Rise Of The Cyborgs: The DIY Hackers Carrying The Future Under Their Skin

Ever since humanity first took shape in the primordial soup we've been piercing and painting and chipping away at ourselves in the hope of improving on nature's design — usually with something a little different to Michelangelo's David in mind.

In 10th century Imperial China, women in the upper classes starting breaking and binding their feet to achieve the perfect teensy tootsies, with horrifyingly effective results. In Victorian England rearranging your innards with a corset was par for the course and If you didn't have a couple of duelling scars across your cheeks around the same time in Germany then you were clearly boring and a coward. The Bopoto sharpened their teeth to points, while the Mayans glued gems to theirs like early-naughties Nellys. To this day the Padaung women in Myanmar start wearing their neck-stretching brass coils at around five years old. Here at home, several Indigenous nations practised penile subincision (seriously NSFW), and no matter where you're from, if you're a Jewish lad you've likely met a Mohel.

Dyed hair, piercings from bow to stern, dripping in ink with a stretched bottom lip - people like to mess with their rigs. But throughout history, our obsession with 'extreme physical revision' has been, for the most part, aesthetic, ritualistic or sexual. While that's still true, this is the 21st century, and there are new reasons to remake what your mama gave ya. Gaining popularity and attention over the last few years, grinders and body modders are trying to redefine what it means to be human, improving themselves with implantable cybernetic devices; everything from magnetic fingertips to subdermal biometric readers. Overseas the movement is even beginning to affect the professional sector. Swedish company Epicenter began microchipping willing employees in April and Three Square Market in Wisconsin made the same offer just this week. While AGL and Woolies haven't jumped on board just yet Australia's own grinder movement is alive and well, with Sydney hosting its first Hackfest in November.

Science Party candidate for Grayndler Meow-Ludo Disco Gamma Meow-Meow is the mind behind BioFoundry, a Sydney-based "community lab for citizen scientists", and is one of Australia's most vocal proponents of "biohacking". He's also a self-confessed cyborg. He has several implants, though the one that gained him the most notoriety is the Opal travel card he had put in his hand back in June. The 10x6 millimetre chip is a prototype from Seattle-based start-up Dangerous Things, and allows Meow-Meow to tap on with a tap of his hand. Meow-Meow and his fellow biohackers see these kinds of experiments as the next step in human evolution, though of course, not everybody agrees.

"I've copped heaps of flack over my implants, 'Oh, you got an Opal card implanted in your hand,'" mimics Meow-Meow with a laugh. "And the fact those people are even having that conversation is a good thing. Mission accomplished. I got people to speak about emerging technology that I care about."

That technology is still surprisingly grass roots. While larger companies work on comparable projects - "There’s going to be things like contact lenses that can do AR overlays" - anything that's actually going to get under your skin, for the next few years at least, will probably come from one of two places according to Meow-Meow.

"Pretty much everyone else is a non-participant," says the biohacker. "There's Grindhouse Wetware, with Tim Cannon, and then you've got Dangerous Things, with Amal Graafstra. They were the first ones that have really been popularising this. Before then there was nothing. There was like, cat and dog microchipping. Even if people came before they didn't do enough to make anyone know what they were doing."

After mentioning he does know a few body modders with cat and dog chips, Meow-Meow informs us that the biggest difference between the two companies is in their power sources. "Everything that Dangerous Things does is inductively powered. This is really important because it guides the way that their technology goes. Everything that Tim Cannon does, Grindhouse, is powered by batteries. Now, batteries are dangerous, but they allow things to be a lot more high powered. You can have one LED blinking underneath your skin with an RFID [radio-frequency identification] field, right. When you have batteries, you can have a crazy ring of five [lights] that last for years underneath your hand."

With stories like the woman whose headphones exploded on a flight to Melbourne last March, power over stability seems like a tough call to make. "And you know, you've got Samsung Galaxy Note S7s exploding everywhere, obviously your mind immediately goes to, 'Lithium-ion battery, aren't they the ones that explode?'" says Meow-Meow. "So there's some pretty big risks. If you have a device explode underneath your skin you are well fucked." A couple minutes spent YouTubing 'battery explosion' and we think he might be right. But to be fair, just a handful of the phones actually exploded and only 35 handsets in total were found with the issue, which is around 24 faulty devices per million sold — a number anomalous enough to trigger a total recall. If it's your handful that explodes though, those numbers probably won't be too comforting.

It's probably one of the reasons another company, Cyborg Nest, made North Sense, a device that lets you know when you're facing north, to sit outside the body, attached to the chest by two dermal anchors.

"Waste of time. Absolute waste of time. They're like hacker lite," states Meow-Meow. "You can have a watch that can do the same thing, why does it need to be a piercing? It's 'cause they're scared, and too technologically incompetent, to make it properly. Then you see some cunt like Tim Cannon come along and be like, 'Fuck, I'm going to stick a whole computer in my arm.'"

Meow-Meow's referring to the Circadia 1.0. If you Google 'biohackers', one of the first things you're going to see is a picture of Grindhouse Wetware founder Tim Cannon with something that looks roughly the size of a second gen iPod implanted in the underside of his left forearm, usually with about 12 stitches up the side. The Circadia collects 'round the clock biomedical data - the 1.0 model reads body temperature, but the next generation will hopefully add blood glucose, blood oxygen, blood pressure, and heart rate data. The applications are easy to see, particularly for the chronically ill who need to regularly track their vital responses, but the size would likely put off your average consumer.

