I honestly think you didn't understand the article. Let me summarize what I got out of it - we can agree to disagree about the quality of the prose. In the lat

I honestly think you didn't understand the article. Let me summarize what I got out of it - we can agree to disagree about the quality of the prose. In the late 60s, as the early political struggles of the the baby boomers were coming into full flower, Stewart Brand published a series of books about how to build back-to-the-land communes. While they were high quality productions and somewhat influential, they were written based on some mushy political ideologies that have since been discredited. In the present day Brand, now an old man, has realized some of his mistakes and half-heartedly distanced himself from the premises of the "Whole Earth Catalogue". Instead of a sort of pseudo-intellectual hippy libertarianism, he now identifies with the thinking of people like Steven Pinker, another baby boomer, who has written extensively about how despite the obvious growing problems of the early 21st century, everything is actually fine. The author closes by musing on the damage the boomer generation has caused. The paragraph at the end is not a random addition - it's the point of the article. The point is: Brand had it wrong in the 60s and he has it wrong today. His calls to retreat from politics and build utopian communes in the 60s reflect his panglossian attitude now; in both cases, he washes his hands of the hard work of actually building and surviving the real world. Also - if you're not familiar with Anna Wiener, I think her best work is the essay "Uncanny Valley": https://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/on-the-fringe/uncanny-valley/ https://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/on-the-fringe/uncanny-valle...