The New York Times reports:

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 say 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 chief executive of Praxis, said in an interview. “It’s the coolest thing ever.”

Mr. 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 start-up 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 Mr. 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 the 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.

Mr. 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.

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

Future residents of the new city, whom Mr. 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. Mr. 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’s preferred deity.

Mr. 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.

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. [Continue reading…]