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    "original_url": "https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/09\/22\/world\/americas\/praxis-uruguay-colonia-tech-utopia.html?ae=oa&emc=edit_nn_20260923&nl=the-morning&segment_id=226928",
    "parsed_content": "These Tech Utopians Want to Build a City for the Post-A.I. WorldAfter a sprawling world tour, Praxis, a New York-based, crypto-backed \u201cdigital nation,\u201d has signed a deal to build a physical city in Uruguay.Construction of apartment buildings as part of the +Colonia city development in Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay. Praxis said it plans to build its community within +Colonia.These Tech Utopians Want to Build a City for the Post-A.I. WorldAfter a sprawling world tour, Praxis, a New York-based, crypto-backed \u201cdigital nation,\u201d has signed a deal to build a physical city in Uruguay.Construction of apartment buildings as part of the +Colonia city development in Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay. Praxis said it plans to build its community within +Colonia.Credit...Supported bySKIP ADVERTISEMENTListen \u00b7 10:13 min Share full articleBy Emma BubolaVisuals by Sarah PabstEmma Bubola, who is based in Buenos Aires and also covers Chile and Uruguay, reported from Colonia, Uruguay.Sept. 22, 2026Leer en espa\u00f1olThe American tech utopians had spent years scouring the globe for a place to build their city of the future. The founders of Praxis \u2014 a company and online community backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in financing from a crypto company \u2014 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.\u201cThe world tour has concluded: We\u2019ve chosen Uruguay,\u201d Dryden Brown, the chief executive of Praxis, said in an interview. \u201cIt\u2019s the coolest thing ever.\u201dAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTMr. 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.ImageDryden Brown, the chief executive of Praxis.Credit...Dryden BrownThat 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\u2019s 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\u2019s recent decampment to the region. And it offers a glimpse into what one of Silicon Valley\u2019s most whimsical tech-utopian enclaves could look like.ImageConstruction workers earlier this month at an apartment building in the +Colonia development, which is headed by an adviser to President Javier Milei of Argentina. AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTImageAn apartment building under construction in +Colonia. Dryden Brown, the chief executive of Praxis, said he planned to move to Uruguay by the end of this year.Mr. Brown is planning to move to Uruguay as soon as December, which is \u201cgoing to be awesome,\u201d 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 \u201cmeet me in the eternal city.\u201dPraxis, according to its agreement in Uruguay, would start acquiring land by the end of next year within the +Colonia property \u2014 a barren stretch with rolling dunes about an hourlong ferry ride from Buenos Aires.\u201cHaving, like, an actual place is, like, really, really fire,\u201d Mr. Brown said.Future residents of the new city, whom Mr. Brown described as \u201cthe most talented, sharp sort of thinkers in the world,\u201d 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\u2019s preferred deity.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTVideoThe construction of apartment buildings at the +Colonia smart city development.ImageVisitors at dusk at a former quarry, now a lake, in Colonia del Sacramento.Mr. Brown\u2019s 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 \u201cnetwork state,\u201d first popularized by Balaji Srinivasan, the former chief technology officer of the crypto exchange Coinbase.In Mr. Srinivasan\u2019s vision, online communities bound by shared values eventually crowd-fund 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 \u2014 including high-profile venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen and Mr. Thiel \u2014 say they could be essential laboratories for governance that could help cut through bureaucratic red tape to accelerate technological innovation.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTImageA rendering of a seaside building planned by Praxis.Credit...PraxisPerhaps the most prominent attempt at building a start-up city is Pr\u00f3spera in Honduras, a privately run, semiautonomous city-state created under favorable charter-city laws. It became entangled in a multi-billion-dollar international arbitration after the Honduran government repealed the legal framework that allowed it to exist.Mr. Brown has said that independent governance is not an immediate requirement for Praxis, since it has already committed to operating within Uruguay\u2019s 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 United Nations General Assembly.That would be a different scene from the milieu in which Mr. Brown started his initiative. During the Covid pandemic, Mr. Brown said, he started reading \u201ckind of weird, right-wing stuff on the internet,\u201d and later began bringing \u201cweird internet right-wing people to parties\u201d 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.ImageEduardo Bastitta, an entrepreneur and developer of the +Colonia smart city project. Of Praxis, he said, \u201cI like their vision.