Gregory Bateson: Yes, yes. All cybernetic entities are displaced small boys.

Margaret Mead: Displaced small what?

Bateson: Boys. They’re jacks. You know what a jack is? A jack is an instrument to displace a small boy. A boot jack is a thing for pulling off boots ’cause you haven’t a small boy to pull it off for you.

Mead: I’ll remember that next time. This is an English joke that no one will understand.

Bateson: I can’t help it. On the first steam engines, you’ve got a pair of cylinders and you’ve got valves, and you pull this valve to run the steam into this one, close it, let it drive the piston, pull it—this is done by hand. Then they invented the idea of having the flywheel control the valves. This displaced a small boy.

Stewart Brand: The governor displaced another one?

Bateson: And the governor displaced another small boy, who was to keep the engine going at a constant rate, that’s right. Now then, the John Stroud stuff is the study of the psychology of the human being between two machines.

In any device such as an ack-ack gun you’ve got a whole series of small boys in the situation of being between a machine and another machine. What John Stroud worked on was the psychology of that situation. He found what I still think are some very interesting things, namely that the orders of equations (you know, equations in X, or in X2, or X3 ,or whatever) are discontinuous in the human mind, as well as being discontinuous in mathematical paper work. Where is John Stroud now, do you ever see him?

Mead: He is retired, teaching at Simon Fraser somewhat, and he’s been brought back by Gerry O’Neill into discussions of space colonies.

Stewart Brand: Good lord.

Mead: He was very much interested in space colonies. He told me all about them twenty-five years ago, and I was interested in all the problems then, the selection of people, and what not.

CoEvolutionary Quarterly, June 1976