For this reason, I will call both those who actually established such communes and those who saw the transformation of consciousness as the basis for the reformation of American social structure New Communalists. In doing so, I hope to tease apart an important strand of countercultural thought and practice that has become so thoroughly entangled with the terms counterculture and New Left over the years as to have been rendered nearly invisible. By identifying the intellectual roots, the social ambitions, and the extensive historical influence of those who turned toward technology and mind as foundations of a new society, I also hope to clear up two historical misconceptions. Many historians today still read the youth movements of the 1960s as a generational rejection of the cold war world into which they were born. Among New Communalists, though, this was simply not the case: even as they set out for the rural frontier, the communards of the back-to-the-land movement often embraced the collaborative social practices, the celebration of technology, and the cybernetic rhetoric of mainstream military-industrial-academic research. More recently, analysts of digital utopianism have dated the communitarian rhetoric surrounding the introduction of the Internet to what they have imagined to be a single, authentically revolutionary social movement that was somehow crushed or co-opted by the forces of capitalism.75 By confusing the New Left with the counterculture, and the New Communalists with both, contemporary theorists of digital media have often gone so far as to echo the utopians of the 1990s and to reimagine its peer-to-peer technologies as the rebirth in hardware and software of a single, “free” culture that once stood outside the mainstream and can do so again.