\u201d AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTImageA map of +Colonia. The development is on a barren stretch in Uruguay about an hourlong ferry ride from Buenos Aires.Praxis started raising money in 2021. By 2023, it had almost $20 million from companies that included Sam Altman\u2019s 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, Mr. Brown considered Greenland, he said. But, he told TechCrunch, Greenlanders \u201chave a sort of sense of pride that makes the idea of being bought \u2014 it\u2019s almost, like, condescending.\u201dUruguay \u2014 a small, politically stable country offering easy paths to residency and citizenship, and tax exemptions for newcomers \u2014 already satisfied nearly every legal condition Praxis members hoped to incorporate into their new city. AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTIt also has a \u201cSwitzerland in South America vibe,\u201d Mr. Brown said, with \u201cgreat waves\u201d and enough natural beauty to attract creative professionals and tech executives unemployed because \u201cA.I. is going to take all the jobs.\u201dLeonardo 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.ImageVisitors walking through the historic district of Colonia del Sacramento.ImageA cobblestone street in Colonia del Sacramento. Uruguay is attracting Europeans and North Americans because of its safety and tax laws, experts said.The appeal extends to Uruguay\u2019s 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.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTHow Praxis describes its future city-state seems to be in constant evolution. Its founders have previously defined it as a \u201ccryptostate,\u201d a \u201csociety of portly merchants, muscular warriors and very thin priests,\u201d and an entity that would need a \u201cspecial legal and regulatory environment.\u201dNow Mr. Brown appears to have softened his pitch, calling it a place with \u201cawesome yoga\u201d and \u201cgreat DJs\u201d where \u201cyour friend who\u2019s, like, a painter is going and they\u2019re doing, like, a show there.\u201dBecause of his emphasis on Western aesthetics and Nietzschean references to social hierarchies and martial virtues, critics have called Mr. Brown\u2019s movement an alt-right internet subculture. But while Mr. Brown says he is \u201cdefinitely not a Democrat\u201d and \u201cdefinitely not a woke guy,\u201d he resists being categorized as right-wing, deeming the right-left political framing \u201cvery boomer.\u201dMr. Brown\u2019s most pointed detractors are perhaps the skeptics.Tech utopian initiatives \u201chave 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,\u201d said Raymond Craib, a history professor at Cornell who wrote a book about attempts to build market-driven enclaves. \u201cThus far these haven\u2019t gone particularly well.\u201dVideoThe construction of apartment buildings and surrounding nature as part of the +Colonia smart city.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTImageThe R\u00edo de la Plata riverbank in Colonia del Sacramento.Speaking about Praxis, he said, \u201cI can never tell if it\u2019s an effort to troll critics or it\u2019s real.\u201dMr. 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, \u201ceveryone has gone quiet.\u201dLast year, the president of Uruguay, during a visit, called +Colonia a \u201cvery innovative project.\u201d It is being erected along a nearly five-mile stretch of the R\u00edo de la Plata coastline \u2014 a rolling plot of land acquired by Mr. Bastitta\u2019s father.Mr. Bastitta is planning to build a sleekly designed \u201csmart eco-city\u201d for tech workers. Because it sits a short distance from Montevideo and Buenos Aires, Mr. 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.\u201cI like their vision,\u201d Mr. Bastitta said. \u201cTheir story is very powerful.\u201dImageA view from an apartment building that is part of the +Colonia development. On a visit, Uruguay\u2019s president called the initative an \u201cinnovative project.\u201dMichael J. de la Merced contributed reporting.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT",
    "published_at": "2026-09-22T09:02:37+00:00",
    "author_name": "Emma Bubola",
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    "ai_simplified_title": "Praxis Signs Deal to Build Post-AI City in Uruguay",
    "ai_excerpt": "Praxis, a crypto-backed \"digital nation\" based in New York, has signed a deal to build a physical city in Uruguay. This project aims to create a new culture and governance system for a post-artificial intelligence world, drawing skepticism and support from various figures.",
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