“The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
The theme of the Summer 1976 issue of CoEvolution Quarterly is “Understanding Whole Systems.” On p. 32, an interview begins. Nestled a quarter of the way through the magazine, Stewart Brand—The Whole Earth Catalog’s editor and a key impresario of Bay Area, and then global, “whole systems” counterculture—hosts a conversation between Margaret Mead, the best‑known American cultural anthropologist of the mid‑twentieth century, and Gregory Bateson, the British‑born anthropologist and cybernetic systems thinker who was also Mead’s former husband and fieldwork collaborator. Within the printed object, it is a 13-page spread in tight two-column format, punctuated by textbox interruptions and large black‑and‑white photographs of Bateson, Mead and their work, composing an encounter that feels both intimate and highly editorialized and composed. Even in the digital scans we can most easily access (e.g., wholeearth.info), you can sense the tactile vernacular of the magazine: slightly tired yellow newspaper tone, characteristically hokey page layouts, Lawrence Ferlinghetti poems, hand-drawn ouroboros figures, designed to make the content read as grassroots—straightforward, trustworthy, communally sourced. Yet a darker common interest sits on the table that stages this discussion among Brand, Mead, and Bateson: their shared urge to diagram kinship and communication as relations would not remain limited to anthropology. Downstream, it would harden into a project for sampling and operationalising the metadata of social life, at scale: relations made storable, comparable, and predictive through digital, platform capitalism.
Brand’s research sensibilities first reached a mass audience through The Whole Earth Catalog (1968), a countercultural directory of books, machines, and supplies for communal life. The Catalog—and its smaller‑circulation, essay-and-interview offspring CoEvolution Quarterly—grew not only from back‑to‑the‑land counterculture but from the institutional borderlands of the Cold War and Space Age that Brand moved through and helped assemble: ecology and cybernetics, military‑funded research, art worlds enamored of systems thinking, and the oddly clinical staging of psychedelics. The Whole Earth publisher’s mantra is as disarming as it is insidious—“access to tools”—a promise later mythologised as a paper ancestor of Google, with its similarly unassuming, now defunct, early motto (“don’t be evil”). But the calm deference which “neutral” indexes is never neutral: bias‑free mapping installs default users, needs, and worlds, quietly colonizing what can be seen, sought, and taken to matter.
Whole Earth’s lists and essays circulated largely among a relatively privileged, mostly white, highly educated audience—exclusionary even as they performed openness. Where the Catalog is structured as a “transparent” directory of recommendations, CQ finds a more opinion-driven voice in the form of essays, arguments, and staged conversations. Alongside the tool‑based, grassroots “for the people” ethos runs a second proposition that steadily gains a still-unstoppable seeming force: technology not merely as instrument, representation or distribution mechanism, but as the necessary infrastructure for—or even the savior of—democracy, community and culture. By the mid‑1980s, Brand helped translate that proposition into networked forms through things like the WELL (the first online virtual community), carrying Whole Earth ideals and managerialism into a Bay Area economy increasingly organised around digital networking and precarious labour. He recruited and mentored figures such as Kevin Kelly (Wired Magazine’s founding executive editor), thereby helping to build some constructive but many ultimately pernicious bridges between 1960s counterculture and 1990s digital utopianism (Turner, 2006; Harris 2022). The upshot was a story in which increasingly privatized infrastructures and Cold War technical logics could be narrated not as contradictions to a “public” internet, but as its obviously ironic conditions of possibility.
It is on that same “public” Internet, decades later, that I—a media maker, writer, artist, and aspiring lefty‑prepper—kept bumping into “For God’s Sake, Margaret!” and reading it again. Published in the summer of my birth, the Summer 1976 issue of CoEvolution Quarterly is not just a container for ideas; it’s a staging apparatus. Around the cover tease—“Margaret Mead fighting with Gregory Bateson”—the issue leans hard into NASA and space‑colony futurism (“Jacques Cousteau at NASA”): a big‑science optimism that already rehearses the later boosterist idiom of privatized research and design‑as‑destiny, the kind of climate that makes figures like Elon Musk and institutions like the MIT Media Lab feel less like choices than like outcomes. You can almost watch a depoliticized world coming into focus—one in which ideas circulate as sleek services, carried along by networks of money, access, and influence.
