Last summer, a twin-propeller airplane touched down in the gray cratered area of Nuuk, Greenland’s capital. A 28-year-old disembarks, ready to march into the Nordic parliament building with a bold proposition: “I went to Greenland to try to buy it,” the founder of Proxy Dryden Brown later wrote in a viral tweet.
On the phone with TechCrunch last week, he filed his Edge Lord bluster. “Obviously there’s a kind of pride in them that creates a sense of being bought — it’s almost, like, understated,” he said. “But they would actually prefer to be independent.”
So, instead of buying Greenland, he wondered if he could work with the government to build a new city, purposely built on uninhabited land. “What if we could build a prototype of Terminus?” he said, referring to Elon Musk’s favorite name for a city on Mars.
A member of the Danish Parliament was not amused. “Greenland’s independence requires approval by the Danish parliament and changes to our constitution.” Politician Rasmus Jarlov tweeted.. “I can guarantee you there’s no way we’re going to approve independence so you can buy Greenland.”
But, if building a new city in Greenland was just a question of finances, Brown has the resources to do it — sort of. For the past five years, Brown, along with co-founder Charlie Callanan, has headed Praxis, a networked state startup with the express goal of building cities. He asserted the proxy as an Internet-first doctrine—one that sparked controversy, such as when a proxy member guide allegedly said that “the traditional, European/Western standards of beauty to which the civilized world, at its best, has always succeeded.”
Despite the controversy, the Peter Thiel-backed project recently picked up $525 millionWith a big asterisk: The startup has the ability to lose money as it passes certain milestones in its city-building project.
So for now, proxies are the Internet’s idea of finding a physical home. The group hosted 250 proxy advocates in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, earlier this month, where attendees such as Bedrock’s Geoff Lewis and former Georgian Prime Minister Mamuka Bakhtadze were presented with options for proxy locations.
Praxis is one of the prominent examples of a “network state,” a term defined by former a16z investor Balaji Srinivasan as an Internet community that acquires a physical home and “pre-existing states.” receives diplomatic recognition from he wrote. Marc Andreessen has defined the concept, and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Butrin has his own Experience your network state.
But, while most of the current network state projects so far have been short-term, Brown wants to take it much further. For years now, he’s been traveling from country to country, cold emailing politicians and exploring the possibilities of a techno-optimistic city. “In my early 20s, I didn’t know anyone, and I flew to Nigeria the same way I flew to Greenland,” he told TechCrunch. He pinged politicians on LinkedIn and said he was able to land high-level politicians, such as Ghana’s Vice President Dr. Mahamadu Bawumia.
He has since traveled to dozens of countries with the same proposition: “It’s basically finding some kind of opportunity for mutual benefit between a group of founders who want to create something new and exciting, and A country that will benefit from it.”
In Greenland, between polar jumps and light marathon training, Brown met with government officials, mining tycoons and local businessmen. Brown’s main move was that many residents want Greenland to become independent from Denmark, but the government feels obligated to pay the roughly $500 million that Denmark gives to the country each year.
“If we can replace the $500M with another revenue source – taxes from a new city, mining, and tourism followed by terraforming – we can make a mockery of annexation, and give Greenlanders their long-awaited independence. Can – and with it vast wealth”. Brown tweeted..
Brown wants the potential Greenlandic city to be a hotbed of technological experimentation, particularly the community of young male hard-tech founders who have gathered in El Segundo. Imagine, he said, a city that could generate rain on demand using Rainmaker technology, a cloud-seeding startup, or a nuclear-powered community from Velar Atomics.
You’d think it would be a difficult task to convince proxy members to go to a desolate, frozen country, rather than, say, the Dominican Republic. Brown insisted it was the opposite. “It’s about proxy members,” he said. “A group of people who will actually move to Greenland.” Because It’s tough.”
To hear Brown tell it, the proxy community is a return to an old American sensibility, where there is land to conquer and a hegemonic international structure to dominate. You can see it in El Segundo, where hardware startups compete for the biggest American flag, and you can see it in Brown, which feels like it embodies a new era of manifest destiny. . “My ancestors came to America from Ireland in the early 18th century. They made the trip across the Atlantic on ships, landed, built a town and a fort and a farm, fought in the Revolutionary War,” he said. “I think it’s important to make things that honor your ancestors and their sacrifices,” he said.
He believes that Americans have “bravery and daring” and, well, a sense of expansion. “It feels like the fire was put out, at least temporarily,” he continued. “It was like, you couldn’t really do this in America – or at least it was very difficult. It was basically impossible. You couldn’t build a city. There was no new place to go.’ ‘
In Brown’s story, President-elect Donald Trump looks like a deus ex machina, a balm for a rogue America against its own borders. He said that Trump wants to do this, building new cities. Trump is “reviving the classic aesthetic” and ushering in a cultural shift for Americans to be “unafraid” of ambitious proposals like building a prototype of Terminus.
Between support for a potential city in Greenland and a red tide over America, Brown feels vindicated. Several years ago, Brown said that “having such a tightly coded aesthetic and big ambitions,” he faced “a lot of crazy people trying to oust us—or put it mildly.” Canceling us or whatever—”. “And now they’re constantly tweeting about all these things.”
Credit : techcrunch.com
