Prototype it, don't preach it
The Diggers were guerrilla-theatre anarchists in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, 1966–68, who tried to prototype a free society in the middle of the hippie scene rather than merely preach one. Taking their name from Gerrard Winstanley's 17th-century English radicals, and drawing members from the San Francisco Mime Troupe, they ran a Free Store, handed out Free Food in the park daily, staged street events, and printed provocative broadsides — insisting that everything be free and that life itself be the artwork. Their gift-economy experiments and street theatre profoundly shaped the communal movement, the language of the counterculture, and, decades later, the decommodified ethos at the heart of Burning Man.
Do your own thing
- Free food in the Panhandle
- The Free Store
- Everything is free, do your own thing
- Life-acting / guerrilla theater
- The gift economy, prototyped
Act free
Prototype a post-scarcity gift society directly, now — through free food, free stores, and life-as-theater — refusing money, leaders, and even credit.
The contagion of the free
- 01Giving things away free enacted utopia now rather than demanding it later — irresistibly concrete.
- 02Anonymity — "nobody" as author — made it a role anyone could step into.
- 03Guerrilla theater blurred the line between protest, art, and daily life.
The engine room
Convergent — what pulled it together
- Daily free food and the Free Store as rituals.
- San Francisco Mime Troupe roots and street theater.
- Radical anonymity and refusal of leadership.
Divergent — what pulled it apart
- The strain of sustaining a free economy amid the Haight's chaos and hard drugs.
- Refusal of organization limiting scale.
- The 1967 "Death of Hippie" as self-declared endpoint.
A service that was also a play
Inside: a leaderless anarchist theater-collective that ran real services as performance; its anonymity and anti-organization were principled and self-limiting.
Outside: it prototyped the gift economy, free stores, and mutual-aid tactics — seeding the commune movement, Burning Man's decommodification, and later anarchist praxis.
The cast
Street-theater anarchists who staged utopia as a working service, authored by nobody.
— the scenius signature
Found on the wire
Reproduced in mimeograph duotone — a name lifted, a face of the free city, credited as the free press always should be.
The Death of Hippie
Declared "the death of hippie" and dissolved in 1968 — a self-authored ending, staged like everything else. Its gift-economy praxis recurs in every autonomous and mutual-aid scene since.