To be fair, the issue also includes Ursula K. Le Guin’s landmark feminist speculation “Space Crone,” which treats menopause as a kind of superpower and imagines post‑menopausal women as humanity’s only credible emissaries should aliens arrive (“Into the spaceship, Granny,” she writes). But even that piece is pulled into Brand’s editorial ecology: he introduces it by foregrounding the anthropological family romance—Mead’s ties to Theodora Kroeber‑Quinn, Le Guin’s mother—an origin story that not-so-subtly drapes Le Guin’s futurism in the same institutional aura the rest of the issue is busy manufacturing.
On Pages 32-44 of this June issue of CoEvolution Quarterly, Brand is no neutral stenographer, any more than Mead and Bateson are merely having an ex-lovers’ quarrel. At the core of the quarrel is a disagreement about staging: how technologies of index or representation—data, images and other recordings—function as more or less transparent, as more or less of a truth machine, depending on their modes of registration: their placement, deployment, and conditions of reception, as well as the stance, at once physical, political, and epistemological, of those who make and use them. It is an argument as old as philosophy, and domestic as hell: what recordings count as a record, and who gets to call that “truth.”
In early 2026, while preparing this piece for History of Anthropology Review’s “Clio’s Fancy,” a more material encounter with the evidence took place: I found a paper copy of the issue in the wild—or it found me. It was wedged in a ramshackle pile of unsorted publications at John K. King Used & Rare Books in Detroit, Michigan, with just an italic red “N” peeking out far enough to snag my eye. The fabled multi‑storey labyrinth of used print that is King’s on Lafayette was an appropriately amodern setting: a ruin‑adjacent, survival‑minded, aggressively analog place where the “public” internet feels like a rumor. The photos included here are hand‑held shots taken at the desk where I write, with my gazillion-pixel smartphone camera. The physical issue now sits, resolutely offline, on my prized shelf of problematic and ambiguous left-wing prepper guides and survivalist how-tos from various eras that seem increasingly likely to be quite useful in the next few years. Dusty documents of how certain “certain” futures are effortfully produced, promoted, soar or plummet, but inevitably confess the shortcomings of their creators and the scaffolding of their construction.
It’s (Not) About the Tripod
On a spring afternoon in 1976, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson sat at his home near Santa Cruz, facing one another across the long table of their shared past—which by that time included a daughter (Mary Catherine Bateson, 1939–2021, a distinguished cultural anthropologist and author in her own right), a world war and a cold one, increasingly divergent career paths, and a deep, shared interest in how media support the understanding of others. They were in their seventies, and Stewart Brand had arranged to record a reunion. “For God’s sake, Margaret!” Bateson would eventually exclaim, no doubt half weary and half delighted. Amongst them the oldest of arguments returned like familiar weather: what techniques can or should be used in order to make a “scientific” image true?
For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, photographs and other camera-made images were treated as indexical records of reality: the camera as evidentiary machine, Talbot’s Pencil of Nature inscribing light itself (1846). Yet anthropology, as Jenny Chio reminds us (2021), has always been visual—not only in the sense that it produced images, but in the sense that it relied on visual technologies to theorize culture. From early anthropometric photography to Boas’s and Haddon’s field images, the camera was never merely illustrative; it was analytic. By the mid-twentieth century, Mead and Bateson had already advanced this capacity further in Bali, using film and photographic sequencing to study gesture and interaction.
And yet by 1976, when they resumed their argument in Santa Cruz, the ground had shifted again. Visual anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s broke with static framing and omniscient narration toward what would come to be called ‘observational cinema’—an unprivileged camera style that foregrounded the filmmaker’s embodied presence and long takes unfolding in real time. In that sense, Bateson’s irritation with the grinding tripod aligned with the ascendant aesthetic of the moment. But the irony is that he had been experimenting with relational seeing decades earlier in his Iatmul photography, in which framing and proximity were already integral to the encounter. Conversely, Mead’s defence of the steady sequence—what Andrew Lakoff describes as her “diagnostic photography”—was less a naïve appeal to objectivity than a wager on temporal arrest (Lakoff 1996). To “freeze” interaction was not to deny interpretation, but to hold open the possibility of return, of reanalysis, of collective scrutiny. The “truth” of an image, then, is neither pure index nor pure performance. It is structured by decisions about duration, authorship, and control—about who may move, who must stand still, and who gets to look again. These questions feel newly urgent in an era that has shifted from concerns over unfiltered objectivity to the proliferation of synthetic, “artificially” or “intelligently” generated imagery—visuals that are either rigorously hyper-indexical to an archival depictions of the real world and/or abstracted from that world entirely… depending on how you look at them.
