NEWMAN: A chip in the hand isn’t worth much – Scottsbluff Star Herald

Will you be chipped one day? Will you be forced, or strongly encouraged or incentivized, to have a microchip under your skin to make payment, identification and no doubt tracking all that much easier?

Three Square Market, a Wisconsin-based firm specializing in vending machines, recently offered its employees a chance to say goodbye to hard-to-remember log-in codes and the need for ID badges. Employees could sign up to have a dime-sized microchip implanted in their hands. Surprisingly, 50-some employees allowed a tattoo artist to insert the chips. The company hopes to generate enough buzz to sell consumers on one day opting for a wave of their chipped hands in front of its vending machines, instead of pulling out a credit card or using their smart phones.

Technology appears to be charting its course to land within us. This trajectory, I suppose, stands to reason. Tech continues to grow smarter and smaller.

I just want to say one word to you, one word plastics. Thats the advice the know-it-all businessman offers the title character of the 1967 classic The Graduate. Today I have one word for you: miniaturization.

From swarms of mosquito-sized killer drones to phones/augmented-reality tech/passports inside of us, mini could be the word that defines the future. Already in Sweden, according to USA Today, some 3,000 folks have microchips implanted that allow them to board the train with a swipe of their hands.

If you want to be chipped right now, you just need to go to Dangerous Things, a Seattle-based outfit. The company is big on transhumanism: the notion that through genetic and technological enhancement people will soon transcend what it means to be human. We will genetically engineer away disease. We will amp abilities and extend lifetimes to near immortality. We will be posthuman, even (in the words of some transhumanist theorists) homo deus. Ye will be as gods, I remember someone saying once.

There are some things, the company says on its web site (dangerousthings.com), we will likely never achieve through gene modification. The ability to store digital data in our bodies. The ability to compute data and perform cryptography in our bodies. The ability to transmit and receive digital data and talk directly to machines in their digital language.

The interconnected world of the Internet, in other words, will come to us to the point that we will become our phones and laptops. Truly we will live and move and have our being in the Web. We will swim within its currents.

Or drown.

Our bodies are our own, to do what we want with, the company continues on its web site, sounding the clarion call for bio-hacking. Sound familiar? That is the ideological tidal stream one of radical personal autonomy carrying us deeper into the 21st century and what may well be the abyss. This amounts (it is said smugly) to the right side of history. People are what they say they are and what they want to be, and will do what they want with themselves. And if anyone challenges these assertions, she is a bigot. And of course, Nazis were bigots; therefore, anyone who stands in the path of the declared right side of history is a Nazi. And you know what you do with Nazis, dont you?

The company invokes a familiar incantation to ward away any criticism: The socially acceptable of tomorrow is formed by boundaries pushed today, and were excited to be part of it. History, in this paradigm, advances by the knocking down of boundaries. What is socially acceptable in one time becomes regressive in the next, thanks to boundary-pushing radicals like Dangerous Things, and so the dialectical dance makes its way one transgression after another until we reach a utopia where money and sex and identity are as fluid and free as the waters of the ocean.

If this isnt the hijacking of Christian eschatology, that is, how the world will play itself until the end of times, and jury-rigged to disordered human desire bent on casting aside all restraints and becoming as gods onto themselves, Im not sure what it is. I do know it takes a society as wealthy as it is decadent to think history works that way, that progress is engendered by smashing one boundary after another and that, in this chaos, everything will come out swimmingly well.

Boundaries, like the guardrails on a road, can be there for a reason. The ones on roads can be replaced if they are knocked down. Its not so easy with the ones that maintain civilization.

For the ancient Greeks, those who, in their arrogance, confused themselves with the gods garnered the attention of Nemesis. Nemesis in Greek means to give what is due, for she is the agent of inescapable vengeance. By her hand many a civilization has been crippled, dispatched to the graveyard even. In our hubris, in our dreams of self-proclaimed godhood, I dont think a microchip in the hand will be much match for the sword Nemesis carries in hers.

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NEWMAN: A chip in the hand isn't worth much - Scottsbluff Star Herald