by Jenny Odell
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IN GETTING BACK TOGETHER, Houriet distinguishes two “stages” in the evolution of communes of the time. Facing disorganization and frustration—unfinished geodesic domes, crops gone wrong, arguments over how to raise children, and “the phenomenon of the unlabeled jars”—the atmosphere of naive optimism eventually gave way in some places to a more rigid and less idealistic approach. This second stage was epitomized by the vision of a new society in the 1948 utopian novel Walden Two.
Originally published to little fanfare, Walden Two became hugely popular in the 1960s, enough that some were inspired to base their communes on it. It was written by B. F. Skinner, an American psychologist and behavioral scientist famous for the Skinner box, in which a test subject animal learns to press a lever in response to specific stimuli. Walden Two reads like exactly what it is: a novel written by a scientist. To Skinner, everyone was potentially a test subject, and utopia was an experiment—not a political one, but a scientific one.
In Walden Two, a psychology professor named Burris (B. F. Skinner’s first name was Burrhus) visits an eerily harmonious community of one thousand people founded by a former colleague named Frazier. When he arrives, the scene is bucolic: People stroll about and have picnics, organize impromptu classical music performances, and sit contentedly in rocking chairs. Children are heavily conditioned from an early age, and the entire community is run as a behavioral engineering experiment. As a result, no one is unhappy with his lot in life; Frazier, the founder, has engineered it that way. “Our members are practically always doing what they want to do—what they ‘choose’ to do,” says Frazier cheerfully, “but we see to it that they will want to do precisely the things which are best for themselves and the community. Their behavior is determined, yet they’re free.”29 Members do not really vote; they live by “the Code,” whose development is deliberately obscured from them for their own good. Planners and “experts,” nearly anonymous and linguistically hidden in the passive voice, wield all of the power in Walden Two. In turn, they’re beholden to Frazier’s all-encompassing vision.
In the void left by politics, the emphasis in Walden Two lies on the aesthetic. Giving Burris a tour of the grounds, Frazier extols the advantages of their better designed and more efficient tea glasses. Even the members are reduced to elements of decor. At one point Burris observes that all of the women are beautiful, and one female passerby—with a hairstyle and outfit that he apparently finds pleasing—reminds him of “a piece of modern sculpture done in a shining dark wood.”30
Burris is accompanied on his visit by a philosophy professor named Castle, a grumbling man who is supposed to represent old-guard academia. When Castle accuses Frazier of being a fascist despot, Frazier responds not with an actual argument but with a pastoral image:
Frazier…drew us back along the Walk. We entered one of the lounges and went to the windows to look out over the landscape, which was dotted here and there with groups of people enjoying the fresh green countryside.
Frazier allowed perhaps a minute to pass. Then he turned to Castle.
“What were you saying about despotism, Mr. Castle?”
Castle was taken by surprise, and he stared at Frazier as a deep flush crept over his face. He tried to say something. His lips parted but no words came.31
However, in order for this “image” to persist, every part must have a static, controllable function. Frazier addresses this first by conditioning all of the members of Walden Two so that, although they are not literally static, they exhibit predictable behavior. In that regard, the members are not too different from the artificially intelligent “hosts” of the TV series Westworld, who believe they are acting of their own volition but are actually running a series of scripts and loops designed by humans they do not know.
Furthermore, just as the hosts of Westworld are designed to be tame yet technologically superior to humans, Frazier looks forward to eugenic breeding and says in the meantime that the “unfit” of Walden Two are discouraged from having children. (Presumably, Frazier decides who is unfit, and for what.) The iPad-like devices that the engineers use in Westworld, with sliders for qualities like intelligence and aggression, come to mind when Frazier brags about his own behavioral technology:
Give me the specifications, and I’ll give you the man! What do you say to the control of motivation, building the interests which will make men most productive and most successful? Does that seem to you fantastic? Yet some of the techniques are available, and more can be worked out experimentally. Think of the possibilities!32
Frazier’s example of a more productive man is no accident. Like someone running a corporate digital detox retreat, he is obsessed with productivity, claiming fantastically that mankind is only 1 percent as productive as it could be.
Memory and horizontal alliances are two hallmarks of individuality. In Westworld, humans maintain the hosts’ docility by periodically wiping their memories, keeping them effectively trapped in the present. Indeed, the show’s drama originates when aberrant hosts become able to access memories from past lives, allowing them not only to connect the dots about how they are being used, but to recognize old kinships with other hosts that exist outside of their given narratives. We should not be surprised, then, that Walden Two prohibits members from discussing the Code with each other, or that the study of history has been dispensed with entirely. Amazingly, Frazier tells Burris that “we can make no real use of history as a current guide,” and spends an entire paragraph sneering at large academic libraries and the librarians who stock them with “trash…on the flimsy pretext that someday someone will want to study the ‘history of a field.’”33 Instead the library at Walden Two is small and for entertainment purposes only. Both implausibly and creepily, Burris is “amazed at the clairvoyance with which the Walden Two librarians had collected most of the books I had always wanted to read.”34
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IN A NEW preface from 1976, Skinner reflects on why his book drew so much attention in the 1960s. Like others, he detects that “[t]he world was beginning to face problems of an entirely new order of magnitude.” But the problems he lists are decidedly scientific: “exhaustion of resources, the pollution of the environment, overpopulation, and the possibility of a nuclear holocaust”—he mentions neither the Vietnam War nor the ongoing struggles over racial equality.35 Even in 1976, the remaining question for Skinner was not how power could be redistributed, or injustice redressed, but how a technical problem might be solved with the very same methods as the Skinner box: “How were people to be induced to use new forms of energy, to eat grain rather than meat, and to limit the size of their families; and how were atomic stockpiles to be kept out of the hands of desperate leaders?” He proposed avoiding politics altogether and working instead on “the design of cultural practices.”36 To him, the late twentieth century was an exercise in R&D.
