> "Communal ownership of the means of production" evokes an image of a hippy co-op trying to buy pallets of GPUs

The quote is a direct reference to a core tenet of Marxist theory, socialism, and communism.

Historically, communal ownership at scale has almost always been implemented via a centralized state, which has tended to gravitate towards authoritarianism. The Soviet Union and East Germany, and many other countries along those lines, didn't really fit the "hippy co-op" image very well.