Brautigan writes about "mammals and computers liv[ing] together in mutually programming harmony", with technology acting as caretakers while "we are free of our labors and joined back to nature.
[5][6][7] Brautigan's publisher, Claude Hayward, said it "caught me with its magical references to benign machines keeping order ... [which] fit right in with our optimism over the promise of the computer".
[8] Digital humanities professor Steven E. Jones described the theme of the poem as "what is now called cyborg identity", and situated it in 1960s California counterculture, with its juxtaposition of hippie values with technology, burgeoning hacker culture, and psychedelics.
[7]: 187–193 The idea of a technologically enabled utopia was popular in 1960s California, with one strain, exemplified by "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace", described by historian Charles Perry as a post-scarcity "robots will do all the work" leisure society.
[9] Historian of counterculture Theodore Roszak wrote that it "captures perfectly the much-prized synthesis of reversionary and technophiliac values",[10] while futurist James Lovelock viewed it in an environmentalist light, as "an early, and in some ways accurate" example of the subject of his book, Novacene: "an age in which humans and cyborgs would live together in peace—perhaps in loving grace—because they share a common project to ensure their survival.
[5]: 104 Jones also wrote that Brautigan's use of religious language, in a way that was common among hippies, was "at once ironic and deliberately naive" while also placing the poem in "the American literary-religious tradition".
"[11] Literary critic Steven Moore wrote that the collection All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace marked "the transition of Brautigan from 'the last of the Beats' ... to the first of the hippie writers", and that the poem "[captured] the giddy sense of new possibilities that was in the air back then".
[21] In the 1970s, the poem became associated with the appropriate technology movement and the name Loving Grace Cybernetics was adopted by the hippie-hacker group operating Community Memory, the first bulletin board system based in a record store in Berkeley.
The show starts with a poster for the poem, and included works which Art in America's Federico Florian said superficially fulfill Brautigan's dreams, "[evoking] a present tense where technology has imbued every aspect of human life, and therefore reshaped the mechanisms of our affections.