A New Planetary Nationalism?

While I am encouraged by The Center from Christogenesis' support of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's original notion of the noosphere, I am disturbed by a techno-optimist push toward planetary nationalism.

On May 13, 2025, Boris Shoshitaishvili and Lisa H. Siderismay wrote about The New Planetary Nationalism. in NOEMA., a magazine "exploring the transformations sweeping our world" published online and in print by the Berggruen Institute.

Praxis Nation describes itself as the “world’s first Sovereign Network” or “network empire.” This “new form of nation — one that exists wherever its citizens gather, whether in physical space or across the digital expanse” — aims to “restore Western Civilization and pursue our ultimate destiny of life among the stars.” Dryden Brown, Praxis’s founder, is searching first on Earth for a place to establish "a proof-of-concept, crypto-based, libertarian-minded dream city" and sees Greenland as a potential site.

Trump-Vance donor Peter Thiel along with investors like Palantir’s Joe Lonsdale and the Altman brothers' (Sam, Max, and Jack) Apollo Project help fund Praxis Nation,

On November 15, 2024, TechCrunch reported: that "Praxis is one of the prominent examples of a “network state,” a term defined by former a16z investor Balaji Srinivasan, as "an internet community that acquires a physical home and “gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states,”

Srinivasan wrote an e-book on The Network State and has a podcast. A Network State Conference: was held in Singapore on September 22, 2024. Marc Andreessen has praised the concept; see Andreesen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin created his own network state experiment."

Mother Jones on September 7, 2023, described Praxis as “a free-market” “city-state” which “the company hopes to build under the leadership of a CEO [Dryden Brown]who, former employees said, is interested in fascist authors and occultism and has touted a book that argues Black people are intellectually inferior to whites.” The article details accounts and associations of the Praxis CEO and employees with Nazi-ism, occultism, race science,and various fascist ideologies; the account is substantial and another piece of evidence that venture colonialism is fascist in character, and is being spearheaded by fascists."

Venture Capital Status has a rundown of Network States, Tech, and Crypto Cities. saying "Tech fascists are building The Network State -- a distributed nation-state made up of tech and crypto cities around the world. "

You might also be interested in reading OpenAI's Infrastructure Blueprint for the U.S., November 13, 2024: Trump's Weird New 'Freedom Cities' and the Network State Cult; and billionaire Elon Musk‘s November 2024 proposal to turn Starbase (the South Texas site where SpaceX builds and launches its massive Starship rockets) into a new tech city.

Meanwhile, in June 2025, Praxis is proposing Atlas, California: a defense-focused spaceport city on 3,850 acres at Vandenberg Space Force Base.

---

NOEMA noted "Big Tech figures who drive projects that engage planetary themes have aligned themselves more closely with nationalism in recent years. A subset of this “broligarchy” sat prominently in the front row at Donald Trump’s second inauguration. For instance, major Silicon Valley figures embrace the nationalist narrative that besting China in the A.I. race should be a primary U.S. focus. But positioning a transformative planetary technology like AI as a zero-sum contest between adversary nations impedes progress toward governing it on a planetary scale."

On another end of the political spectrum, neither am I comfortable with explicit appeals to planetary concepts by nationalists like Steve Bannon, who has voiced a misguided interpretation of the “noosphere" - a planetary sphere of entwined human and technological activity.

See the article published by Counterpoint: Navigating Knowledge on July 9, 2024 for clarification and a more appropriate contemporary interpretation of Teilhards' reference to the noosphere.

#TeilharddeChardin #Noosphere #BerggruenInstitute #NOEMA #NetworkState #PraxisNation #broligarchy #SteveBannon