THE GRASSHOPPER MAN
Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta
2017

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Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.
Marshall McLuhan

When we are immersed in an environment, we are not aware of it. We become the environment, and it can be our clothing, our cities, our artifacts. However it can be observed from time to time, nobody "thinks" on the clothe that is dressing, on the car that is driving or on the building he or she is inside.
It can be called "culture" or "medium". T. S. Hall preferred the expression "environment".
When that happens, everything seems natural to us, invisible.
Inside an environment our neuronal structures change, our minds are transformed.
It is about our daily life. And we are immersed in it.
Therefore, it is popularly said that when we are too close to a problem, we are not able to perceive it, but many times a person who is more distant can distinguish what is invisible to us.
According to an ancient Vedic thought, only difference produces consciousness.
Marshall McLuhan rightly said that a new medium tends to create a new environment which works against the environment in which we are immersed, that is, it is anti-environmental, generating new functions and making us aware of part of reality.
If the interiorization produced by phonetic alphabet and paper in a literary society projected the "detachment" of reality generating the perception of figure and ground; the same doesn't happen in electronic culture - as McLuhan himself emphasized when he said that the electrical circuit "involves in depth. It merges the individual and the mass environment".
This is one of the central elements of this book, if not the main one.
Such lack of ability to perceive something in which we are immersed happens because we are not closed.
We are continuously formed, mentally and biologically, by everything we participate in, by the "world around us". In fact, the world isn't around us. We are the world. We are planet Earth. On the other hand, there is no big difference between biological and mental.
Everything is process.
In the same way that a fabulous amount of bacteria - beings with non-human genetics - constitutes a large part of our bodies, even producing a good part of our neurotransmitters; so it also happens to our ideas.
Ideas and organism are not isolated things - they belong to a complex picture that reminds us of John Archibald Wheeler when he stated: it from bit.
So, the question arises: if that is true, much of what we believe is drawn by our own artifacts, by what we produce, even in physiological terms.
The Rule of Law, freedom and privacy among other so-called "human values" are logical conditions of an environment in which we are submerged and that is, therefore, imperceptible to us. When we change an environment, we immediately change those logical conditions.
What are the ways through which we design such environment - imperceptible to us - how it continually transforms itself and how it changes us physiologically, is the basis of the observations that construct this book.
One of the most exciting aspects in such journey to which I invite the reader to be with me, can be found in the identification of the origins of the criminal impulse - in its broadest sense. And, since we are working with senses and cognition, it is about an aesthetic question: what we perceive and what we construct while thought.
As it is easy to predict, the book eventually touches political issues, which is inevitable. But at no point there are value judgments, and it is never about political parties. Thus, some of the most important characters of international politics in the passage from the twentieth to the twenty-first century are referred - always with the purpose of illuminating the issues established in the text. When the controversial Donald Trump was elected president of the United States in the end of 2016, this book was already completed. Thus, the references to him are few.

This book is part of a more extensive work, started in 1992, which includes two other books: Teleanthropos, published in 1999, and Low Power Society, published between 2003 and 2010.
The three books are a single work about the planetary transformations in the transition from a literary culture to the electronic universe.
Teleanthropos is a concept coined by the Swiss philosopher René Berger in the early 1990s, with whom I worked for more than twenty years and was one of my best friends. It is about the contemporary human being made at a distance: what we eat, the clothes we wear, what we know no longer belong to a specific space-time frame, to a territory or to a certain historical moment. The book Teleanthropos - written between 1992 and 1999 - was dedicated to René Berger and had an introductory text by Lucrezia De Domizio, the legendary Baroness Durini, another kind friend.
Low Power Society is a book with a different method of elaboration. It was originally released in electronic form in 2003, and was continually re-elaborated over the following seven years, having had a more stable electronic edition in 2008 and its paper publication, in a definitive version, in the year of 2010. The book Low Power Society featured an introductory text by the celebrated American journalist Jon Rappoport; a text and an image by the Brazilian visual artist Marcia Grostein, and a foreword by the economic journalist Corrado Bianchi Porro, from Lugano, Switzerland. This book, dedicated to Giorgio Alberti, a specialist on art and alchemy, deals with energy, power, and metamorphosis.
Finally, The Grasshopper Man - written between 2010 and 2017 - deals specifically with environments, taken in the cognitive sense of the term, involving more deeply some elements of the so-called neurosciences. This time, because it was the conclusion of a long work started in 1992, consisting of three books, I decided that it should not be any introductory text other than my own.
Curiously, by pure coincidence, each book took seven years of studies and researches; totaling twenty-one years.
In a sense, we may consider that the three books follow the founding principles of the General Theory of Signs of the brilliant philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.
The first book of the triad deals, in conceptual terms, with a relation of existence with its object: the human being made at a distance; the second, with a quality relation: energy, power; and the third deals with theory, reason, a thirdness.