The kind of escape that Walden Two embodies reminds me of a more recent utopian proposal. In 2008, Wayne Gramlich and Patri Friedman founded the nonprofit the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to establish autonomous island communities in international waters. For Silicon Valley investor and libertarian Peter Thiel, who supported the project early on, the prospect of a brand-new floating colony in a place outside the law was interesting indeed. In his 2009 essay “The Education of a Libertarian,” Thiel echoes Skinner’s conclusion that the future requires a total escape from politics. Having decided that “democracy and freedom are incompatible,” Thiel’s gesture toward some other option that is somehow not totalitarian is either naive or disingenuous:
Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country; and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom.37
For Thiel, only the sea, outer space, and cyberspace can provide this “new space.”
As in Walden Two, the locus of power is carefully hidden in Thiel’s language, either disappearing into the passive voice or being associated with abstractions like design or technology. But it’s not hard to infer that the result in this case would be a technocratic dictatorship under the Seasteading Institute. After all, the masses do not interest Thiel, for whom “[t]he fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.”
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AS ARTICULATIONS OF retreat, both Thiel’s essay and Walden Two seem almost to have been reverse-engineered by Hannah Arendt’s classic 1958 work The Human Condition, in which she diagnoses the age-old temptation to substitute design for the political process. Throughout history, she observes, men have been driven by the desire to escape “the haphazardness and moral irresponsibility inherent in a plurality of agents.” Unfortunately, she concludes, “the hallmark of all such escapes is rule, that is, the notion that men can lawfully and politically live together only when some are entitled to command and the others forced to obey.”38 Arendt traces this temptation specifically to Plato and the phenomenon of the philosopher-king, who, like Frazier, builds his city according to an image:
In The Republic, the philosopher-king applies the ideas as the craftsman applies his rules and standards; he “makes” his City as the sculptor makes a statue; and in the final Platonic work these same ideas have even become laws which need only be executed.39
This substitution introduces a division between the expert/designer and the layman/executor, or “between those who know and do not act and those who act and do not know.” Such a division is evident in Walden Two: the workings of the Code are hidden from the members, whose only job is to live out Frazier’s dream. It’s also their job not to interfere. Arendt writes that these escapes “always amount to seeking shelter from action’s calamities in an activity where one man, isolated from all others, remains master of his doings from beginning to end.”40
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HOURIET’S DESCRIPTION OF what happened to Bryn Athyn, the commune that shunned house meetings, illustrates this development. Like many communes, Bryn Athyn got its start thanks to a wealthy person sympathetic to the cause. In this case, it was a man named Woody Ransom, “an heir to corporate wealth” who had recently gotten into anarchism and who had bought a farm as an artist’s retreat for himself and his wife. When the marriage failed, he invited friends to move in and start a commune. Ransom was initially content to recede into the background: “Anarchically, he declared that the land and house belonged to the community.”41
But Ransom had spent a large sum on equipment, taxes, and upkeep, and eventually became restless about the farm’s lack of economic self-sufficiency. While the rest were exploring communal culture and practicing free love, Ransom monomaniacally pursued the idea of harvesting syrup from the farm’s stand of maple trees, buying books and equipment and setting a three-hundred-gallon production quota. He wanted to recoup the money he’d invested not for personal reasons, but rather to prove that an economically self-sufficient community was possible. But when harvest time came, the other members were on another plane of existence:
One morning, he hitched up the horses to collect the sap, which was rapidly dripping into buckets scattered over the property. However, that day the others were taking a trip. When he walked into the farmhouse to get help for the sap run, Woody found everyone rolling in a “love heap” on the floor. He left, furious, and collected the sap himself.42
Antagonism grew between Ransom and the rest of the commune, and he eventually left.
