Permanent Earbuds and Night-Vision Eyes: The Weird World of Biohacking
September 11, 2015
In an interesting article over at the Telegraph
this week, writer Jamie Bartlett details a strange road trip to visit a
convention of biohackers. Depending on your point of view, it’s either a
thrilling peak into the future or the premise for a deeply disturbing
horror film.
Biohacking,
for the uninitiated, refers to intersections of the hacker ethic with
matters of medicine, biology, and biotechnology. The term can refer to
ethical issues around high-minded institutional research — genetic
engineering, say.
But
more often it’s applied to a radical subset of the DIY/maker community.
These are the people who, impatient with pesky traditions like
government regulations and clinical trials, hack their own bodies in the
name of science.
One of the more infamous biohacking incidents took place just a few months ago, when an independent researcher injected his own eyeballs with
a serum that granted temporary night vision. It also made the
researcher look like a villain in a 1980s cyberpunk movie, but that was
just a bonus, really.
These
aren’t just random guys monkeying around, either. The researcher,
Gabriel Licina, is a biochemist and part of a larger group of biohacking
proponents calling themselves Science for the Masses. The group’s mission: to make “the tools and resources of science more available to the layperson.”
In the Telegraph
article, Bartlett describes attending an informal convention of
biohackers, or “grinders,” who regularly perform experiments and install
upgrades on their own bodies. He meets various citizen scientists who
have, for instance, inserted RFID chips under their skin, or implanted magnets in their fingers.
Why
magnets in the fingertips? To feel electromagnetic fields, of course.
No joke — those who have undergone this particularly painful biohack
describe how a previously invisible world suddenly opens up when you
have a tactile perception of the magnetic fields all around us.
Other
grinders at the event demonstrated how they use implanted chips in
their hands to automatically unlock their phone, or even start their
cars.
A specific biohack currently gaining in popularity involves implanting permanent earbuds
that can be paired with your smartphone or media player. To pull this
kind of thing off you need to know what you’re doing, in terms of
materials, and work with a body modification artist familiar with
piercings and implants.
Like
the activists at Science for the Masses, the participants at the
convention — called Grindfest, by the way — are wary of ginormous tech
or pharma companies wresting away legitimate scientific developments and
hoarding them for profit. There’s an abiding open-source ethic in
biohacking in which researchers publish their work online, for everyone,
for free.
It’s
all pretty compelling, and even quite admirable from a
citizen-scientist point of view. Unless, of course, you have an
irrational fear of needles, scalpels, or dripping 50 microliters of
chlorophyll analog into your conjunctival sacs. Hey, science isn’t for
the squeamish. If you’d like to ease into all this, maybe consider
starting small. Just hack your 3D printer with a tattoo gun and stick
your arm in there. No, seriously.
Glenn McDonald writes about the intersections of technology and culture at glenn-mcdonald.com and via Twitter @glennmcdonald1.
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- Sep 10, 2015 · A specific biohack currently gaining in popularity involves implanting permanent earbuds that can ... Biohacking, for the uninitiated ... Night-Vision Eyes ...I predicted this world would exist soon about 5 to 7 years ago now because I saw it coming then. However, this will create a separate root race of people who choose to go in this direction where sometimes instead of going to sleep and dreaming at night they will constantly be online.So, living in a constant state of sensory overload 24 hours a day will become normal for them. So, this will create an entirely different group of people that might be treated like Hippies were in the 1960s where they were just so different people shot them like in Peter Fonda's "Easy Rider" in 1969.I'm not sure how this is all going to go by the way, there likely will be many different phazes of types of people in this direction over the next 500 years or so.Some of their enhancements will become normal just like custom burglar alarms on cars once were only custom made and eventually made their way onto high end cars.Just like with the car burglar alarms some enhancements will go mainstream and some won't because most people don't have a way of having an income while being in a completely different psychological universe 24 hours a day from the rest of us.
IS this good or bad? It's both. In some ways it will help society and in other ways it will drive thousands to millions completely insane and dysfunctional and likely they will die young. However, in the long run society in general might benefit from some of these experiments but that will be a long time from now.
Basically, we are watching the Borg Form as a subculture here on earth. And yet it is also completely different than that. This is just an example that might be useful to you to get some type of a grip on all this.
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