One can have the impression, especially in this book - The Grasshopper Man - that it is about a negative criticism against the technological universe in which we live at the beginning of the 21st century.
It is not the case.
Since the 1970s I've developed projects in Virtual Reality; in 1980 I coined the concept of "virtual architecture" and started the first virtual planet in history; in the early 1990s I participated in the presentation of the World Wide Web through the EPFL in the context of Locarno's Video Art and Electronic Art Festival, with Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau; I participated in what was considered the first Internet television broadcast in the early 1990s, with René Berger, Philippe Quéau and Bernard Allien; and since the year 2000 I've developed space architecture design for environments outside planet Earth among many other projects. Thus, in my entire life I have always been deeply connected to the universes of art, science and technology.
But, despite of all that, it is always fundamental to question and to look for discovery.
Like some other works of mine, this book deals with an analysis regarding the formation and metamorphosis of the human being. And it would not have been possible without the electronic culture, without the Internet, without computers and networks. For its preparation, over the period of seven years, some hundreds of books, dozens of scientific papers, and more than three thousand journalistic articles published in various countries were analyzed and studied.
Not only, its process of elaboration and publishing, deeply electronic, which would be impossible few years before, establishes a new relationship between author and reader, a new intimacy - with new media changing the nature of an old medium.
In fact, it is fundamentally about a work of meta-analysis. A reflection on the world using its own fragments, as a sort of contemporary immaterial archeology.
This is the nature of networks and, in this way, it is about a metalinguistic process.
The book is divided into twelve chapters. Each chapter has an underlying theme, a central idea that is not directly revealed to the reader. It is left to him to discover these hidden ideas that generate the development of the text.
It was important to establish a process of unity in the elaboration of the text. Thus, I have chosen to distribute some ideas that are repeated in different chapters - a text design that sometimes produces a feeling of déjà vu. It is another metalinguistic reference to the network - where information is distributed by coordination.
In other words - while the first two chapters establish the basic conceptual elements of the book, each one of the following chapters has an internal idea, and, crossing in several of them, five or six ideas emerge at different times in different contexts, generating unity, some redundancy, and sometimes surprise. In some sense, it is like what happens in a musical composition.
It is a nonfiction text that seems to reveal the world while fiction as if, some times, it could reveal the fundaments of Surrealism, inverting André Breton's thought "The imaginary is what tends to become real".
Here, in this electronic world we live in, the real seems to always tend to the imaginary.

