As the cash, and the promise of cash, continues to flow in, the profile of one Dryden Brown continues to grow. Like a real estate developer with a fine-tuned spiel on a mission to get units pre-sold, he is pushing his niche community to a niche audience, only what Brown is selling is considerably more ambitious than waterfront property.

Brown has an outsized influence given his relatively thin resume, and by many accounts, the team around him has little formal experience in the business of building cities. But where they may fall short on diplomas and documentation, they abound with a dream, one that stretches from AI and cryptocurrency to architecture, culture and, ultimately, the way human beings organize themselves.

And now Brown, 30, has found a place to try it. Praxis, the organization he co-founded in 2019, announced on September 22, 2026 that it has chosen Uruguay for its first permanent community, planning a waterfront development within +Colonia, an emerging city near historic Colonia del Sacramento, across the Río de la Plata from Buenos Aires. The initial agreement covers about 350,000 square meters of development within the larger project, with the first residents expected in 2027.

It is a significant step for a project that has spent years existing largely as an idea, an online community and a global search for land. Praxis says its digital community now numbers more than 150,000 people, with about 2,700 expressing interest in relocating to Uruguay. The first phase is envisioned with private residences, a resort, parks, restaurants and spaces for art, music and film. Brown plans to move to Uruguay himself.

Technology is the foundation of Brown’s argument for why such a community should exist.

Praxis describes itself as a digital nation born on the internet and argues that communication technology has historically changed the way people organize themselves. In a lengthy 2024 address to supporters, the organization traced a line from spoken language to writing, the printing press, radio and television, arguing that each changed how people communicated and how societies were governed.

In Praxis’ telling, the internet represents the next rupture. Online communities allow people to form identities around shared interests and values rather than geography. AI pushes the theory further. Brown believes AI will eventually eliminate much of the need for human labor, forcing society to reconsider where people live, how they spend their time and even what gives their lives meaning.

Praxis states it is developing “real estate for the world after AGI.” Its platform also incorporates encrypted communication and AI that introduces members to one another and helps manage community life.

There is money behind the vision. Building such a community won’t come cheap. Praxis had raised about $20.8 million in traditional venture funding before announcing $525 million in additional financing commitments in 2024. Most of that later financing was structured around conditions and milestones rather than $525 million simply deposited into a Praxis bank account. Its backers over the years have included prominent names and firms from the technology and cryptocurrency worlds, including Paradigm and Apollo Projects, the investment vehicle founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his brothers.

The desire to gather like-minded people and build a better society from scratch is considerably older than Silicon Valley.

In 1825, Welsh textile manufacturer and social reformer Robert Owen purchased a settlement in Indiana and renamed it New Harmony, imagining a cooperative society built around equality, education and reason. The experiment fractured within a few years. Two decades later, religious leader John Humphrey Noyes established the Oneida Community in New York, where followers shared property and attempted to reorder family, work and relationships around Noyes’ doctrine of Christian perfectionism. That community lasted more than three decades before abandoning its communal structure.

Brown’s ambitions are decidedly digital. Praxis speaks not merely of building a community but of turning an online population into a physical one. At its 2024 World Congress, the organization declared “We will be the Rome of the digital age.”

The same speech imagined a future freed from the necessity of human labor and a civilization whose ambitions eventually extend beyond Earth. Participants were invited to sign a “Declaration of Ascent,” envisioning humanity moving “into the cloud,” into space and toward a technologically enabled form of transcendence.

Praxis says Uruguay offers what its worldwide search had struggled to find in one place: open land, a long coastline, political stability, strong institutions and room to expand. Despite Praxis’ rhetoric about nations and empires, its Uruguay project will operate within the country’s existing laws. And the agreement with +Colonia remains at an early stage, with land transactions still to be completed.

That leaves distance between Brown’s vision and the civilization he describes. New cities require infrastructure, government approvals, capital and people willing to uproot their lives for someone else’s idea of the future. Brown has spent years assembling the people, the money and the story. The project has moved from manifesto to real estate, even as the skepticism grows.