These tech utopians want to build a city for the post-AI world

COLONIA, Uruguay – The American tech utopians had spent years scouring the globe for a place to build their city of the future. The founders of Praxis – a company and online community backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in financing from a crypto company – surveyed the Mediterranean region, but said it was too close to active conflicts. They said they had mulled buying Greenland, but faced public pushback.

Now, they claim to have finally found a home for their project to reinvigorate Western culture, along the riverbanks of Uruguay.

“The world tour has concluded: We’ve chosen Uruguay,” Dryden Brown, the CEO of Praxis, said in an interview. “It’s the coolest thing ever.”

Brown, 30, a former professional surfer, who left his last job at 23, has since pledged to build a new civilization. He has drawn sustained skepticism and courted controversy for promoting a musclebound, Western-centric vision of society, and now plans to build his hub within another startup city an Argentine company is building near the southern Uruguayan city of Colonia del Sacramento.

That project, called +Colonia, is led by Eduardo Bastitta, an entrepreneur whom President Javier Milei of Argentina named as an adviser.

Praxis has so far only signed a largely nonbinding deal with Bastitta’s company, and many questions remain about whether its promise to build a city from scratch will ever result in brick and mortar.

Still, the deal hints at the rising appeal of the southernmost part of the Americas as a tech escape route, following billionaire Peter Thiel’s recent decampment to the region. And it offers a glimpse into what one of Silicon Valley’s most whimsical tech-utopian enclaves could look like.

Brown is planning to move to Uruguay as soon as December, which is “going to be awesome,” he said, while more members of his community are expected to move into the first buildings in +Colonia next year. That would already be a substantial step for a community that has largely existed only online, and gathered at New York parties where members wore dog tags reading “meet me in the eternal city.”

Praxis, according to its agreement in Uruguay, would start acquiring land by the end of next year within the +Colonia property – a barren stretch with rolling dunes about an hourlong ferry ride from Buenos Aires, Argentina.

“Having, like, an actual place is, like, really, really fire,” Brown said.

Future residents of the new city, whom Brown described as “the most talented, sharp sort of thinkers in the world,” would launch new cultural, economic and governance systems for a post-artificial intelligence world.

The details are thin, but the ambition is huge. Brown says the city will be a laboratory for creating a new culture drawing from classical Greek, Roman and Renaissance aesthetics and the virtues of truth, beauty and heroism as embodied by the Greek god Apollo, Praxis’ preferred deity.

Brown’s plan is part of a broader drive among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to build tech-friendly havens run like for-profit corporations. The movement is inspired by the concept of a “network state,” first popularized by Balaji Srinivasan, the former chief technology officer of the crypto exchange Coinbase.

In Srinivasan’s vision, online communities bound by shared values eventually crowdfund physical territory, form mini nations with their own laws and secure diplomatic recognition from existing states.

Critics describe attempts to build such a state as elitist efforts by tech moguls to secede from society or unfeasible pipe dreams. But supporters – including high-profile venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen and Thiel – say they could be essential laboratories for governance that could help cut through bureaucratic red tape to accelerate technological innovation.

Perhaps the most prominent attempt at building a startup city is Próspera in Honduras, a privately run, semiautonomous city-state created under favorable charter-city laws. It became entangled in a multibillion-dollar international arbitration after the Honduran government repealed the legal framework that allowed it to exist.

Brown has said that independent governance is not an immediate requirement for Praxis, since it has already committed to operating within Uruguay’s existing legal system. He is planning to meet with the president of Uruguay, Yamandu Orsi, this week when the leader is in New York for the U.N. General Assembly.

That would be a different scene from the milieu in which Brown started his initiative. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Brown said, he started reading “kind of weird, right-wing stuff on the internet,” and later began bringing “weird internet right-wing people to parties” in New York. That social circle evolved into a digital community that now claims over 2,500 people committed to moving to the new city, according to the Praxis website.

Praxis started raising money in 2021. By 2023, it had almost $20 million from companies that included Sam Altman’s venture capital firm Apollo Projects and Alameda Research, founded by Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced crypto entrepreneur, according to Crunchbase, a venture-tracking website.

In 2024, Praxis announced that Gem Digital, a crypto firm, had provided a $500 million line of credit.

After initially saying Praxis would be built somewhere in the Mediterranean, Brown considered Greenland, he said. But, he told TechCrunch, Greenlanders “have a sort of sense of pride that makes the idea of being bought – it’s almost, like, condescending.”

Uruguay – a small, politically stable country offering easy paths to residency and citizenship, and tax exemptions for newcomers – already satisfied nearly every legal condition Praxis members hoped to incorporate into their new city.

It also has a “Switzerland in South America vibe,” Brown said, with “great waves” and enough natural beauty to attract creative professionals and tech executives unemployed because “AI is going to take all the jobs.”

Leonardo Costa, a Uruguayan lawyer and tax law professor, said that in recent years, a growing number of Europeans and North Americans have bought property in Uruguay, drawn in part by its distance from turmoil in other parts of the world.

The appeal extends to Uruguay’s neighbors: Martin Varsavsky, a Spanish-Argentine tech entrepreneur, has built a ranch in the Argentine city of Mendoza, which he has said would be a potential shelter in case of another world war.

How Praxis describes its future city-state seems to be in constant evolution. Its founders have previously defined it as a “cryptostate,” a “society of portly merchants, muscular warriors and very thin priests,” and an entity that would need a “special legal and regulatory environment.”

Now Brown appears to have softened his pitch, calling it a place with “awesome yoga” and “great DJs” where “your friend who’s, like, a painter is going and they’re doing, like, a show there.”

Because of his emphasis on Western aesthetics and Nietzschean references to social hierarchies and martial virtues, critics have called Brown’s movement an alt-right internet subculture. But while Brown says he is “definitely not a Democrat” and “definitely not a woke guy,” he resists being categorized as right-wing, deeming the right-left political framing “very boomer.”

Brown’s most pointed detractors are perhaps the skeptics.

Tech utopian initiatives “have big aspirations: There is a lot of money behind them; there are enormous egos; they have extrapolated out of their crypto world that they can now create some kind of new country,” said Raymond Craib, a history professor at Cornell University who wrote a book about attempts to build market-driven enclaves. “Thus far these haven’t gone particularly well.”

Speaking about Praxis, he said, “I can never tell if it’s an effort to troll critics or it’s real.”

Bastitta, the +Colonia entrepreneur who built a successful logistics company, dismissed naysayers. He said his own project had initially faced objections from skeptics, but now, with $290 million committed to the development, several buildings under construction and hundreds of apartments sold, “everyone has gone quiet.”

Last year, the president of Uruguay, during a visit, called +Colonia a “very innovative project.” It is being erected along a nearly 5-mile stretch of the Río de la Plata coastline – a rolling plot of land acquired by Bastitta’s father.

Bastitta is planning to build a sleekly designed “smart eco-city” for tech workers. Because it sits a short distance from Montevideo and Buenos Aires, Bastitta, a libertarian, views the site as a strategic cross-border hub that offers residents the flexibility to pick and choose between Uruguayan and Argentine legal and tax frameworks.

Praxis, he said, would occupy a significant portion of the development.

“I like their vision,” Bastitta said. “Their story is very powerful.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.