The transcript of Bateson, Mead and Brand’s discussion, itself a depiction, editorially massaged by Brand and others, was published that June in CoEvolution Quarterly. This journal evolved from the Catalog as a further vehicle for Brand’s vision of democratising “access to tools and ideas” that deeply influenced then-burgeoning disruptive California ideologies and underwrites the image-based, digital culture in which we now all (mostly) live (Turner 2006). The three-headed interview wanders through discussions of the early Macy Conferences and the principles of homeostasis and feedback loops before a sharp pivot to the subject of media, cameras, and film. A trans-historic argument about systems, circuits, truth and self-awareness also veers toward a domestic spat—that ancient genre of intimacy in which affection finds its proof through generative disagreement. The quarrel of lovers who think too much: as if every pair from Woolf/Sackville-West, Beauvoir/Sartre, Kahlo/Rivera, Foucault/Defert, to Mulder/Scully, were also held in mid-conversation. The intimacy seems real, and the romance of explicit and intentional canon-making is, too.
The Truth of the Future
Werner Herzog opens his recent short non-fiction book, The Future of Truth, with a Persian legend in which God’s mirror of truth breaks, and people mistake their shard for the whole. Bateson begins the Santa Cruz conversation with a similar provocation. “By the way,” he muses, “I don’t like cameras on tripods, just grinding. In the latter part of the schizophrenic project, we had cameras on tripods just grinding.”
Mead: “And you don’t like that?”
Bateson: “Disastrous.”
Mead: “Why?”
Bateson: “Because I think the photographic record should be an art form.”
The tripod seeks a wide, steady landscape; the handheld gives us a glance, a moving shard. All are partial, and the risk in each case is that they are taken for true.
For Bateson, art here doesn’t mean aesthetic composition; it means relation, movement, performance, choreography. An “art form” is a real-time, continuous, feedback device—a way of moving with what is happening, not merely pointing at it, or extracting from it. To him, the “grinding” of a fixed camera killed the shifting perspective that enables perception, a slow death for ecologies of mind. “If Stewart reached behind his back to scratch himself,” he says, “I would like to be over there at that moment.”
Mead replies with slippery curatorial empiricism: “If you were over there at that moment, you wouldn’t see him kicking the cat under the table.” For Margaret, mobility also introduces distortion. A more honest camera is a patient one, keeping still presence and staying still long enough for patterns to emerge: “long sequences,” she insists, “so that other people can see what you saw.” The exchange runs for pages, turning into a duet of accusation and affection. Bateson: “The camera on the tripod sees nothing.” Mead: “Well, I think it sees a great deal.” Bateson: “I want one per cent that tells.” Mead: “I want a record that others can use.” Their quarrel is a debate about control and immersion, verification and art, the use of being and being useful.
The Balinese Difference
Amongst the scenes they are surely re-fighting in 1976 is Bali, 1936–39, the crucible of their collaborations and the source material for the publication Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (1942). There, newly married, they developed what Mead later called “a way of seeing culture without words”: some 25,000 still photographs and 22,000 feet of film of “everyday” gestures—bathing, dancing, carrying babies, chewing betel, mourning.
Balinese Character was an extraordinary experiment in what we now call media anthropology. Its published plates unfold like a film strip, sequencing stills into behavioural symmetries. Each page is both analysis and montage: an attempt to show that culture itself can be diagrammed through movement, posture, and mutual feedback. “The Balinese,” they wrote, “are inhibited by a system of interlocking rigidities” that suppress release; the photographs, with their composure and tension, set out to prove this, without text. As Mead insisted in 1976, the images provided reproducibility, archive, witness and testimony. Film and photographic media could make anthropology cumulative, allowing “reexamination of the material” as theories changed or were developed. A long, steady shot could be revisited like a fossil or a weather record, making anthropology more of a science. As she reminds Bateson, hours of such footage had sustained “twenty-five years of re-analysis,” from Erik Erikson’s work on ego formation to Marion Stranahan’s studies of bodily “limpness” in children. Her reflections also strike a chord for those of us who got excited (again, and particularly during the Coronavirus pandemic) about the possibilities of videoconferencing technologies and other networked mediation “innovations” for “remotely knowing other places” (Allen, Verjat, Ricci & Matthias 2021)
Bateson, however, had come to distrust this ideal of mechanical completeness. The camera, he tells her, is “only going to record one per cent anyway.” Better, then, that the one per cent mean something, even if just to you. By the mid-1940s, Bateson’s thinking had shifted from the documentation of pattern to the dynamics of ecology—the recursive, interpretive loops of loops through which information builds structures and form. To film behavior in a static, mechanical way was to miss the living circuit, the interaction, the differences that make a difference.
