Greenland Test Run + The PayPal Mafia | Abolishing States, Establishing Private Cities
GlobalResearch.ca | Hermann Ploppa
The world is currently undergoing radical change. In Greenland, the wet dreams of the super-rich are set to become reality. We are talking about private cities and special economic zones.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, US President Donald Trump reiterated that he “absolutely must have Greenland.” Because if the US cannot extend its Golden Dome over Greenland, then, according to Trump, the evil Chinese and Russians will inevitably control the island. Trump: you only really want to defend what you actually own![1]
Trump undoubtedly has geopolitical ambitions for the world’s largest island. The covetousness of the Western community of values is evident in the growing number of NATO military operations in the Arctic Ocean. Climate change, which is repeatedly denied, is causing the polar ice to melt. This would allow ships to sail directly from Rotterdam to Shanghai via the Arctic Ocean. In addition, the melting of the permafrost makes it possible to extract even more mineral resources.
In fact, investors are already salivating: rare earths and oil lie beneath the glaciers of Greenland. And billionaire heir Ronald Lauder has already met with Greenlandic politicians to source “luxury water” from Greenland on a massive scale. All of this has been widely discussed in the media.
That’s all true and important. [except for the ice melting climate bullshit] But here we want to focus on those super-rich US citizens who want to impose a radically new form of governance, a completely new concept of politics and administration, on Greenland. Energetic promoters of this radical concept belong to the scene of platform capitalists from Silicon Valley. These are people who market extremely lucrative services based on the internet: Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, to name but a few. They have all amassed unimaginable wealth – Elon Musk is already set to become the first trillionaire in world history[3]. Oxfam’s latest report vividly documents how the gap between the handful of super-rich and the rest of humanity has reached obscene proportions[4]. These super-rich, and especially the group of newly rich platform capitalists, often referred to as the “PayPal mafia,” do not want to share their obscene wealth with the rest of humanity.
They dream of abolishing states altogether and instead establishing cities and regions that are run entirely by the private sector. In these private cities, citizens are not taxpayers but shareholders. And the city is not a community open to all, but an exclusive event, only for individuals who have enough money to buy their way in. Those who do not like this private city can have their entry fee refunded and buy into another private city. There is no mayor in private cities elected by the community, but rather a CEO appointed by the investors. Instead of a city treasurer, there is a managing director who is also appointed from above. Taxes are not paid[5].
The private city contains elements of so-called gated communities, which have long existed in unstable regions of the world: in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Like medieval feudal cities, gated communities protect the rich from the impoverished rest of society that they exploit. In addition, private cities contain elements of the smart city. They are fully digitized and use elements of artificial intelligence. They generate and use renewable energy. Nevertheless, the inhabitants of these private cities are not to be envied. For they voluntarily submit themselves to hypermodern, comprehensive surveillance. No normal person would want to live in this golden cage.
It is little known that there are already over twenty such private cities. Most of them are located in Africa. We are currently experiencing a radical upheaval of the world as we knew it. For many decades now, nation states have been driven into debt and calculated bankruptcy from within by radical market politicians. Save, save, save again. Until the insolvency administrator arrives and the nation state is completely discredited among its citizens. The austerity craze extends all the way down to the lower echelons of local politics.
Since this internal hollowing out of the nation state is not happening fast enough for the super-rich, they are promoting private cities and special economic zones. A blank slate is to be completely rewritten from scratch. And the Trump administration is now the executor of this global expropriation of public space and democracy. The scandalous plans for the Gaza Strip are an eloquent example of this[6]. On top of the mountains of corpses of an estimated 70,000 Palestinians killed and a region ethnically “cleansed” of Palestinians, a special economic zone is to be created in the Gaza Strip according to the guidelines described above. Trump himself wants to preside over the newly founded “Board of Peace” as its lifelong king and CEO, hiring and firing countries and board members according to his own neo-feudal tastes.
The ever-transatlantic European Council on Foreign Relations describes the constitution of this so-called “Board of Peace” as follows:
“The BoP can be thought of as a Trump-owned US company, with the US president as permanent chairman and majority shareholder. According to the board’s charter, all decisions and power emanate from Trump as he selects and presides over a subordinate governing board of member states.“[7]
This is nothing less than a massive revolution from above. Regardless of what one may think of the achievements of these political entities, states are, by definition, the guardians of the interests of all their citizens. The concept of the nation state is inclusive. It embraces all its citizens. In contrast, the new Trump world order is exclusive. It represents only the interests of the wealthy. The rest of the people, with all due respect, can fend for themselves. The state represents the interests of the common good, and the Basic Law stipulates that all citizens should share in the achievements of the community. At least, that is the idea. The concept of private cities and special economic zones excludes the majority of people.