But he returned later that year with six people he’d met on the West Coast, determined to form a new work-oriented commune entirely under his command. Ransom had given up anarchism in favor of behavioral science, and wanted to create a technocratic Walden Two community whose rigidity was his vengeful answer to the “love heap.” When Houriet visited a second time, he found an Arendt-ian tyrant running “the diametrical opposite of leaderless, ruleless Bryn Athyn.” Now members lived in a modern house with regular appliances, worked eight hours a day six days a week, and kept strict visiting hours. The new emphasis was on “mechanized efficiency.” Hoping to wipe the slate clean once again, Ransom changed the name from Bryn Athyn to Rock Bottom Farm.43
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IT TURNS OUT, though, that no slate can be thus cleaned—even in the sea. In 2018, two years after the Seasteading Institute signed an informal agreement with French Polynesian officials to allow offshore development there, the government backed out, citing concerns about “tech colonialism.” A documentary on the Institute’s efforts found that Polynesian locals weren’t given much attention at the Seasteading Institute’s events. In a description that might not have displeased Peter Thiel, a local radio and TV personality called the project a cross between “visionary genius” and “megalomania.”44
Thiel had in fact already backed out of the Seasteading Institute because he decided the plans for island nations were unrealistic—amazingly, not in terms of politics. “They’re not quite feasible from an engineering perspective,” he told The New York Times.45 It seems likely, however, that even if his islands had been perfectly designed (by an elite contingent of Plato-ish designers, no doubt) and accepted by existing governments, things could easily have strayed from the plan.
As Arendt observes, part of what these escapes from politics are specifically avoiding is the “unpredictability” of “a plurality of agents.” It’s this ineradicable plurality of real people that spells the downfall of the Platonic city. She writes that the all-seeing plan is unable to withstand the weight of reality, “not so much the reality of exterior circumstances as of the real human relationships they could not control.”46 Writing about Walden Two, psychology professor Susan X. Day observes an unrealistic absence of friend groups or pairs among the people in the novel, even though this phenomenon is so natural that it occurs in other animals and “proceeds inevitably from the differentiation of individuals.”47 That Skinner struggled in his novel with plurality is suggested not only by the implication that all members of Walden Two are white and heteronormative, but by the fact that Skinner originally had a chapter on race that he decided to take out.48 Combined with memory (might someone smuggle in a history book?), it’s not hard to see how such differences and alliances might lead to the dreaded politics, thus contaminating the scientific experiment that is Walden Two.
Like Frazier’s pastoral scene with which he wordlessly answers the accusation of fascism, Thiel’s “escape from politics” could never be anything more than an image that existed outside of time and reality. Preemptively calling it a “peaceful project” avoids the fact that regardless of how high-tech your society might be, “peace” is an endless negotiation among free-acting agents whose wills cannot be engineered. Politics necessarily exist between even two individuals with free will; any attempt to reduce politics to design (Thiel’s “machinery of freedom”) is also an attempt to reduce people to machines or mechanical beings. So when Thiel writes of “new technologies that may create a new space for freedom,” I hear only an echo of Frazier: “Their behavior is determined, yet they’re free.”
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OF COURSE, THE distance between image and reality is an issue endemic to the idea of utopia itself, utopia meaning literally “no-place,” as opposed to the all-too-placeful-ness of reality. There is no such thing as a clean break or a blank slate in this world. And yet, amid the debris of the present, escape beckons. To me, at least, the stories of the 1960s communes exert as strong an allure as they ever did, especially now.
It was something like this allure that led the Swiss curator Harald Szeemann to put on an unusual show in 1983 called Der Hang Zum Gesamtkunstwerk (The Tendency Toward the Total Artwork). The artists he included in the Zurich exhibition ranged from very famous to obscure outsider artists, but
they all had one thing in common: a total conflation of art with life, sometimes even an attempt to live one’s art. Alongside a scale model of Vladimir Tatlin’s never-built Monument to the Third International, one might find a costume from Oskar Schlemmer’s techno-utopian Triadisches Ballett, the spiritual color theories of Wassily Kandinsky, a score by John Cage (for whom “all sounds are music”), or documentation of the Palais Idéal, a structure hand-built with thousands of rocks by a mailman, after he tripped over one and decided it was beautiful. The domes and other art from the Drop City commune would not have been out of place here. Because the show was full of reconstructions of things never built and documentation of short-lived dreams, the collection has a potentially melancholy air. Its mix of inspiration and failure echoes Brian Dillon’s description of Monument to the Third International, in which the tower “survives as a monument of the mind: half ruin and half construction site, the receiver and transmitter of confused messages regarding modernity, communism and the utopian dreams of the century gone by.”49
Szeemann was not interested in finished, fully materialized visions. Instead he was preoccupied with the energy generated by the gap between art and life, holding that “one could only learn from the model of art as long as art remained the Other—something that differs from life and transcends life, without being assimilated by life.”50 He was looking for records of an impulse that strained the bounds of representation. The writer Hans Müller offers a name for that impulse: “After all, individual stories of totality were still in place and even if no single grand idea was feasible, the great intensity—the Hauptstrom, as Beuys called it—the grand idea was still essential to energize society.”51 Hauptstrom translates to something like “main stream,” in the sense of electrical current. And the word Hang in the exhibition’s title, Der Hang Zum Gesamtkunstwerk, translates variously to “addiction,” “penchant,” or even “downward slope,” implying an innate tendency in humans to imagine ever-new, electrified visions of perfection.