Story By: Frank Swain BBC.com
A few years ago, I perched on the edge of my bed in a tiny flat,
breathing in a cloud of acetone fumes, using a scalpel to pick at the
corner of an electronic travel card. More than 10 million Londoners use
these Oyster cards to ride the city’s public transport network. I had
decided to dissect mine. After letting the card sit in pink nail polish
remover for a week, the plastic had softened enough that I could peel
apart the layers. Buried inside was a tiny microchip attached to a fine
copper wire: the radio frequency identification (RFID) chip.
My
goal was to bury the chip under my skin, so that the machine barriers at
the entrance to the Underground would fly open with a wave of my hand,
as if I was some kind of technological wizard. But although I had the
chip and an ex-Royal Marines medic willing to do the surgery, I failed
to get my hands on the high-grade silicone I’d need to coat the chip to
prevent my body reacting against it. Since then, people have used the technique I helped popularise
to put liberated Oyster chips in bracelets, rings, magic wands, even
fruit, but the prize for first London transport cyborg is still up for
grabs.
The person who does will find themselves inducted into the
community of “grinders” – hobbyists who modify their own body with
technological improvements. Just as you might find petrol heads poring
over an engine, or hackers tinkering away at software code, grinders
dream up ways to tweak their own bodies. One of the most popular
upgrades is to implant a microchip under the skin, usually in the soft
webbing between the thumb and forefinger.
Take Amal Graafstra, a self-described “adventure technologist” and
founder of biohacking company Dangerous Things in Seattle, Washington.
He is a double implantee – he has a microchip in each hand.
In his
right hand is a re-writable chip, the same kind used in Oyster travel
cards, which can be used to store small amounts of data. By pressing his
hand to his phone, information can be downloaded from his body or
uploaded into it. The left contains a simple identity number that can be
scanned to unlock his front door, log into his computer or even start a
motorbike (see video, below).
This month at the Transhuman Visions
conference in San Francisco, Graafstra set up an “implantation station”
offering attendees the chance to be chipped at $50 a time. Using a
large needle designed for microchipping pets, Graafstra injected a
glass-coated RFID tag the size of a rice grain into each volunteer. By
the end of the day Graafstra had created 15 new cyborgs.
For other
people, though, the idea of implanting themselves with microchips may
conjure up spectres of surveillance and totalitarian control. “Every
Hollywood movie has told them that implants are for tracking people,”
says Graafsta. “People don’t get that it's the same exact technology as
the card in your wallet. When someone uses a credit card, wireless or
not, they are tracked because several other corporations know who they
are, when they purchased, how much they spent, and where they spent it.”
Yet
if that’s true, what’s the point of implanting it? Graafstra and his
fellow cyborgs could just as easily use a chip inside plastic wallet to
store data, and a key to open his front door or start a motorbike. “Yes,
basically you've taken an RFID access card normally stored in a pants
pocket and moved it to a skin pocket,” admits Graafstra. Still, there
are some advantages: one benefit is that you’ll never lose the chip, and
it makes physical theft impossible – at least unless a thief is
prepared for some gruesome surgery.
Graafsta also points out that
embedding the chip under the skin reduces the distance that it can be
read with a scanner, making it more secure. When it’s in your arm or
hand, there’s less chance someone can surreptitiously scan your details,
by sweeping a card reader nearby.
Ultimately, implanted microchips offer a way to make your physical
body machine-readable. Currently, there is no single standard of
communicating with the machines that underpin society – from building
access panels to ATMs – but an endless diversity of identification
systems: magnetic strips, passwords, PIN numbers, security questions,
and dongles. All of these are attempts to bridge the divide between your
digital and physical identity, and if you forget or lose them, you are
suddenly cut off from your bank account, your gym, your ride home, your
proof of ID, and more. An implanted chip, by contrast, could act as our
universal identity token for navigating the machine-regulated world.
Yet
to work, such a chip would need to be truly universal and account for
potential obsolescence. My own flirtation with implanted technology came
to an end when I moved away from London, making an Oyster-equipped hand
pointless. Even with a return to London on the cards, I’m thinking
twice about returning to my project, since Oyster cards are being phased
out.
Such a development may actually be a cause for optimism for
implant enthusiasts, however, because instead of Oyster cards, London's
transport authority is allowing people to ride the subways and buses
using bank cards. It marks the beginnings of a slow move toward a world
where everything will be accessed from a single RFID microchip. If that
day comes, I can’t think of a safer place to keep it than inside my own
body.