Afterimages
We might read the exchange between Mead and Bateson as a postscript to cybernetics itself. Their argument over the camera concerns the boundaries of a system—whether the observer thinks they can stand outside the box or embrace the fact that they are inside it. Bateson reminds Brand of this point: “the engineer is outside the box… and Wiener is inside the box; I’m inside the box.” Mead’s tripod is positioned “outside” the box, measuring and preserving; Bateson’s handheld camera moves inside it, a participant in the circuit it records. He is not trying to represent culture, but to enter its pattern, diffract it against observation itself. The disagreement is ontological: whether the image belongs to the world it depicts or to the disciplines and archivists that will interpret it later. Their quarrel also prefigures the split between two futures of ethnographic film. Mead’s lineage leads to the comparative archive, and what was eventually termed “far reading” in humanities digital and otherwise (Greening 2016); film-as-data, the synchronized tombic annals of John and Ruby Lomax or John Marshall. Bateson’s intuition, by contrast, anticipates the reflexive turn, from Jean Rouch to Trinh T. Minh-ha: the camera as conversation, moving amongst movements. Both were right; both were wrong, none were true.
What is striking, reading the transcript of Brand’s interview with these erstwhile titans of Anglo-American liberalism, is how their disagreement also recapitulates the theme of the Macy Conferences that Brand had invited them to recall: feedback, in its most fundamental mode as the oscillation between image/representation and experience/action (Allen et al. 2016). Neither doubts the utility of circularity in formulation, but they do want to argue for and against its guises as first- and second-order cybernetics. Mead defends the negative feedback of science: the fixity of controlled variables, the possibility of repeating an experiment, attempts to maintain objective signal over subjective noise. Bateson insists on the creative instability of positive feedback—”art” emerges when a system amplifies its own chaotic, idiosyncratic, and contextual deviations. “I don’t know what science is,” Bateson proclaims at the end, with dubious humility. “I don’t know what art is,” he adds, with the arrogance of someone creating turbulence in a system just to enjoy the pattern, no matter who or what it frustrates or disturbs. Mead answers with brisk certitude: “That’s all right. If you don’t, that’s quite simple. I do”—as immovable as the tripod she’s defending.
Years before this irritable interchange, Mead and Bateson had once themselves been the living embodiment of anthropology’s dreams of synthesis—method and metaphor, field and form, ethnography and aesthetics. By 1976, that unity had split, and slowly became a double image that refused to resolve. And through Brand’s tape recorder, transcript and edits, layout and publication, their argument enters a further feedback system, looping across disciplines and decades toward formulations that are maybe even too common and familiar in our contemporary moment: the ethnographer as artist, the artist as ethnographer, the camera as neutral support or as post-truth machine, the ongoing dialectics of the relations between science and art. At one point in the exchange, Mead remarks that the only serious works of visual anthropology still shown, decades later, are their Balinese films: “because there aren’t any others that are anything like as good.” Bateson replies that the strength of their earlier work was its lack of professionalism: the reason no one has matched the fluidity of their film is simply “because people are getting good at putting cameras on tripods.” Mead fires back, “Nobody’s put any cameras on tripods in those twenty-five years that looked at anything that mattered.”
Between these positions lies the paradox of all media and all representation: how to register without distortion, how to see without fixing and excluding (or how to choose fixations and exclusions that allow something to be clearly seen); how to bring things closer in ways that will not tear them apart. Bateson and Mead’s voices and positions are as tender as they are irritable; they loop on repeat, like the feedback they theorized. “For God’s sake, Margaret!” Bateson cries out, trying to get out of a frustrating loop, losing control in an attempt to regain it. For every ethnographer who steadies the lens, there will forever be another who picks it up and moves. Just as our eyes move over a static page, registered film moves through the projector, and supposed objective data traverses the globe—each word, each packet, each frame reframing. Small attempts to catch a world in motion, while quietly undertaking its reorganization.
Bibliography
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Allen, Jamie, Baptiste Verjat, Donato Ricci, and Sebastian Matthias. “Translation, Mediation and Bodily Practices: Remotely Knowing Other Places.” Course syllabus, Critical Media Studies, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, 2021.
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This piece was edited by John Tresch and Ira Bashkow.
