Dryden Brown, the 28-year-old founder of the network state startup Praxis, has an ambitious vision: to create a new city in Greenland that would serve as a testbed for innovative technologies and a gateway to Greenlandic independence.
After visiting Greenland last summer and meeting with government officials, Brown believes he can work with the Greenlandic government to build a city from scratch on uninhabitable land, inspired by Elon Musk’s concept of “Terminus” – a city on Mars.
Praxis, a Peter Thiel-backed project, recently raised $525 million with the goal of establishing a physical home for its internet-first ideology. Brown has traveled to dozens of countries, cold-emailing politicians and proposing his idea of a mutually beneficial partnership – a tech-utopian city that could provide an alternative revenue source for Greenland, potentially enabling its independence from Denmark.
While the idea of buying Greenland outright was met with skepticism, Brown believes that by replacing the $500 million in annual subsidies from Denmark with income from the new city, taxes, and tourism, Greenland could achieve its long-sought independence.
The proposed city would be a hub for technological experimentation, drawing on the community of young, ambitious hardtech founders in El Segundo, California. Brown envisions a city powered by innovative solutions like cloud-seeding technology to create on-demand rain, or nuclear energy from startups like Valar Atomics.
Praxis has courted controversy in the past, with reports of a member guide promoting “traditional, European/Western beauty standards.” But Brown believes the Praxis community embodies a pioneering American spirit, akin to his ancestors who “took this voyage on ships across the Atlantic, landed, built a town and a fort and a farm, fought in the Revolutionary War.”
Despite skepticism from Danish politicians, Brown remains undaunted in his quest to create a new city in Greenland that would serve as a prototype for his vision of a network state – an internet-first community that gains diplomatic recognition and a physical home.
