I Love My Microchip

The new slavery: employers are now microchipping employees the way a veterinarian would microchip the family pet. Image Source: Mark Gasson/BBC.

I Love My Microchip: Employers are now micro-chipping their employees and the BBC thinks this is a good idea.

Predicting the biometric future of 2017 in 2007: NBC Prediction That We Will All Have an RFID Chip Under Our Skin by 2017 (28 May 2010). Video Source: Youtube.

The LA Times reports on BD EpiCenter software, which "provides advanced data management for all BD Microbiology systems" and confirms that the Internet of Things will incorporate biological entities:

"'The biggest benefit, I think, is convenience,' said Patrick Mesterton, co-founder and chief executive of Epicenter. As a demonstration, he unlocks a door merely by waving near it. 'It basically replaces a lot of things you have, other communication devices, whether it be credit cards or keys.' ... 'I mean, people have been implanting things into their body, like pacemakers and stuff to control your heart,' he said. 'That's a way, way more serious thing than having a small chip that can actually communicate with devices.'"

On 2 August 2017, Dave Williams, a Mozilla systems engineer in the UK, explained the benefits to the BBC:

"'I have the world's worst memory,' says Williams. The fact that he now has a gadget on him at all times that opens doors and unlocks his computer — one that he can’t leave at home or forget — is a huge advantage. 'It's also fun to give someone my number and email address by touching their phone to my hand.'"

Microchipping is recommended for commuters so they don't have to buy transit tickets. Image Source: Independent.

Swedish rail operator accepts microchip tickets (16 June 2017). Video Source: Youtube.

The claims that microchips will be used to monitor public health, improve workplace efficiency, and enhance tech users' convenience distract target audiences from the fact that microchips are the foundational element of a new slavery. Soon, being microchipped will be a prerequisite for being employed. Not only is it possible that you won't get hired without a microchip, you may not even be able to travel to work without a chip in your hand.

In past centuries, slaves were branded like livestock to show ownership. For centuries, serfs and slaves fought to become free citizens, demanding constitutions, democratic elections, and civil rights. The resolution to that journey is to be microchipped, live in a faux-democracy, and await World War III in a 5G supercity.

Mark Gasson's 12mm x 2mm implant, encased in glass, next to a match stick. Image Source: Paul Hughes/BBC.

Why is this happening and what does it mean? I have argued on this blog that globalization has emerged de facto through a leap in technology, not from liberal globalist policies. Even though it appears that globalists are directing this process, they are not. That is why the globalists' policies may falter, but globalization will continue and it is inevitable.

It will not be a type of globalism the globalists want. Nor will it be something desired by their political opponents. What will emerge will be a different thing, a mechanized corporatist integrated technocracy. Federalized globalism was a 20th century dream of a 21st century reality. Our reality is better described as cyber-internationalism.

The nature of this expansion is obscured by the way high tech companies market their products as smiley and progressive. To understand what is happening, you have to stop believing the story the tech sector is telling us (and itself) about itself. You also have to ignore conventional political narratives. Both derive from outdated 18th-to-20th century models, and the notion that developed countries became beacons in the darkness, emancipated and rationalized to defend human rights and live happily ever after in prosperous, free societies.

X (22 August 2010). Video Source: Howard Glitch/Youtube.

If one considers that the political divide and internationalism may be tech-driven, then we can better grasp how hyper-technology is altering perception and behaviour. We think about technology all the time, but remain blind to our core response. That response is unconscious, like stepping through a reverse mirror; we are trying to make machines more human, and make ourselves more like machines.

I came to one conclusion after reviewing the Pedogate moral panic, the disinformation campaigns, the anti-fake-news agenda and systemic corruption of 2016-2017: it is time to wake up to the true impact of technology.

Ignore your political biases. Stop blaming bogeymen defined by outdated 20th century political thought systems. If you are liberal and you think your problems come from right-wing knuckle-draggers, think again. If you are right-wing or populist and you waste all your time and energy attacking liberal lunatics, think again. The same people who are developing the microchip for your hand, or your neck, or your bloodstream, are the ones who now censor Internet discourses. But no one has a monopoly on fascism; it comes in all political flavours.

