Some young people in the 1960s did far more than adopt new hairdos or replace a six-pack of beer with a baggie of marijuana. Millions challenged the legitimacy of the political system and America’s international role. Others insisted that American culture itself had to be radically restructured. Some advocated for both political and cultural rebellion.

The Diggers were at the heart of that rebellion. Operating in the mid-1960s in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, they crafted an alternative way of life based on the practice of “Free.” In league with local musicians such as the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, as well as a host of other community activists, the Diggers put on free festivals and open-air concerts. For years they gave away free food, set up free “crash pads,” and even arranged for free medical care. The Diggers did more than get stoned and listen to rock music in their parents’ basement. They meant to reinvent everyday life. For them, the sixties were a time of radical experimentation aimed at challenging Americans’ core cultural precepts.

Some have dismissed the Diggers’ work as utopian foolishness. Others have condemned them, as well as other countercultural activists, as a dangerous and destructive force in American life for their advocacy of illegal drug use and sexual liberation. A few, however, have praised the Diggers and the broader activist counterculture. They argue that the Diggers’ advocacy of a more free and emancipatory approach to life generated a creative spirit and experimental frame of mind that, among other things, helped to inspire and craft cyberculture.