Kerri and I finished watching an American Experience episode about the Summer of Love this weekend. The main point of the program was that the Summer of Love in San Francisco was a great countercultural success at the beginning but eventually failed because there were too many people doing drugs and freeloading.
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It occurred to me that simply saying that druggies and freeloaders showed up isn’t quite enough to explain why the whole big experiment failed. The Hippies wanted people to be able to do drugs and get stuff for free (the Digger soup line and the Free Store are good examples of this). The problem wasn’t that people were taking the things offered to them, it was that there weren’t enough people creating. Plenty was being sucked out of the system they created but not enough was added back in.
We can think of it as a sort of user created content system. Since the Hippies weren’t creating new wealth in the form of money, they needed to do so in the form of food, goods, etc. But when everyone is stoned instead of contributing to the community the whole system consumes itself in very short time.