In addition to books, movies and scientific articles, the process of meta-analysis was heavily based on the attentive study of newspapers and magazines.
In 2008, journalist Gilbert Cruz, of Time, said: "The newspaper industry is in a bad spot. Actually, run a correction on that statement - newspapers are in a 'time to panic' spot. The business model is collapsing, ad dollars are disappearing, newsprint prices are at a 12-year high and the Internet is just giving news away for free. On July 2, the Los Angeles Times announced it was cutting more than one-sixth of its newsroom staff; the Tampa Tribune said it would cut 20%". Cruz also made a special reference to the journalist Paul Steiger, for whom the distribution of free content on networks "is a lot like what's happening with music... a total collapse of the business model".
In general, people do not think that journalists and musicians need to make money to be able to work - they need to eat! And people often think that everything should be free; see musicians as rock stars - who, in the best of the hypothesis, do not represent 0.01% of the universe of musicians; and take as main reference famous journalists that present TV programs. The end of the "business model" means the elimination of millions of serious musicians and journalists.
And, interestingly, people seem not realize that they want everything free because there is less and less money in the planet.
But throughout the Western world, the role of journalism, especially of the investigative journalism, was fundamental to support the Rule of Law, defending individual rights, and fighting for democratic values. A possible disappearance of serious journalism will mean to dive into the darkness of a medieval universe where the credibility of ideas will give place to all sorts of manipulation and fraud.
This book is also a manifesto recalling the spirit of I. F. Stone, for whom "no society is good and can be healthy without freedom for dissent and for creative independence".
In some sense, I was born inside a journalistic world. One of my grandfather's dreams, as a young man, was to be a journalist. My father created and directed a magazine for more than thirty-five years. Very young, as a teenager, I started working with the legendary Brazilian journalist and poet Jorge Medauar, who would be my great friend for life. Especially when I lived in Brazil, I regularly wrote articles for newspapers and magazines, such as O Estado de São Paulo, Folha de São Paulo, or the architecture and urban planning magazine Projeto, for example. I believe that I wrote articles for almost every issue of the music magazine Som Três, created by another dear friend, the journalist Maurício Kubrusly. I have been very close and collaborated with many other journalists, such as Mauricio Kus or Efigenia Menna Barreto, who also became friends for life.
After more than forty years, to this day I have dear journalist friends in different countries - and I am quite aware of their important role in contemporary society.
Thus, in some sense, this book is a tribute to this universe threatened with extinction: the world of journalism.

Still, it must be emphasized that the criticisms sometimes made in relation to this or that country, are only intended to illuminate the process of transformation in which we live.

The Grasshopper Man is dedicated to all spirits who actively love and advocate knowledge, discovery, education and individual liberties.
It is published in memory of three dear friends, who died too early and with whom I talked about The Grasshopper Man. Ana Teixeira da Silva, brilliant judge in Portugal; Wilton Azevedo, great artist and thinker, who lived in São Paulo, Brazil; and José Mariano Gago, a man of science and literature, also in Portugal. The three suddenly disappeared. At different times and places, we plunged into passionate discussions about planet Earth and the human condition.

The understanding of some of the most important mechanisms of the formation of ideas is not justification, of any kind, not even historical, for crimes, dictatorships or any kind of tyranny, but the exact opposite.
This book is an absolute and radical cry against any impulse in the sense of eugenics - indeed, it clearly demonstrates eugenics, tyranny, dictatorship, racism and totalitarianism, of any kind, as farces with the aim of concealing human theft and exploitation.
Not only, it shows the essential importance of culture, of education, of the formation of the human being.
Even at the physiological level, what we know is drawn by culture, by our artifacts, visible or not, by the way of knowing.
Culture is plastic and physical.
We continually redesign our brains, whose dynamic plasticity clarifies us about the importance of all elaborations while formers of the human spirit.
There are no racial or religious conflicts - what there is is culture.

One of the conclusions is that the only way-out for the world is a consensus in relation to a pact establishing high quality education in long term - history, mathematics, literature, philosophy, art, music, architecture, science, physics, chemistry, biology and so on - as absolute priority.
Only with essential instruments to freely understand space-time relations we will be able, each one of us, to freely elaborate the future.
Another of the conclusions is that although today's technologies seem to project a particular scenario, it is important to emphasize that they are always in permanent transformation.
Technology - as daughter of science, whose first sign is the principle of refutability - brings in itself the genetic matrix of this metamorphosis.
The important is to question, always.
Dwight D. Eisenhower said, "If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom".
So, this is, in fact, a book about freedom.

Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta
Locarno, Switzerland, 2017