There is something almost suspiciously contemporary about *Sandinista!*—which is to say that a record released in 1980, now feels less like a period piece than like a dispatch from the exact emotional contradiction a lot of young people currently inhabit: namely, a sincere hunger for justice combined with a basically total distrust of any institution that claims it knows how justice is to be achieved.

The easy thing to say about the renewed attraction of youth to communism is that it is ignorance, cosplay, historical illiteracy, etc., and certainly some of it is that—every generation gets the fantasy that it has discovered a pure and unbetrayed version of an idea that history somehow managed to mangle through mere implementation. But this easy dismissal misses the atmosphere in which the attraction occurs, which is one of late-capitalist humiliation: permanent precarity, algorithmic self-marketing, rent as a form of low-grade extortion, the weirdly universal feeling of being both overexposed and powerless. Under those conditions, “communism” can function less as a worked-out program than as a morally charged No, a refusal of the demand that one accept the present order as the mature and adult one.

And *Sandinista!* understands this kind of political feeling better than almost any “political album” because it is not neat enough to be propaganda. It is a giant, messy, overcommitted, intermittently embarrassing triple album that seems to believe, with a kind of touching recklessness, that if the world is globally connected by money and violence then music ought to be globally promiscuous in response. It takes dub, reggae, gospel, funk, children’s choruses, disco, calypso, and punk and throws them together not with the confidence of a conquering empire but with the enthusiasm of people trying, maybe too hard, to imagine solidarity sonically. There is a difference. The album’s politics are less “Here is the line” than “Look how large the world is, and look how much of it the market teaches you not to hear.”

This is why it still matters now. Young listeners drawn to communism are often—beneath the memes, the iconography, the sometimes slightly undergraduate romance of revolutionary chic—responding to a starvation of the collective imagination. They have been handed a culture in which every value is translated into branding, every dissent into content, every desire into purchasable identity. *Sandinista!* sounds like a band trying to bust out of that conversion system before it fully hardened into the air we breathe. Even its excess—especially its excess—is politically legible. The record refuses optimization. It is too long, too scattered, too sincere in several incompatible directions at once.

What makes the album especially useful, though, is that it also dramatizes the danger in political longing. The title itself invokes revolution in a way that is thrilling and, from the vantage of history, also a little chilling. There is always a risk that the desire for justice attaches itself to an image of purity, and that purity, once institutionalized, becomes its own kind of brutality. *Sandinista!* does not solve this problem; it enacts it. Its anti-imperial commitments are real, but so is its occasional susceptibility to romance—to the idea that being on the side of the oppressed can exempt one from ambiguity, vanity, or error. Today’s young leftists could do worse than to hear that tension rather than flatten it. The album is best not as a manual but as a record of what it feels like to want a better world without yet knowing how to want it cleanly.

And maybe that is its deepest relevance: not that it tells youth attracted to communism they are right, or wrong, but that it takes seriously the ache from which the attraction emerges. It says that boredom is political, that monoculture is political, that whose voices get heard is political, that style itself can be a map of power. But it also says—because the album is too human not to—that solidarity is noisy, compromised, frequently gauche, and still worth attempting. In other words, *Sandinista!* remains contemporary because it understands revolution less as an answer than as a pressure: the pressure exerted on the soul when a society becomes impossible to admire and yet impossible, for moral reasons, to abandon.

In 1985, as personal computers flickered in garages and *Whole Earth Review* still believed in the counterculture’s promise, Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant founded the WELL—Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link—on a borrowed mainframe in Sausalito. It wasn’t meant to be a social network. It was meant to be a *public sphere*, a digital successor to the Whole Earth Catalog’s belief that tools could empower individuals and communities [1]. The vision: a place where informed, civically minded people could talk about ideas, technology, and culture—no ads, no anonymity, just real names and real consequences.

The WELL launched with a few hundred users, mostly Bay Area intellectuals, hackers, and environmentalists. Conversations unfolded in “conferences”—text-based forums on everything from Zen to nuclear policy. Early users like Howard Rheingold would later coin the term “virtual community,” but in 1985, it felt less like cyberspace and more like a very slow, very earnest dinner party where everyone typed.

Its context was crucial: pre-web, pre-Google, when the internet was still ARPANET’s nerdy cousin. The WELL offered something radical—connection without commodification. Users paid a monthly fee; there was no data mining, no viral content. The culture prized clarity, civility, and depth. Irony was suspect; sincerity, almost mandatory.

But as the 1990s dawned and the web exploded, the WELL’s model began to seem quaint. AOL offered flashy chat rooms and instant messaging. The WELL offered 14,400-baud modems and eight-page posts about *Moby-Dick*. Yet it endured. It became a relic, then a legend—a place where flame wars raged with the intensity of theological debates, where divorces were processed in threads, where people confessed addictions and got advice from strangers who knew their real names.

By the 2000s, the WELL was no longer influential, but it was *historically* significant. It proved that online spaces could foster genuine discourse—if you built them with intention, not profit. It anticipated today’s debates about digital identity, echo chambers, and the erosion of public conversation. The WELL didn’t predict Facebook or Twitter, but it asked the same question: *Can we be human together in text?*

Now, as social media collapses under its own weight—algorithms, outrage, performative identity—the WELL stands as a ghost in the machine. Not a utopia, but a cautionary tale and a quiet ideal: that community isn’t about scale, but about accountability. That conversation, even in ASCII, matters.

It was never perfect. It was often insufferable. But for a moment, in the amber glow of early screens, the WELL believed—and made others believe—that the internet could be more than a marketplace. That it could be a town square.

[1] A clear inspiration for littlebiggy given the default user photo taken from the catalog (people under the influence of something pushing the earth uphill).