The Different Dialects of Private Cities
However, not all private cities are the same. In my latest book, “Der Neue Feudalismus” (The New Feudalism), I have identified three types of private cities[8]:
1. Experimental cities. For example, in the private city of Woven City, built by the world’s largest car manufacturer Toyota at the foot of Mount Fuji, new concepts of human mobility are to be tested in an open-air laboratory. Here, the jurisdiction of the Japanese state remains in force and the yen remains the regular currency. In Woven City, mobility researchers are to live together with “normal” citizens.
2. Then there are the private cities built by pragmatists. The operators of these private cities are not concerned with realizing ideological ambitions. It is simply a matter of building a maximally profitable and functional city from scratch on previously vacant land without compromising tradition and regional customs. Preference is given to establishing private cities in weak states that dare to raise little objection to the plans. States that have no political power and may view the private city experiment as their last straw. The Rendeavour company, for example, operates as Africa’s largest construction group. Africans dominate its operational staff. The cities that Rendeavour is building are called: Tatu City (in Kenya), Alaro and Appolonia City (both in Nigeria), King City (Ghana), Kiswishi City (Congo), and Rendeavour Roma Park (Zambia). Although Rendeavour operates as an African company, it is actually backed by US and British investors.
3. Finally, we must mention the ideologues among the private city founders. These are people who adhere to the radical market ideology of Milton Friedman or Murray Rothbard. For these people, the state is a criminal because it “steals” money from the capable through taxation and gives it to incompetent, worthless individuals. So the ‘capable’ lock themselves away in their citadel. Because they don’t want to share their wealth with the “stupid rest.” Patri Friedman is the grandson of the famous Milton Friedman. He headed the Seasteading Institute for many years. A start-up financed by Peter Thiel. The idea: to build floating pontoon cities on extraterrestrial waters where nations have no access rights. So far, however, not a single floating private city has been realized. Overall, ideologically motivated private city operators have a harder time. Their plans provoke the local population. For example, German investor Titus Gebel’s plan to build private cities on the African islands of Principe and Sao Tomé failed due to local political resistance. On the idyllic island of Roatan in Honduras, however, the city of Prospera was successfully built from scratch against the will of the indigenous inhabitants. This was met with resistance from the Honduran government. This resistance has now been temporarily broken by Trump’s regime change maneuver. A new president appointed by Trump now secures the strongly neocolonial Prospera.
Ideologically driven private city founders have also long had their eye on Greenland. Greenland could have been exploited at any time. However, the platform capitalists of the PayPal Mafia were unable to get their message across to the Biden administration. People like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and investor Marc Andreessen pumped a lot of money into Donald Trump’s election campaign. With their money, Trump has now become US president for the second time. And now he has to deliver, please.
We can see that he is already delivering with the Board of Peace, which is intended to replace the UN in the long term. He is delivering with the Gaza Special Economic Zone. And now he is also delivering with Greenland. The PayPal Mafia has bundled its Greenland ambitions into the start-up company Praxis. The head of Praxis is Dryden Brown. Shortly after Trump’s election victory, Brown was in Greenland to “buy” this polar island, as he cheekily announced on X. Every year, Denmark transfers half a billion dollars to Greenland. The oligarchs from the US could raise this money, and in return Denmark would relinquish control of Greenland. Wouldn’t that be a fair deal? Neither the Greenlanders nor the Danes were enthusiastic about this idea, as Brown lamented. To give these efforts more weight, Trump appointed PayPal co-founder and Thiel confidant Ken Howery as US ambassador to Denmark. The icing on the cake was the appointment of Louisiana’s Republican governor, Jeff Landry, as “special envoy” for Greenland. Landry left no doubt as to the mission that took him from hot and humid Louisiana to the icebergs: “It is an honor to serve you [President Trump] in this honorary capacity and to make Greenland part of the US.”[9]
The Futuristic Fantasies of the Paypal Mafia
Let’s return to the company Praxis. In October 2024, it announced that it had already raised $525 million for the colonization of Greenland. That’s a lot of money, but certainly not enough to realize such an ambitious project. However, according to the creators of the Praxis concept, this can be offset by a radically new understanding of statehood. The concept is called “Praxis Network State.”
The state of these ideologists is no longer defined by a geographical location. The citizens of the Praxis Network State (PNS) are connected to each other via the Internet. They are no longer bound to a conventional territorial state.
