There is a strange ideological movement fueled by technology growing. Advocates of the “Network State” seek to create “independent” cities owned by the private sector, decentralized capitalism, and the like are the equivalent of urban planning for cryptocurrency. It is essentially a high-tech version of John Galt’s Gulch, the Taoist utopian community in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged coveted by the rich and obsessed.
One of the key developments related to the Network State movement is a proposed new city called the “Praxis App City.” Founder and 28-year-old CEO Drayden Braun recently said that the urban development plan was an effort “to create a more heroic and more interesting place than anything we’ve seen.” Braun ultimately hopes to build his new city in the Caribbean, although a specific location has not been disclosed and project details have remained secretive.
This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Praxis project received new funding of $525 million. A significant portion of this funding – $500 million – comes from a cryptocurrency investment company called GEM Digital. The funds from GEM are provided as part of what is called “drawdown financing,” a type of loan where capital is distributed in various stages during a specific deal. As part of this business arrangement, GEM will receive cryptocurrency tokens from Praxis that equate to approximate ownership in the urban development deal. The drawdown funds will be released to Praxis after they list these cryptocurrency tokens on a public cryptocurrency exchange, the newspaper reported. The Journal also noted that Praxis recently secured another $25 million from financial lender Arch Lending.
Despite now having access to hundreds of millions of dollars, it is worth noting that the Praxis App City is still essentially just an idea. It is an idea supported by a Rand-loving man (Braun) who, by his own admission (as reported by the New York Times), dropped out of college, somehow landed a job as a hedge fund analyst, and then was fired. From the mentioned hedge fund, and after that, in his mid-twenties, he decided that his life’s mission must be to build a new city. Despite a limited list of accomplishments under his belt, Braun seems to have lived a somewhat charmed life that included parties, travel, hobnobbing with the 1%, and mysterious business deals.
It appears that this makes him relatively suited for the “Network State” movement, filled with people with big dreams but seemingly not tightly bound to reality. For example, another advocate of the movement is Balaji Srinivasan, a former tech executive at Coinbase, who recently started his own school dedicated to educating people on the principles of the Network State philosophy. “California Forever,” a fictional effort to create a new city owned by the private sector on thousands of acres of farmland in the Gulf region, has also been linked to the movement.
The global view of the “Network State” is obsessed with cryptocurrencies and sees speculative digital assets as the key to the strange high-tech future they want to see. Such malignant and cohesive beliefs lead to statements full of righteous city jargon, curated from the Praxis website, like this sentence: “The next wave of cryptocurrency adoption, on the road to a crypto civilization, requires merging the cryptocurrency infrastructure into the basic functions of society.” Or this: “Large, networked, Network State-compatible communities will use the chain-connected infrastructure to operate their payments, contracts, identities, communications, and physical infrastructure.” As you can see, we are dealing here with a rare breed of political fanaticism.
This could have been more funny than scary if it weren’t for the fact that those supporting this movement have so much money that they have actually begun to hijack the American political system. The cryptocurrency industry poured money into this election cycle, representing nearly half of total corporate money spent on political action committees this year. Using this dough, the cryptocurrency industry sought to support the US presidential election (by showering a lot of money on their preferred candidate, Donald Trump), while also targeting their political adversaries – the Democrats, but they are moving slowly. On the other side.
