Network State invades Uruguay?
The Network State cult has made a rare cameo appearance in the New York Times.
Praxis, a proposed tech utopia supposedly backed by a slew of interconnected tech billionaires, now claims to have found a location in Uruguay. The announcement comes after years of fruitless searching, along with previous announcements that Praxis would be built somewhere on the Mediterranean, in Greenland, in California, and in outer space.
For years, Praxis was one of the world’s most well-publicized Network State projects. The Network State movement calls for tech billionaires to create their own sovereign mini-nations—or else use their wealth and influence to take over existing governments–in preparation for the collapse of the global order.
Praxis once boasted of having over $500 million in financing and the backing of billionaires including Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel. But the project struggled to find any country interested in hosting a bizarre new billionaire city.
Then, in the summer of 2025, Praxis’s founder and CEO had a dramatic public meltdown during Pride Month in New York City. After witnessing Pride celebrations, the Praxis CEO—a 30-year-old college dropout named Dryden Brown—predicted that NYC would face “biblical punishment” and “God’s wrath” due to allowing Pride festivities.
“Fuck gay pride,” he wrote in posts he later deleted.
As I wrote at the time, this seemed like the end of Praxis, since some of its most celebrated supporters were gay venture capitalists, including Altman and Thiel. Soon, Praxis disappeared from the official Network State dashboard, which lists 38 supposed sovereign tech projects around the globe. Praxis, which had once billed itself as the world’s “first Network State,” also scrubbed all mention of Network State from its website.
Praxis may have lost the gays, but Brown now claims to have a location in Uruguay, just a stone’s throw from Argentina, where Network State aficionado and renowned Antichrist lecturer Thiel has taken up part-time residence. (Though often linked to Praxis in news stories, Thiel has disavowed any relationship to it.)
As one of the few journalists in the world paying attention to the Network State cult, I’m not sure Brown’s latest announcement is any more real than the previous ones. He keeps making dramatic announcements about his imaginary city, and major legacy media outlets keep writing somewhat credulous stories about his project.
Certain details in the Times story suggest Brown is generating major publicity from vapor. He’s not building a new city—he’s attaching his project to another corporate startup city under construction in southern Uruguay.
The Times reported that Praxis has merely signed a “largely nonbinding deal” to attach itself to an entirely different project, +Colonia, led by an advisor to Argentina’s president. “Still, the deal hints at the rising appeal of the southernmost part of the Americas,” the Times reported, offering “a glimpse into what one of Silicon Valley’s most whimsical tech-utopian enclaves could look like.”
“Whimsical” is a strange word to use for a cult that believes its tech utopia mini-nations are necessary to prepare for a post-democracy, post-nation-state world. The Times briefly mentions the Network State movement’s desire to “secede from society” and Brown’s history of courting “weird internet right-wing people.” But it packages this apocalyptic ideology as a quirky real estate trend for a “post-AI” world. And it fails to mention Brown’s Gay Pride meltdown, which is highly relevant given that he would seem to have alienated his most prominent backers. Also: what happened to the crypto token Praxis was supposed to launch?
Vanished in the sands of time?
Despite the splashy Times piece, which described Praxis as a Network State project, Brown’s folly remains absent from the official Network State dashboard.
Click here for a gift link to read “These Tech Utopians Want to Build a City for the Post-A.I. World.”
The Nerd Reich climbs
Someone should write a book about this dangerous and apocalyptic Network State cult.
Oh wait, I did!
The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, surged to #5 on the New York Times bestseller list this week (for combined ebook/hardcover sales) and #8 on the hardcover nonfiction list.
The book continues to gain momentum as readers finish the book and spread the word. If you haven’t yet bought The Nerd Reich, please do so today! And if you’ve already read it, please tell everyone you know to read it, too. Word of mouth works!
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