The Last Glimpses of California's Vanishing Hippie Utopias

https://www.gq.com/story/californias-vanishing-hippie-utopias

by dmckeon • 5 years ago

29 3 5 years ago

gq.com

ctrlp• 5 years ago

"That's what came out of the '60s, the sense that you could create your own reality."

A morality tale.

Ericson2314• 5 years ago

Despite the pictures, they mainly interviewed the people that stuck it out, and perhaps had more patience and humility in order to be able to do so.

That said, this sort of deep green stuff buttressed lots of NIMBY low density bullshit, sometimes overtly, sometimes as a weird sort of ideological cover. The result of that has been disastrous to humans and nature, and antithetical to their original goals.

xyzzy21• 5 years ago

Nice article btw.

Honestly hippies haven't been a thing since the 1970s-1990s.

You used to be able to go to Seattle in the 1990s and see something that resembled California hippie culture but that's long gone also.

Hippies were made up of two groups.

First were the "Real" hippies. Most of these people were high IQ, thoughtful and deep. They were also broadly read/educated and talking to them was a useful, educational thing. They were true libertarians; leaders rather than followers.

The second were the hangers-on, the soulless, guys wanting easy hook-up sex, drug addicts, etc. The latter mostly became Disco hustlers in the late 1970s, Yuppies in the 1980s and Dot Com entrepreneurs in the 1990s.

The last remaining vestiges I know about were those who left the Haight-Ashbury BEFORE "Flower Power" became popularized. They went first to Marin, especially Mill Valley. And then they left Mill Valley and often went to places like Bolinas and Stinson Beach - far enough away that groupies and trash wouldn't follow.

Others, of course, became your long-haired, bearded Unix admins.

One "nice" part was hippie girls who went braless and wore macrame tops. That was about 30% of all the girls I went to middle school with. Marin was a wild place for everyone in the 1970s. The downside was patchouli perfume which smells like garbage.

The Last Glimpses of California's Vanishing Hippie Utopias

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