Radical countermedia communes were torn between starting fresh and staying plugged in.

Evidence

Even at Stephen Diamond’s New Age Farm, a commune that split off from the radical underground Liberation News Service (LNS) in New York with the express purpose of running their own news service, the world of politics began to feel distant from the farm. “[W]e were getting farther and farther away from it, away from the draft resistance news, birth control articles, Abbie Hoffman in Chicago, the poetry of the ‘revolution’” At one point Diamond fantasizes about burning down the barn in which they still prepare their LNS mailings: … But would that stop it, though? Would that act of the flaming building help reduce those contrasts and tensions (“The ironies that kill”) that were driving me mad: would it put an end to LNS, to that poorly balanced seesaw between starting new, from nothing, and still trying to stay “plugged in,” carrying all the old death karma with us into the hills—and it bringing us down with it. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 171