This week, Praxis, an American project to create a sovereign micro-state whose organization and governance would be designed for a post-AGI world — that is, when AI has cognitive and intellectual capacities equal to those of humans — announced that it has begun constructing a “new city” in Uruguay, on the shores of the Río de la Plata, just a few dozen kilometres from Buenos Aires.
- Praxis is a project launched in 2019, initially under the name “Bluebook Cities,” by Dryden Brown and Charlie Callinan.
- Brown, the public face of the project, is a 30-year-old entrepreneur who grew up in California, where he pursued a career as a professional surfer before starting studies at New York University.
- He drops out at the end of his first year, and, from 2017, he partners with Callinan, with whom he briefly worked in an investment advisory firm, on the concept of a “floating village” (seasteading).
Seasteading is tied to the Seasteading Institute, an organization founded in 2008 by Wayne Gramlich and Patri Friedman, the grandson of economist Milton Friedman, with financial backing from Peter Thiel. Beyond physical platforms, Friedman and Gramlich aim to foster the emergence of self-governing autonomous communities, leveraging the legal ambiguities surrounding international waters.
The enthusiasm for seasteading has waned since the institute’s creation, but several dozen libertarian micro-state projects have emerged.
- The United States has a long tradition of attempts to establish new autonomous societies, on land or at sea, nomadic or fixed.
- In the 1960s, Werner Stiefel, a devotee of Ayn Rand, launched an iron-clad boat on the Hudson River, then attempted to convert an oil platform and anchor it between Cuba and Honduras, where it was ultimately destroyed by a storm.
- In the early 1970s, Michael Oliver, a millionaire who had made a fortune in real estate, attempted to create a new country “without taxes, without social welfare, without subsidies, and without any form of economic intervention,” on coral reefs in the South Pacific. The project, built on a sandfill, ended a few months later when Tonga sent troops to annex the reefs.
The movement has experienced a resurgence since the 2010s, notably under the impulse of entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, who joined the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz in 2013 before becoming chief technology officer of the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase in 2018.
- Srinivasan theorized his concept of the “network state” during talks and interviews that circulated widely in Silicon Valley, before publishing in 2022 a book, The Network State: How To Start a New Country, in which he calls for the foundation of new “digital communities” that would come to compete with nation-states.
- In a talk given at Y Combinator in 2013, Srinivasan already described the United States as a society whose democratic system would resemble an “obsolete software” that would need a “update.”
- He thus presented a solution offering two main paths, inspired by the economist Albert O. Hirschman: the “voice,” i.e., changing the system from within, via elections or a revolution, or the “exit” from the system to “another system, a startup or a rival.”
Praxis constitutes, alongside other communities like Próspera, a project for a private city located on a Honduran island that would host 1,000 residents. It is one of the most advanced Network State projects, notably thanks to funding obtained from Peter Thiel, who has since distanced himself from Praxis, from Joe Lonsdale, one of the co-founders of Palantir, from Marc Andreessen and from Apollo Projects, a venture-capital fund co-founded by Sam Altman.
- Formerly defined as a “crypto-state,” a “society composed of burly merchants, muscular warriors and very slender priests” or as an entity that would require a “specific legal and regulatory environment,” Praxis is today presented as a community in which residents can “practice excellent yoga” and find “great DJs.”
- The city’s futuristic aesthetic, meanwhile, appears to have given way to a modern minimalist design, combining statues inspired by Greek and Ancient Rome with expansive glass spaces offering a breathtaking view of the Río de la Plata coastline, according to renderings published on Praxis’s site.
Praxis claims 150,000 members and asserts that 2,700 have expressed interest in relocating to Uruguay. Rather than a foundation created out of nothing, the project is expected to attach to an existing real estate venture, +Colonia, an urban development initiative led by Eduardo Bastitta, an entrepreneur named as an adviser to Javier Milei.
- Brown said he planned to settle in Uruguay by the end of 2026, and that Praxis would begin purchasing land in 2027.
- Brown has made several “spectacular” announcements in recent years, and the agreement signed with Bastitta’s company is non-binding.
- The head of Praxis did, however, meet this week with the Uruguayan president Yamandú Orsi in New York, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.