In the newspeak of the practice makers, this reads as follows:
“In this world, the primary contested space is not land, but the mind. All follows from the mind – the minds of the masses and the minds of those who control strategic assets. Today, we are at an inflection point where power is increasingly determined by the ability to capture mindshare of globally dispersed communities. Traditional Nation States, built on physical territory and top-down governance, are no longer aligned with how people form identities and organize their lives.“[10]
Nevertheless, the Praxis Network State also wants to acquire a territorial home. There, techno-freaks can do whatever they’ve always wanted to do without regulations. For example, playing around with geoengineering a little, as the technology magazine The Crunch notes:
“Brown wants the potential Greenland city to be a bastion of technological experimentation, specifically drawing on the community of young male hardtech founders that have gathered in El Segundo. Imagine, he said, a city that can create rain on demand using Rainmaker technology, a cloud-seeding startup, or a community powered by nuclear technology from Valar Atomics.“[11]
Authors such as Christian Stöcker see the networked city founders in the tradition of early nineteenth-century futurism in the style of Marinetti[12]. Futurism explicitly professed fascism. A scientific study has examined the self-testimonies of the Praxis scene and concludes:
“PNS has been advancing a technological accelerationist project to generate knowledge about terraforming Mars for future colonization, starting with the challenging environment of Greenland as a neocolonial tabula rasa supposedly free of existing social and political constraints.”[13]
At first glance, this seems somewhat exaggerated. But the manifestos of the Praxis Group can be read online. The men (there are no women involved) do not hide their true feelings. They see themselves as the militant vanguard of a new world order. Of a new human race. Their “Declaration of Ascension” states:
“We ascend toward transcendence, striving to reunite with the eternal principles that shaped our highest civilizations. As the warrior-kings once sought the sacred Grail, so too shall we build an empire where true power flows from heroic courage and alignment with the divine order. Through this sacred pursuit, we will restore the foundations that elevated mankind beyond mere existence into ever greater heights of greatness and glory.”[14]
Let us remember: this is the state of mind of those people who, thanks to Donald Trump, have been given a free pass to rule Greenland. The objection is often heard: Greenland is so cold and inhospitable. How can you found a city there and attract people? One reason has already been put forward: both the creation of cryptocurrency and the feeding of artificial intelligence require an enormous amount of electricity. In Arctic regions, Mother Nature provides free cooling for hot-running generators. On top of that, you can make use of hydropower.
But that alone is not the motive of the Praxis people. Because the pompous text quoted above from the Praxis pioneers continues and refers to ambitions for the universe:
“We ascend into space, claiming humanity’s destiny among the stars. We declare that Praxis will be the first civilization to congregate beyond Earth, extending human consciousness and community into the cosmos itself.“[15]
Apparently, a private city in the Arctic region is to be used to practice colonizing the planet Mars. After all, Elon Musk has often spoken seriously about colonizing our cold sister planet Mars.
My suggestion to these futuristic-minded multi-billionaires: move to Mars as soon as possible—and leave the rest of humanity alone.
Notes
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTT-xnqatI4&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fhermannploppa.substack.com%2F
[3] Vermögen von Elon Musk zum Zeitpunkt der Niederschrift dieses Artikels (28.1.2026, 17:30 Uhr): 777,77 Miliarden Dollar. https://www.forbes.com/profile/elon-musk/?ctpv=rtb&list=rtb
[4] https://www.oxfam.de/publikationen/bericht-soziale-ungleichheit-2026
[5] Andreas Kemper: Privatstädte – Labore für einen neuen Manchesterkapitalismus. Münster 2022
[6] https://www.globalresearch.ca/netanyahu-dirty-work-blackrock/5901866
[7] https://ecfr.eu/article/welcome-to-the-jungle-trumps-board-of-peace-goes-global/
[8] Hermann Ploppa: Der Neue Feudalismus – Privatisierung, Blackrock, Plattformkapitalismus. Marburg 2025. If you would like to purchase the book, please order it directly from the author at: [email protected]. Although the book has been available since November 16, 2025, Amazon is censoring it and falsely claiming that it is not available. This is a technical censorship measure.
[10] https://www.praxisnation.com/news/network-state-cryptos-end-game
[13] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/29768640251377168
[14] https://www.praxisnation.com/news/declaration-of-ascent
[15] Siehe Fußnote <14>
[16] https://www.zdfheute.de/panorama/mars-mission-elon-musk-space-x-100.html
Original Article: https://www.globalresearch.ca/take-off-greenland-land-mars/5914506
Note: Comments placed in [ ] are added by Truth11.com editor. For example; [Flu]
Related:
Some say Mars is the other area you can see on the video above. If so you can see why a practice colonization of Greenland is a good practice run for the next step outside our ice wall.
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