When he took the stage at a conference for “start-up societies” in Amsterdam in October, 27-year-old Dryden Brown cut a rumpled figure, moving stiffly in a gray hoodie with a T-shirt poking out at the bottom.

He was there to tout his company, Praxis, which has an ambitious goal: to create a new city on the Mediterranean.

The Santa Barbara native had never built a house before, let alone a city. A New York University dropout, he had been fired from his last job, at a hedge fund. He isn’t a charismatic speaker or an accomplished businessman. He’s big on promises and light on specifics, such as where on the 28,600-mile Mediterranean coast his city will be.

Nevertheless, he has raised $19.2 million for his project: a paltry amount in the worlds of venture capital and urban development — Hudson Yards, for example, cost $25 billion — but still a lot to fork over to a young man with no track record.

In a monotone delivery, leavened by surfer-dude inflections, Mr. Brown made some astounding claims: His team, he said, included two former prime ministers and was armed with investments from leading venture capitalists. The waiting list for membership, Mr. Brown said, was nearly 50,000 people long, with 12,000 members already interested in moving, en masse, to a “beautiful, green city” — presented in a slick rendering by Zaha Hadid Architects — starting in 2026.

Praxis takes its name from a Greek word that means putting theory into practice. And 62,000 members and prospective members would represent quite a bit of praxis, given that in July, the company listed only 431 members on an internal company roster.

(In an email, Mr. Brown clarified that 12,000 was the number of people who had signed up for Praxis groups on Discord, Telegram, and Signal.)

Mr. Brown’s success attracting capital is in part a vestige of the crypto bubble, when easy cash and highfalutin mumbo jumbo often went hand in hand. (The company’s 2022 Series A pitch claimed that the city would be a “cryptostate.”) The most notable venture of this era was FTX, whose founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was running an elaborate Ponzi scheme. Praxis’ largest backer, Paradigm, was a central investor in FTX.

Praxis’ extravagant plans face daunting odds, even within the moonshot culture of tech investing, but what makes that more than $19 million truly strange is the disturbing society Mr. Brown wishes to build inside his city. “Our values inform our vision for the future,” read a slide during his presentation at the Network State Conference. “Our vision is a more vital future for humanity.”

Onstage, Mr. Brown left those values undefined, but an internal Praxis branding guide makes it clear that the company is part of a creepy internet subculture that has drawn reams of news media coverage as a fascist breeding ground within the American right.

The guide denounces “enemies of vitality,” who “reject what they consider the optional ‘European beauty standards.” It goes on to extol “traditional, European/Western beauty standards on which the civilized world, at its best points, has always found success.”

Beauty, here, connotes proper breeding: “In humans, beauty implies a number of things — namely that two people, themselves of beauty, formed a union to create more beautiful life,” it reads.

According to several former Praxis employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they signed nondisclosure agreements, Mr. Brown had discussed wanting to attract tech talent to his city by introducing founders to “hot girls.” He threw lavish parties, where computer nerds rubbed elbows with the stylish members of a now-infamous demimonde that has grown up in and around New York’s Chinatown, which places shock above most other values.

Even if Mr. Brown never ends up building an eternal city, he has already built something of this moment. Praxis, a real-life partnership between puffed-up subcultures that mix mostly online, has pulled together those in the tech world who seek alternatives to liberal democracy, members of an ascendant right that rejects the premise of human equality, and a band of downtown New York scenesters who find it all a bit thrilling.

Crisis as Opportunity

In Amsterdam, Mr. Brown described Praxis as his response to being trapped inside his apartment during Covid, mixed with his longstanding interest in colonial America. “Ready to join America in 1776?” reads a company pitch deck.

In 2022, Mr. Brown had been more specific about his motivation to build a city from scratch, telling a speechwriter that he got the idea for Praxis after witnessing looters break shop windows in SoHo during the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd.

(Mr. Brown gave detailed biographical information to the speechwriter, Webster Stone, during hours of recorded meetings in 2022, of which The New York Times has reviewed a transcript. In an email response to a detailed list of questions, Mr. Brown disputed several of his own statements to the speechwriter, without offering any clarification.)

According to the transcript, Mr. Brown described himself to Mr. Stone as neurotic and ambitious. He said he was home-schooled in Santa Barbara so that he could pursue competitive surfing. Exposed to the classics by his tutor, Mr. Brown read Ayn Rand and the Austrian economists in high school. He said he was drawn to the idea of the charter city — a kind of special, decentralized economic zone championed by libertarians, in which a poor host country leases a piece of land to a third party, which then governs it as it sees fit. (As of 2023, the most advanced of these projects is Próspera, on the Honduran island of Roatán.)

Applying only to Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, and Cambridge, Mr. Brown was rejected by them all, he told Mr. Stone. He ended up at N.Y.U., tried to transfer to Stanford, and was rejected again. Eventually, he stopped attending college and was hired as an analyst at a hedge fund. There, he met Charlie Callinan, a former Boston College wide receiver who is Mr. Brown’s co-founder at Praxis.

