The tactics also had their shortcomings, like media dependency and addiction. After a while our imperative tended to be developing stunts rather than counterinstitutions. It didn't start out that way. Abbie started the Free Store in New York circa 1967, and I helped found the Free University in Berkeley in 1965 and People's Park, also in Berkeley, in the summer of 1969. Schools, parks and stores represented our effort at not just being against the system, but trying to lay the foundations for a much better way of life. But we eventually tended to put all our efforts into the stunts, and after a while this became predictable and repetitious. Repetition is deadly to the rebel impulse, and modern day anti-corporate globalists are already getting repetitious -- the same puppets, the same kind of disruption ... beware!

And I agree it's very important to say we're not against globalism. I'm for a popular participatory and democratic globalism -- maybe a soulfully socialistic globalism and not the top-down corporate variety.

I also worry about the rampant technophobia. The yippies used to say, "Let the machines do it" in advocating post-scarcity anarchy and an end to wage slavery. Most of today's young anarchists are saying, "Don't let the machines do it." It's pretty much their central tenet. Ted Kaczynski is even something of a hero.

Technophobia is the movement's new brain disease. How many people want to sit around in Barney Rubble's cave?

So how do you make political change in fragmented times? You mention the idea of a soulful socialism. These days, I'm just as interested in the Libertarians and civil-liberties-positive Democratic centrists as I am in the left. What was glorious about the early yippie idea was that it was refreshingly contemporary, more McLuhan than Marx. America was just beginning a transition from industrialism to the media communications era, and we needed, and still need, a liberating politics appropriate to that situation. I think we're still working on it. And ideologies and philosophies of the past -- from socialism to libertarianism and even to anarchism -- are worth sampling from, but only in the service of a truly novel mix. I think Abbie got that way back in 1967-68, and then maybe lost it.

And I'm as interested in the apolitical people as the activists. American culture is radically anti-authoritarian -- it's vulgar, sexy and wild. People don't know how to politically defend their enjoyment of hip-hop, porn, marijuana and "South Park," but they vote against Joe Lieberman and William Bennett every night with their remotes and their credit cards.

A couple of weeks back I spoke at a benefit showing [for the American Civil Liberties Union] of "Steal This Movie" in Missoula, Mont. Maybe 600 showed up for the event. Afterward I went for a drink, and a bunch of very friendly people came with me. We introduced ourselves, and lo and behold three of them were National Rifle Association [types]. They actually came to see a film about Abbie Hoffman and were in a good enough mood to stick around and have a drink or two with me afterward. It does set one to thinking.

Indeed, at a time when Arianna Huffington is the most yippie-esque figure in the political landscape, reality is truly up for grabs.

So what about the Abbie strategy updated to more sophisticated times? Abbie wanted to politicize the hippies. Let's take a much more pervasive irreverence that now infuses the entire culture and use it in a broad, anti-authoritarian movement. And if you really take on authoritarianism, you wind up taking on excesses in corporate power, as well as the state. In fact, people are already more concerned with privacy issues related to big business than they are with civil liberties.

How do you organize people when they are so fragmented in their causes and desires? What are the common values that bring people out into the streets -- face to face with meaner-than-ever cops? Underneath all the differences, I think, they are all seeking a new community -- a community of support, protest and rebellion. We need to start having common events that celebrate these values. In 1969, People's Park was fantastic because it demonstrated and celebrated the value of community labor in a common cause: hundreds of people, hippies to fraternity boys, working together to create a park for the people. We need events like that today -- where everybody can grab a shovel and dig in. What would be the People's Park of today?

We all hate greed. Let's have a large communal event that celebrates the value of sharing -- a "share-in," maybe a massive free flea market -- and get some famous rich people to give something of theirs away. And everyone rich and poor will be giving stuff away, and getting things they need. Do it big! Maybe in a place famous for greed, like Rodeo Drive. And get worldwide media attention.

One place where that spirit of "free" sharing still has a foothold is on the Net. The open-source movement behind Linux, and the whole Napster -- and more consciously, Gnutella -- technology, form a kind of virtual community based on sharing, and there are deep countercultural roots particularly within the Linux community.

The post-scarcity anarchism that inspired the early yippie idea was premature. It's now implicit and imminent in the economics of the Information Age and, ultimately, in biotechnology and nanotechnology. When you start dealing with self-replicating production systems, the laws of supply and demand are essentially made obsolete. It's been said repeatedly, but the basic law of information bears repeating, since its relevance only increases over time: If I give you a physical object, I no longer have it. But if I give you a piece of information, I still have it. And you can pass it around on through infinity, and I will still have that piece of information.

Now that the globe is networked and media digitized, I can post a piece of media, and in an instant everybody has access to it. With nanotechnology, it will likely become possible that I could share the codes that will self-build a physical piece of wealth, just as we now share information and media. So nanotechnology takes the economics of information into the world of real physical wealth, maybe in our lifetime.

We can argue about how to protect and inspire artists, inventors and investors in the present. But the thing that nobody is dealing with is how the whole Napster situation might be modeling a post-scarcity economy for a near future where getting paid simply doesn't matter that much -- a gift economy. Abbie would have loved that.

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