Dryden Brown is a slight man of 29, with a scruffy, reddish beard and a wry, serious demeanor. On the April afternoon we met at the Beverly Hills Hotel, his dark suit seemed out of place in the sunlit ease of the Polo Lounge patio. But perhaps the suit bolsters Brown’s title: CEO and cofounder of a “network state” called Praxis, which is not so much a business as it is an ongoing campaign for a city that has yet to exist. Over the years, this campaign has largely consisted of throwing lavish parties at insular Manhattan clubs, creating company swag in the form of steel Praxis “visas,” and, every couple years, suggesting that Praxis may have found its new home.
Here is what we know about the city so far: It will be beautiful. Also, it will restore Western civilization, through something called an “acceleration zone,” described on the Praxis website as a special economic zone that will “accelerate technological progress” in areas like AI, biotech, and energy. To do so, Praxis has raised about a half billion dollars from the likes of Sam Altman’s Apollo Projects, Shervin Pishevar, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss through Winklevoss Capitol, and built an online community of nearly 89,000 prospective citizens. These citizens are representative of the new right-leaning tech aristocracy: people working for defense tech companies like Anduril and Palantir, three DOGE employees, and members of the influential venture fund Andreessen Horowitz.
Brown has no shortage of ideas about how Praxis will save Western civilization, a problem he first became fascinated with while interning at Bill Ackman’s hedge fund, Pershing Square, which recently backed Howard Hughes Holdings, a company developing master-planned communities like Summerlin, Nevada, and the Woodlands, Texas. But it wasn’t until the election of Joe Biden in 2020 that Brown realized that America was, as he puts it, becoming “a wasteland,” helmed by a “king in a coma.” To rescue it, Brown decided to build a city founded on Western values, replete with Gothic architecture and filled with a citizenry that upholds classical values and enjoys reading books like The Odyssey.
But Brown has long grappled with the project’s most fundamental question: where, exactly, to put it. Nearly six years ago, Brown began scouting the globe for his city’s home. On a dozen adventures, he surveyed countries in the Mediterranean like Italy, Greece, and Montenegro. More recently, he floated Greenland.
The Polo Lounge, a favorite meeting spot of Brown’s, seems exactly the kind of place he aspires to replicate in Praxis. After all, this is a man who is keenly sensitive to both architecture and ambiance, a man who has spoken about his aspirations to build a city that has a “neo–Gilded Age” aesthetic. Amid the pink bougainvillea and April sunshine, the solicitous white-suited waiters standing at the ready in terra-cotta archways, Brown announces that he has reached a decision. As it turns out, after all these long years of scouring the earth, Praxis will build right here, in America, about a three-hour drive from the sun-dappled patio where we are currently sitting, and one hour north of Santa Barbara, the old-money coastal town where Brown grew up. The new city will be called Atlas.
“The opportunity,” he told me, “is to build on Vandenberg.”
Vandenberg is a 100,000-acre US Space Force base in Santa Barbara County that is home to nearly 3,000 military personnel and their families. These are people who, according to Brown, are “super mission driven” and “technologically competent.” Brown believes these people need something, and what they need is mission expansion. “This is a story about California,” Brown says, his brow furrowed. “It’s also a story about America. At the highest level, it’s about building the arsenal of democracy so that if we get into a conflict with a geopolitical rival like China, we can actually compete at parity.”
The idea goes like this: Let the so-called Praxians build a city on federal land in Vandenberg. They will erect facilities, housing, and offices. They will attract tech talent from nearby Los Angeles and San Francisco. With their newfound city, they will help revitalize American manufacturing. They will build drones and ships and space infrastructure. In doing so, Vandenberg will become the new American industrial base and a proud emblem of Western prowess.
In Vandenberg, one gets the sense that Brown is only just getting started. “When I think about Vandenberg…like, What is Vandenberg?” Here, he seemed to ponder the possibilities. “Vandenberg is a spaceport. It’s a portal to the stars. What are the stars? What is out there? It’s a great theater for heroism, for heroic exploration. It’s, like, space…space is not about mining rocks. It’s not about getting some metal off some rocks—that is gonna be handled by AI and robots. What it’s about is building new cultures and new worlds. That’s what it’s about. It’s about expanding human civilization to new places and giving it new forms.”
Space exploration is one of the subjects on which Brown has a tendency to monologue. Others, as the name of the new city suggests include Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, as well as the ideological foundation of America, and Western aesthetics. Like other libertarians, Brown has long been inspired by Rand’s capitalist utopia, Galt’s Gulch. He speaks fondly of the Founding Fathers, framing his own mission in the mythic terms of a knight’s search for the Holy Grail. During the course of our 90-minute conversation, he mentioned the word “hero” five times.
Cities backed by technologists are not exactly a new idea. In recent years, tech billionaires have rolled out one sweeping blueprint after another—envisioning utopian hubs of innovation marked by walkable cities, clean energy, smart infrastructure, and gleaming high-rises. One such project is California Forever, which is backed by a string of blue-chip Silicon Valley investors like Marc Andreessen, Michael Moritz, and Reid Hoffman. One comparative advantage to Praxis’s designs on Vandenberg is that California Forever has already secured more than 50,000 acres of land northeast of San Francisco, largely zoned for agricultural use only.
But, according to Brown, there is one big problem with California Forever: “Candidly, California Forever is a really boring center-left project,” he says, that is “pandering to the local communities and the farmers or something…. These are boomer, lower-middle-class farmers who hear about Marc Andreessen and are like, ‘This guy seems weird,’” said Brown. “It is low testosterone.”
What Brown is building is “more like the Gundo”—the hard-tech hub of El Segundo just south of Los Angeles that has lately become a breeding ground for companies working in defense tech and manufacturing. “This is a Jetsons/pioneer/1950s/space-futurism insane city on federal land. It is a revival of the aesthetic, classical ideas in America. It is a high-testosterone futuristic vision versus the chill, community-oriented one.”