Per the transcript, Mr. Brown was fired from his job at the hedge fund, but he had never dropped his dream of building a city. With several thousand dollars that Mr. Callinan had won in a golf tournament, the two traveled in 2019 first to Nigeria and then to Ghana, talking their way into a room with Ghana’s vice president, in which they proposed building a financial center. But the pandemic derailed those plans.

In September 2020, Mr. Brown wrote a thread on Twitter about the madcap series of events that went into the meeting in Accra. After, he was mocked online and accused of dilettantism and neocolonialism. Mr. Brown told the speechwriter those insults engaged his fight-or-flight response.

So too had the experience of watching the Black Lives Matter protests, which made Mr. Brown fear, he said in an interview with Mr. Stone, that he might be dragged from his Prince Street apartment. To clear his head, he rented a cabin in Alaska. There, Mr. Brown told Mr. Stone, he read, went for walks around a lake and began to plan. He wanted to build more than an economic hub. He wanted a city based around a “spiritual core.”

What was more, he said, he now understood that Covid didn’t have to be an obstacle; it could be an opportunity. During moments of crisis, you could say and do things that you normally couldn’t, because people are willing to consider extreme options.

Business-Friendly, Utopian Start-Up Cities

Tech-world libertarians have long pushed for “exit projects” free from the constraints of the modern Western state. These hypothetical spaces are mostly the dry realm of wonks debating theories of sovereignty. But Mr. Brown’s company seems to have focused less on the nitty-gritty of building a city and more on its “traditional” “European” aesthetics and on introducing “Praxis values” such as “vitality,” “beauty,” and “patriotism” to prospective members.

The most prominent figure in this world is Peter Thiel, who declared in 2009 that “the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms.” Since then, the billionaire Republican megadonor has backed several attempts to create corporate city-states, and he casts a long shadow over the culture surrounding these initiatives.

So it made sense that when Mr. Brown went looking for money to build his escape from contemporary New York, he found some of it in Mr. Thiel’s orbit. Pronomos Capital, a Thiel-backed city-building fund run by Patri Friedman, the grandson of the libertarian economist Milton Friedman, invested in a 2021 funding round that raised $4.2 million. Two of Mr. Thiel’s associates, the venture capitalists Balaji Srinivasan and Joe Lonsdale, invested in Praxis as well. But according to a person familiar with his investments, Mr. Thiel has never directly supported Praxis. Still, the widespread perception that Mr. Thiel is involved with the company has helped it build its mystique.

The biggest investment in Praxis came from the booming world of cryptocurrency, including from Paradigm, a venture capital firm best known for its $125 million stake in Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange FTX. (Alameda Research, Mr. Bankman-Fried’s trading firm, also invested in Praxis, as did Apollo Ventures, the venture firm launched by the OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman.) Paradigm’s due diligence practices came under scrutiny in October, when then-managing partner Matt Huang testified at Mr. Bankman-Fried’s trial, saying he had been misled by the disgraced founder. Paradigm declined to comment for this article.

According to two sources familiar with the deal who were not authorized to speak on the record, Paradigm raised concerns about gender imbalance within the Praxis community. Men outnumber women by about four to one, according to the July 2023 membership roll.

‘Nobody seemed to have a definable skill set.’

Praxis, cash rich, moved into a 7,500-square-foot SoHo office in May 2022. According to a former Praxis employee, Mr. Brown wore Balenciaga and drank Hallstein water (a six-pack costs $68); company parties featured charcuterie plates from Balthazar. Praxis staffed up, and Mr. Brown plotted how to introduce himself to the national stage.

The following month, the company hired Mr. Stone, the ghostwriter, to help write a biographical speech about Mr. Brown, as well as the script for a short film in which Mr. Brown would walk along a beach, conversing with the disembodied voice of Mother Nature. The plan was to unveil it all at a big town hall, à la Steve Jobs. (The event never happened.)

In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Stone said that during his time working in the Praxis office he was struck that “nobody seemed to have a definable skill set. There was no one with engineering, planning, language or communications skills.”

Mr. Brown continued to spend on showy parties — many at the “Praxis Embassy,” the multi-floor Broome Street loft where he lived along with several of his deputies — in an attempt to build a community of wealthy and influential young people. A report from one such salon, held in June 2022, described an under-30 finance and art set discussing Machiavelli and Hobbes while chamber music played.

Around this time, Mr. Brown started to focus his attention on “Dimes Square,” the downtown party and social media scene that achieved notoriety for its attempts to shock liberals through reactionary political postures. Stylish young people staging their own cultural exit from identity politics naturally might have appealed to Mr. Brown; Mr. Thiel himself had funded a Dimes Square film festival in October 2021.

Praxis co-hosted parties with the downtown film podcasters who call themselves the Ion Pack — one at Art Basel Miami in 2021, and another in February of this year, inside a Bedford-Stuyvesant brownstone. There, White Claw-swigging models, actors, and influencers wore dog tags that read, “Praxis: Meet Me in the Eternal City.”

