Time to Leave the Praxis Society and Do Something Useful for Your Country

It's a talent sink.

I’ve been involved in conversations with various free cities people for some years. It’s very interesting to talk about and in some ways an appealing vision, it evokes something like a cyberpunk Renaissance Italy. But the Praxis Society is a talent sink, designed to get smart people working on something that isn’t going to help their country, and has no chance of being realized. They have raised $15 million. The average cost to build a hotel is $22 million.

At the height of the crypto era, schemes like these looked like they might be possible. It should be clear to everyone at this point that it is not, and will be less so as interest rates continue to rise. As I’ve said before, lots of smart people imagine it is possible to be a man without a country. It isn’t.

I told an old friend years ago, who founded a free cities NGO, that he was only going to be successful to the extent this model could be integrated into U.S. development goals in Africa. There, it strikes me as being able to fit pretty well: this model poses a contrast to Chinese debt-based development on the continent that, to my mind, makes America look good. We’re partnering with them to urbanize, the Chinese are exploiting them for natural resources, at best, if their goal isn’t simply to have African countries default and then seize the collateral.

What isn’t going to happen is a crypto-city in the Mediterranean, which is what the Praxis people are proposing. That they’ve put this possibility forward shows their project is really more about aesthetics and community-building than actually doing anything. The best outcome, if it were to be implemented, is it would become a hive of money laundering and criminality, and the Med already has one of those, it’s called Malta. Malta already presents, in a variety of different ways but chiefly their passports-for-cash schemes, security risks to Europe.

The worst-case is being taken over by the Montenegrins or whatever tiny country with poor governance decides to have a go at offering these people what would surely amount to not much more than a lease with unusual terms. If your libertarian governance project isn’t robust enough to avoid a takeover by the armed forces of Montenegro, it isn’t serious. Somewhere in between these two outcomes, they would be allowed to exist for a time, and surely be watched by various other foreign powers.

So what we have in Praxis is a quasi-secret society dedicated to undermining national sovereignty and getting smart people to work on a pointless project. Sounds like bad news, to me.