And yet, in their own minds at least, the New Communalists were not simply colonizers. They may have bought up lands that formerly belonged to farmers and laborers, and they may have appropriated what they imagined to be working-class styles of manual labor and associated values of craft; but above all, they saw themselves as well-equipped refugees from technocracy. Drawing on the education, money, and technological savvy provided by the American mainstream and, less self-consciously, on its frontier mythology, they aimed to build communities that not only would serve as alternatives to a buttoned-down society, but would ultimately save that society from itself. If nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War, and perhaps even the urban riots that had plagued the last decade, were the products of a technocratic bureaucracy, then small-scale tools, the pursuit of higher consciousness, and the development of rural collaboratives might undermine the bureaucracy itself and, in the process, forecast a new, more harmonious future.