‘Praxis’: Entrepreneur Plans to Build $500M Stateless Cybercity

Dryden Brown believes we are on the precipice of a brave new world and he wants to pioneer it.

The 29-year-old has an audacious vision for a futuristic new city-state he’s planning to found, which will be called Praxis.

“The city will be incredibly beautiful,” Brown told The Post. “The architecture will be a fusion of classical aesthetics. We’re working on a fusion of gothic elements and space-age futurism. The architecture is going to be something you’ve never seen before.”

Brown wants Praxis to be self-governing and completely independent of any other country or state and he claims he is in the advanced stages of talks to secure the land where he plans to found his new colony.

Beyond the buildings, he also has ideas in mind for the type of people who will live there, adding, “If you were to walk through the city, you’d see people who are focused, who are in good shape, who are walking briskly with a sense of intensity and purpose.”

The highest-speed internet will be everywhere and technology at its bleeding edge will thrive. “We want to deregulate technology,” continued Brown. “Praxians are far more intentional about finding projects that have deep meaning for them and are consistent with their values.”

Although Brown’s ideas may sound far-fetched and idealistic to some, he’s managed to get investors to buy in and claims to have a $500 million line of credit to get Praxis started.

One of them, indirectly, is Peter Thiel. According to Brown, Thiel is an investor in Pronomos Capital which has invested in Praxis, although he adds, “beyond that, I can’t comment.”

Others who are interested in the idea see the potential for a bold leap forward into a “post-work” society, where humans leave all the mundane work to AI powered robots.

“If AI and robotics come along, then we don’t need huge workforces,” Sam Hammond, chief economist at the Foundation for American Innovation, told The Post, speculating on Praxis. “We could have a modernized city with fully self-driving cars and robot cops. It would be the high-tech version of a new world where you could start from scratch.”

Schools would be moot. Education, in Hammond’s vision of Praxis, would be done by AI and food preparation would also be handled by robots. “You could have a 3D printer printing out food,” Hammond said. “You get to adopt and integrate new technologies before anyone else in the world.”

The wage-slaves on Praxis, as per Brown, will also not necessarily be human: “Maybe in the future, people don’t work anymore and AI does all the work. We want the city to be designed for a post-work future; we want the city to be able to absorb a new kind of social dynamic. Like, we’re going to find the most talented artists in the world and give them grants and bring them to Praxis.”

Although $500 million – plus $20m raised from venture capital funds in 2021– sounds like a lot of money, in terms of establishing a whole city for 1,000 residents it doesn’t necessarily go a long way. Brown acknowledges this and knows that for the initial founders things will start off tough.

“In the beginning it will be very spartan,” he said, pointing out that he expects to have the early Praxis residents settling sometime next year.

“In the beginning, it’s not going to be a polished consumer experience.”

Those there at the start – say, sometime in 2026 – will be residing in relatively makeshift conditions, bedding down in quickly built homes and not exactly living it up.

“You’re going to be a pioneer, helping to set the foundations of a new city,” Brown continued. “It will take a bit longer for a proper phase one real estate development where people are buying nice houses and there are high-end amenities and restaurants.”

Businesses in Praxis, as seen by Brown, will be as future-focused as the place itself.

Asked what kind of day-to-day work will be done by the people who live in Praxis’ more developed homes, Brown replied, “AI, manufacturing, energy, biotech, building crypto infrastructure. Businesses can say, ‘Hey, these regulatory changes would be super valuable for us.’ Then we start creating [regulations to accommodate those businesses].”

Outrageous as this high-tech wonderland may sound, Brown insists he is dead serious about it coming off.

Raised in Santa Barbara, California, and homeschooled in order to allow time for him to surf competitively, Brown said that the seed for Praxis was planted early: “I spent a lot of time reading about early American history,” said Brown, who, according to Mother Jones magazine, has a father who worked in private equity and grew up in a seven bedroom home worth $6.5 million.

“I got interested in Austrian economics and libertarianism. Bitcoin was getting traction and I thought that internet networks like Bitcoin, aligning people with shared values, would become an important political concept,” he added.

Brown briefly attended New York University but dropped out after less than a year, then interned at a hedge fund and “decided I wanted to pursue this idea of using an internet network to align people around shared values and perhaps even shared policy objectives towards building a new city.”

Nutty as this all sounds, people who have spent time with Brown make clear those who underestimate him do so at their own risk. “He’s one of the most driven people I know,” a friend who worked with Brown told The Post. “He gets devoted to something and he’s not the kind of person who gives up.”

That kind of obsessiveness might be a prerequisite for Praxis, which has yet to lock in a physical location, despite Brown’s claim that 87,000 people have “signed up to the community at the highest level”.

He claims to be in the “final stage of site selection … We’ve been talking to governments for over a year.”

Locations have not all been revealed, though Brown has previously mentioned the Mediterranean and did reveal to Tech Crunch, “I went to Greenland to try to buy it,” before the US government registered its own interest in the Danish territory earlier this year.

Brown explained to The Post how on his trip to Greenland last summer he “met with the locals, met with some people in government and got a fairly deep sense of the priorities of the people,” noting how they have want to be independent of Denmark, but also rely on the approximately $511 million Copenhagen sends them annually, which makes up around 20 percent of Greenland’s GDP and more than half of its public budget.

As to what makes Greenland, which has a population of around 56,000, so attractive for Praxis, Brown said, “We’re a group of people who find the frontier to be exciting, who want to take on heroic challenges, who think there’s spiritual worth to doing hard things. Building a city on a sheet of barren ice is a big test of the will.”

An even bigger test may be to gain acceptance from the territory itself.

Told about Brown’s interest in settling there, Rasmus Jarlov — a Danish politician and the former minister of business affairs for the country — insisted it will not happen.

“Do it in your own country … You have Alaska,” he advised Brown.

“Neither Greenland or Denmark will agree to him taking over [part of] the country. It’s not a negotiable thing,” he added.

Upon hearing this response, Brown replied with the kind of bravado and optimism one would expect from an ambitious statesman, even if it also belies a little of his naivety about the gargantuan nature of his project.

“I don’t think one person speaks for all the interests of Greenland,” he stated.