Generation Bubble

Collective Effort: Boomers and Millennials Revive Communes

It’s easy to fetishize communal living, because we can’t help but believe it would only turn out for the best. In such assumptions we show ourselves the dupes of mass culture, as we project upon the prospect of co-habitating thusly the rosiest elements of the 1960s and 1970s — all peace, love and plowshares into swords and unrefined handwoven fabrics, a real-time, three-dimensional montage of hippiedom’s stock tropes, sanitized and craigslist-ready. These new ashrams of boomers and millennials would have no cult killings, race riots, venereal disease or drug overdoses. No, for them it’s impossible that communal living could ever be other than a Potemkin village of the Aquarian Age, that it could ever lead to dozens of angry, disenfranchised people occupying an apartment crawling with bedbugs and reeking of yesterday’s cabbage.