In April of this year, Praxis hired the publicist Kaitlin Phillips, the doyenne of downtown mythmaking. Then, in June, the Graydon Carter-run outlet Air Mail sent a reporter to a “secret and exclusive” Praxis gala at the Yale Club, where men wore tuxedos and a string quintet played. That same month, a model and D.J. named Dagsen Love, another Dimes Square fixture, helped Praxis stage a week of events around the city. And in August, the acclaimed, Dimes Square-approved designer Elena Velez posted a photo of her children playing in the Praxis office.

Mood Board Reactionaries

Even among a crowd receptive to reactionary chic, the parties were controversial. On June 5, Praxis hosted a mixer at the buzzy downtown event space Sovereign House.

The next day, a Guardian U.S. editor named Amana Fontanella-Khan who had attended the party posted on Instagram that Praxis wanted to “create their own laws, not pay taxes and remove the poors and the undesirables.” The reason “these ghouls” were “courting the downtown club scene,” Ms. Fontanella-Khan wrote, was to solicit new members.

In September, Mother Jones published an exposé about Mr. Brown’s politics, reporting that he had urged staff to read the fascist writer Julius Evola. According to a former Praxis employee who signed a nondisclosure agreement, Mr. Brown’s book collection in the so-called Praxis Embassy also included the memoirs of Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler’s architect, and “Imperium,” an influential 1948 title that calls for the establishment of a neo-Nazi empire in Europe.

“We have thousands of books in our office, I don’t endorse all of their ideas,” Mr. Brown wrote in an email.

In an undated Instagram story from inside the Praxis office that was reviewed by The New York Times, a man measured Mr. Brown’s face using calipers — one of the main tools of physiognomy, the pseudoscience of judging character from facial characteristics, and of phrenology, the discredited science of predicting mental traits by measuring bumps on the skull. Mr. Brown did not clarify in his email response why he wanted his head measured.

These preoccupations place Mr. Brown within a nebulous group of right-wing influencers who practice a sort of mood board politics: a social media pastiche of images and aphorisms that celebrate antiquity, classicism and biological hierarchy — and by extension criticize modernity, diversity and human equality. (Its best known figure is the writer Bronze Age Pervert.)

Internal Praxis documents outline three “persona groups” who will populate the Praxis city. They are “warriors,” who are “muscular” and “clean” and protect society from threats; “priests,” who are “very thin,” and “define the values and beliefs of society”; and “merchants,” who are “portly” and “bearded,” and include venture capitalists and cryptocurrency professionals.

The July membership roster includes many bankers and tech workers, but not many models, artists or influencers. There are a few big names on the list, but they come from the worlds of tech and finance: Martin Shkreli, the ex-pharmaceutical investor who served nearly seven years in prison for securities fraud; Rob Rhinehart, the founder of Soylent, the meal-replacement company; and Max Novendstern, the co-founder — along with Mr. Altman — of Worldcoin, a controversial project that gives people cryptocurrency in exchange for their biometric data. Mr. Novendstern said he had hosted a dinner for Mr. Brown in the fall of 2020. Though Mr. Altman has invested in Praxis, he is not listed as a member.

“I’m not sure there’s a huge overlap between people who want to go to good parties in SoHo and people who want to live on the Mosquito Coast,” said Curtis Yarvin, a right-wing writer, referring to the Paul Theroux novel about an American inventor who attempts to create a utopia in Central America. (Mr. Yarvin stayed for several nights at the Praxis Embassy in 2022.)

Goodbye to All That

Mr. Brown may now be ready to leave the Manhattan party scene behind, for a city where his ideas are more accepted.

“NYC is going the way of Chicago — second tier in every meaningful sense,” he wrote on X on Sept. 11. “I’ll be spending more time in SF.”

Of late, Mr. Brown has posted often about effective accelerationism, a concept popularized by the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. It holds that Silicon Valley should pursue rapid technological development even at the cost of painful social changes, in the interest of bringing about a superabundant utopia.

On a personal blog, Mr. Brown wrote on Oct. 18 that Praxis is building “acceleration zones” and is consulting with seven governments about where to place them. Renderings of a hypothetical city posted in October to the Praxis Instagram account depict low-slung, curvilinear glass structures nestled into coastal chaparral. On X, Mr. Brown has promised airships to future residents.

Meanwhile, he continues to fund-raise. A deal memo distributed to potential investors in October refers to “rumored partnerships with top tech giants” and claims “the team are now finalizing their first partnership with a Host Government,” with a move-in date of 2026. According to the memo, Praxis’ government relations team includes Stephen Harper, the former prime minister of Canada. (Mr. Harper’s consulting business did not respond to a request for comment.)

But Mr. Brown has found a chilly reception in at least one important court: According to the person familiar with Mr. Thiel’s investments, Mr. Brown has pitched multiple representatives of Mr. Thiel’s over the past year, all of whom turned him down. The source said that Mr. Thiel didn’t think Praxis was capable of executing on its ambitious plans.