[...] Ever since the Soviet Union first tested an atomic bomb in 1949, Americans, and particularly young Americans, had suffered under a thick cloud of nuclear anxiety. For the college students of the early 1960s, that anxiety fused with fears for their own professional futures. Thanks to the power of postwar industry, they would have no trouble finding jobs. Yet many feared that to take those jobs would be to enter the bleak ranks of the bureaucracy that had brought forth nuclear weapons and, later, the Vietnam War. “There are models of marriage and adult life, but . . . they don’t work,” recalled the same young woman who had discovered the atomic bomb in the encyclopedia. “There is that whole conflict about being professional, leading a middle-class life which none of us have been able really to resolve. How do you be an adult in this world?”

In response to this question, and to the threat of technological bureaucracy more broadly, the youth of the 1960s developed two somewhat overlapping but ultimately distinct social movements. The first grew out of the struggles for civil rights in the Deep South and the Free Speech Movement and became known as the New Left. Its members registered formerly disenfranchised voters, formed new political parties, and led years of protests against the Vietnam War. The second bubbled up out of a wide variety of cold war – era cultural springs, including Beat poetry and fiction, Zen Buddhism, action painting, and, by the mid-1960s, encounters with psychedelic drugs. If the New Left turned outward, toward political action, this wing turned inward, toward questions of consciousness and interpersonal intimacy, and toward small-scale tools such as LSD or rock music as ways to enhance both. By the end of the decade, as youth everywhere adopted its drug habits and its sartorial styles, this branch of the youth movement, and ultimately youthful protestors as a whole, came to commonly be called “the counterculture.”

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.

By far the most visible of the communes at the time, however, were those founded by the hippies of San Francisco and their confreres on the East Coast.

By turning to consciousness as a source of social change, Reich and the New Communalists who put his ideas into practice turned away from the political struggles that preoccupied both the New Left and the Democratic and Republican parties. But even as they did, they opened new doors to mainstream culture, and particularly to high-technology research culture. If the mind was the first site of social change, then information would have to become a key part of a countercultural politics. And if those politics rejected hierarchy, then the circles-within-circles of information and systems theory might somehow make sense not only as ideas about information, but also as evidence from the natural world for the rightness of collective polity. Finally, if the self was the ultimate driver of social change, and if class was no more, then individual lifestyle choices became political acts, and both consumption and lifestyle technologies — including information technologies —would have to take on a newly political valence.