism post - terraforming — we could derisk accession , and get Greenlanders get their long - sought independence — and with it vast wealth,”Brown twitch .
Brown want the potential Greenland metropolis to be a citadel of technical experimentation , specifically take out on the community of young manly hardtech founder that have pull together in El Segundo . Imagine , he say , a city that can create rain on need using Rainmaker applied science , a cloud - seeding startup , or a community power by atomic technology from Valar Atomics .
You ’d imagine convincing Praxis appendage 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 clump of people that actually would move to Greenlandbecauseit ’s hardcore . ”
To find out Brown tell it , the Praxis community is a return to an old Americana sensibility , where there ’s land to be subdue and a hegemonic outside bodily structure to dominate . you’re able to see it in El Segundo , where computer hardware inauguration compete for the biggest American flagstone , and you’re able to see it in Brown , who feels like he embodies a unexampled - age manifest fate . “ My ascendant came to America from Ireland in the early eighteenth century . They took this voyage on ships across the Atlantic , landed , built a townsfolk and a fortress and a farm , campaign in the Revolutionary War , ” he order . “ I think it ’s significant to make things that honor your ascendent and sacrifices they ’ve made . ”
He believes that Americans have an whim for “ heroism and courageousness , ” and , well , expansion . “ It feel like that form of fervidness was at least temporarily extinguished , ” he continue . “ It was like , you just could n’t really do that stuff in the U.S. — or at least it was like , super hard . It was basically unimaginable . You ca n’t build up any cities . There ’s nowhere new to go . ”
In Brown ’s fib , President - elect Donald Trump appears like a deus ex machina , a salve to a rowdy America chafing against its own borders . “ Trump want to do that , building new cities , ” he tell . trump card is “ reviving classical esthetics ” and ushering in a civilisation shift key for Americans to be “ unshaken ” by challenging marriage offer , like , say , make a epitome of Terminus .
Between the support for a potential Greenland metropolis , and the red waving washing over America , Brown feels vindicate . Several yr ago , Brown say he faced “ an insane number of people trying to ostracize us — or light call off us or whatever — for have these sort of right - coded aesthetics and gravid ambition , ” he say . “ And now they ’re tweeting about all these things incessantly . ”
