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If you delve into Greenland discourse you quickly find all sorts of degenerate weirdness. And let me be crystal clear in the second sentence of this post that by “Greenland discourse” I mean more or less nothing about the actual physical place or its people: I mean the imaginings of various North American tech weirdos and Trumpers. I also mean very little about the generally silly conversation about whether the United States will annex Greenland. I stand by everything I wrote about that yesterday. But whenever you discuss Donald Trump’s Greenland jones, or, more specifically, whenever you dismiss it, you’ll hear from a lot of people about the various Silicon Valley fantasies about Greenland and why this is really what Trump’s talking about. I don’t think those are really what Trump’s yakking is about at all. But they’re at least part of the milieu Trump’s now part of. So it’s in the mix, adjacent, part of the idea world that gets these guys excited. Or, stated differently, what gets Trump’s new money men ginned up and thus keeps him talking.
For this little adventure we can start with this TechCrunch article entitled: ‘I went to Greenland to try to buy it’: Meet the founder who wants to recreate Mars on Earth. You have to go deep into the tech weirdo rabbit hole to make sense of recreating Mars on Earth (it has to do with Elon Musk, basically). Because Mars is actually a super-frigid, waterless barren wasteland. I’m into space travel as much as the next guy. But you wouldn’t want to live there or recreate it anywhere. You also shouldn’t try to buy Greenland. But that’s another story.
The article is about a guy named Dryden Brown who is the founder of something called Praxis. Praxis is, in the lingo, what is called a “network state startup,” which is basically a virtual (online) community that acquires some physical land and then makes it into a state by getting one or more real countries to recognize it as such. From there it’s just a matter of building the new state as a kind of tech utopia: currency is crypto, constitution is developed by AI, VC governance, and basically whatever other idea tech optimists have thought would be cool, you use the network state as the place to make it actually happen. Because normie governments don’t have any say in it. It’s a sovereign state. On this you layer a lot of manifest destiny, superiority of European civilization chatter (yes, they’ve gotten in some hot water over this) and that’s the whole thing. Not surprisingly, the backers of these plans tend to be young men with a lot of money from tech investing.
But back to Dryden Brown. On paper he’s raised half a billion dollars for the venture. Sorta. He’s actually raised it on a contingent basis, which is to say the money only changes hands on hitting specific benchmarks in the creation of the Praxis city state. In other words, maybe you’ve pledged $50 million. But you only have to deliver that cash once Praxis has its first thousand inhabitants and internationally recognized statehood, or whatever. So that half-billion dollars is probably a bit easier to raise than it might otherwise be.
If I’m understanding this Times article correctly, Dryden has actually raised about $20 million in the sense of cash in the company’s bank account, which is honestly nothing to sneeze at, as far as money goes in the real world. Disgraced pharmaceutical entrepreneur Martin Shkreli is an investor, as is Sam Altman, the guy behind ChatGPT.
Dryden is on Twitter, naturally, where he goes by the name “Galactic Roman Emperor.” In this viral Twitter post introducing some of his plans, he revealed that he got the idea to buy Greenland from none other than Donald Trump back in 2019. There’s the kernel of a sort of darkly comic version of a Spinal Tap-type documentary where Dryden goes (he’s actually done this) to various poor countries and tries to buy part of their country. He arrives, looks up the local officials on LinkedIn and is often able to set up meetings where he discusses Praxis’s plans and the possibility of an acquisition. On his way to Greenland, he started setting up meetings while waiting for his flight from Iceland: “In Keflavik, I searched for people to meet. I sent cold DMs on LinkedIn, X, and IG, before finding a website listing emails of Greenlandic politicians. I sent emails offering to discuss building a new city.”
In Greenland as well as in other countries like Nigeria, Dryden’s efforts go about as you’d expect — with local officials trying to be polite, not knowing quite what to make of Dryden, and, with some mix of discomfort or gentleness, explaining their country isn’t for sale to become another country.
This all raises the question of whether Dryden’s various efforts to found Praxis in the Caribbean aren’t an easier sell to his investors than Greenland, seeing as Greenland is super super cold and desolate. Dryden explains that that’s actually the attraction, that Greenland is that “hardcore.” It appeals to the pioneering spirit that once made America great before it became fat (literally and figuratively), lazy and hemmed in by enervating regulation.
Greenland is an actual frontier. It’s hardcore. If humanity is going to build Terminus on Mars, we should practice in Greenland. It can serve as a sandbox for terraformation experiments, funded by realizing its potential as a mining and industrial hub.
I’m assuming Praxis won’t come into existence. “Terminus,” which is Musk’s planned city on Mars, probably has a better shot. But it’s one part of a larger storyline which has been adjacent to the tech world for years. There have been various plans to build permanent island structures in the ocean that would then become sovereign state entities. More practically and actually real, there’s been a move among tech billionaires to build compounds in New Zealand to ride out pandemics, nuclear wars and other widespread bummers. It is, as you’re probably already realizing, a physical realization of the broader trend in the tech world which amounts to a kind of tech liberation movement: the effort to break free of the shackles of normie-dom from which tech world originated and which it derives its wealth. This is what “tech monarchism” is all about, after all, along with the less discussed euthanasia of children, organ farms and all the rest. Far-right tech’s current moment in DC is the, as yet, most successful effort to put these ideas — this breaking free from the shackles of democracy — into effect.
All this said, the Greenland invasion still isn’t a thing. That’s going to happen or not happen right here in the USA.