La sortie de l'Opéra en l'An 2000 [Going Out to the Opera in the Year 2000; 1882; 1902]. By Albert Robida (1848-1926). Click to enlarge. Image Source: Reddit.

Thus, microchips are not about globalization, or politics, or even how advanced we are, because we are not that advanced. One hundred years from now, our successors will study our visions of the future, and the residua of antiquated 18th, 19th, and 20th century perspectives will be obvious. Everything we think is cutting edge will look quaint. Future people will regard Apple's iPhone X the way we think of the telegraph. Globalism will look as modern as railways, or vertical integration, or industrial cartels; and it will look as progressive as Rudyard Kipling's imperial law of the jungle.

I argue on this blog that the true story of Millennial technological development is a protean, epic journey into the human soul, and an exploration of its best and worst potentials. The Internet constitutes a vast, living example of Jung's collective unconscious: a group soul. Being microchipped asks us to plunge into a crisis of the soul.

The Internet is a nexus of humankind and machine. Artificial intelligence is blossoming right at the point where human beings are making manifest their most wild and ungovernable collective ideas, impulses and desires.

Critics fear machines that will be thousands, then millions of times more intelligent than we are. But can the machines, however conscious they become, choose to be as sloppy, useless, crazy, impulsive, and inefficient as one human being can be, much less as billions of human beings can be? I don't think so. A psychopathic ultra-efficient A.I. system could out-think and out-work us, but could it out-feel us, or be equally neurotic and unpredictable?

Fill our bloodstreams with nanobots if you will, break consciousness down into electrical impulses, and download it into a streamlined silicon jug. What makes human beings human is their ability to find escape hatches, to build tools, to love, and yearn for more.

This is the future test we are building for ourselves, almost as if we are creating artificial intelligence to evaluate our souls to the most extreme degree. Perhaps we are investing artificially intelligent machines with the darkest human impulse. This is not an animal brutality, but the coldest, most materialistic aspects of the mind, disconnected and alienated from nature. It is the oldest question in the book: are we part of nature or are we something more?

Alexander Skarsgård in The Legend of Tarzan (2016) © Warner Bros. Image reproduced under Fair Use. Image Source: Den of Geek.

The 'thing outside' the conscious, rational human is no longer the jungle. For two centuries, through racism, colonialism, and stories like Heart of Darkness (1899) and Tarzan (1912), we speculated about the 'jungle inside' us. Now, we are repeating the same story, with the microchip instead of the jungle used as a metaphor for that which is wild and unknown inside the heart, soul, and mind. To make the test even more extreme, the thing is implanted in the body, and set to become a cornerstone of social, economic, and emotional activities.

We will have to reconsider tech-dependencies, addiction and enslavement. Most commentators anticipate this future in the familiar historical terms of the state, politics, freedom, the individual citizen. There is in this configuration a fear of oppression that is almost comfortable. It draws from an old-fashioned cultural memory of uniformed artistocratic autocrats, imperialists, and royal absolutists.

It would be better to plan for super-corporations, weaponized ideas as building blocks of new power structures, and artificial intelligence bots embedded in your brain, feeding it neuro-messages. Psychiatrists are already abandoning designer drugs like Prozac and plan to cure depression with microchip implants. The pilot projects are underway.

There is no medical assumption that depression might be a natural human reaction to living in a bleeping, blinking, permanently plugged-in surveillance state. The knee-jerk answer to this normal human response is to augment and intensify the technological intrusions on human existence. Doctors, obeying their own unconscious impulses, will implant microchips without a second thought, because they are 'new.'

Technology also takes us deeper in to the human soul because it creates power vacuums. It unveils undiscovered countries and previously-unimaginable new power centres, waiting to be colonized. The rush to dominate these centres and to define them with new narratives marks the beginning of a Millennial political and ideological evolution that will be as unrecognizable to the microchip pioneers as to their critics.

One of the main investors in civilian microchip systems is Dubai Holding, "a global investment conglomerate operating in 14 countries and employing over 20,000 people." Here, one can see a greater endgame emerging, beyond the violation of the physical integrity of the individual citizen. In a future post, I will examine investors in this technology and their broader intentions.