"Not anymore. It's tiny now," shares Meow-Meow excitedly. "I'm not too sure how much I'm supposed to say about it, but there's a new Circadia coming out and it's a lot smaller. But this is the world of early adopters and prototypers. Amal's first VivoKey [a bio-ID chip with security, cryptography, and payment applications], I felt it in his arm man, it stretches all the way across his wrist - the thing was huge. He must have given himself ten or 15 stitches to be able to put this thing in. At least. But you know, he's the alpha tester. He made this, so he has to test it first. So he did, and it works, and then he miniaturised it and now it's the size of my Opal implant."

Meow-Meow goes so far as to say that it might even be the device to bridge the gap between body modders and the general tech community.

"This type of lifestyle as well, is not for everyone," says Meow-Meow. "[But] by me getting my implants and working out what they do well and what they don't do well - you start to work out where the technology's going... Dangerous Things' VivoKey - That thing is off the hook. You could put 100 credit cards on there. It's got two-factor authentication on chip, it can do PGP decryption for keys. If everyone allowed you, you could put your Medicare card, your passport, your driver's license, every reward card and credit card in existence - anything you would carry you can put on there and have room to spare. And that suddenly makes life real easy, this is the 'chuck away your wallet' implant.

"It's basically, 'This thing does everything I need it to do.' Only thing is, they're working on, Amal's working on making the technology smaller and easier to insert because at the moment you actually need to get stitches. I think that's a bit of a barrier for people. If it's a needle they'll get it, if it's stitches they probably won't. When I got my Opal card and my flat NFC [near field communication], the flexNT - it's pretty traumatic to get it done. I'm not gonna lie, that would be way past a lot of people's point of, 'I'm ok with getting this thing put in.'

So where do you go to get 'borged? It seems unlikely your family GP would be willing to put a chip in your arm or a magnet in your tragus, and it sounds like something that requires a sterilised environment and a professional touch.

"Professional body mod practitioners," shares Meow-Meow. "So basically a piercer. But you want a fucking high-quality piercer. I get all mine done by Joeltron, and Joeltron is one of the most highly respected members of the body mod community in Australia. And he's also a hardware hacker.

"He's got a piercing store between Oxford Street and Kings Cross. It's not a dirty little back alley by any means, but it's still, it's not like it's in the CBD. I haven't got a beautiful hospital with white walls and white laminate everywhere and some sexy nurse coming in giving me anaesthesia. It's rough. But professional, I want to highlight that. It's one of the most professional things I've ever been to. He's got maybe even more aseptic techniques than my doctor.

"Everyone, all the grinders - and most of them do, not all of them - need have serious respect for the people that allowed all this to even be possible," Meow-Meow adds, "because no doctor or nurse in Australia is going to put a microchip inside you."

It makes sense that the body mod/hacker communities would take care of their own, though it does drive home the need for smaller tech. Comfort once a device is actually installed aside, getting what qualifies as surgery in a piercing joint is going to be a stretch for most, and downgrading it to a quick jab would certainly be a step forward.

But with clear willingness for self-experimentation and a strong DIY ethos so prevalent in the movement it raises the question of whether people are trying to do these procedures without professional help. There are enough rough home job tattoos around to make us think someone would be down to try, particularly when full kits can be purchased directly from several sites.

"I haven't encountered it. I think there's quite a high barrier to entry, technologically. It's not like you can just whip something up in your house and inject it in without being pretty switched on about, how to use a scalpel that's aseptic, what material do you encase it in?

"You know, when I was 14 I pierced my own ear, but there's no way a 14-year-old could get everything they need and really understand this enough to do this to themselves. These devices are pretty high tech, you can't just whip out an NFC chip from eBay and stick it under your skin. Your body's going to reject it. Just the plastics they work with are fucking expensive to make them biocompatible. And there's huge commitment to safety. No one wants to get bacterial infection underneath their skin, that's bad news. I'd say I'd be more worried about people getting piercings and tattoos than I would about these types of body mods. Because when you start asking questions you get really readily welcomed into a community that has your safety as its number one priority. 'Cause they don't want it to get shut down. So they band together, and with all these things you get these tiny little niche communities, they're all looking after each other."

While members of the community putting chips, magnets and LEDs in each other and themselves has some serious sci fi vibes, it's not quite William Gibson's cyberpunk vision just yet. But with people like Elon Musk hinting at "a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence”, Meow-Meow says the Sprawl might be closer than you would think.

"The coolest stuff is going to be when we get neuralink stuff from Musk. That's going to be next level. At the moment a lot of this stuff is kind of cool, but a lot of it I would equivalate to almost novelty."

So will we all be connecting to the cloud from flashing antennae in our necks? "No, in your skull, man," corrects Meow-Meow with a chuckle. "How far away is this stuff? I don't actually don't mind predicting stuff in the future but this is a really tricky one. There's been a few papers that have come out recently that are saying that there's some technology there which is pretty promising...

"I'll get slammed for saying stuff like this," continues Meow-Meow. "Everyone'll go, 'Bullshit, bullshit, pie in the sky, it's never going to happen.' It's you know, less than five years away; really early stuff. We have monkeys that can do stuff with brain-computer interfaces."

That might sound like a pipedream, but you can legitimately watch videos of monkeys typing messages and driving wheelchairs using tiny electrodes implanted in their brains right now - an advance that's going to have a pretty major effect for people with impaired mobility. Even as far back as 2004 British-born Neil Harbisson, who suffers from achromatopsia, became the first legally recognised cyborg when he had an antenna implanted that allows him to 'hear' colours, up to and including infrared.

"The thing is, how invasive is the surgery? How permanent? Can you upgrade it? Those are the questions that everyone will be asking. But there'll be early adopters potentially, with this stuff, really soon. Maybe not next year but not much further than that. I would say in three years you'll have some basic proof of concept type stuff, which will be - and it's echoed with all the commentators - binary logic; I can open, close, switch my light on, switch my light off. This type of stuff will happen is three years easy."

For the moment though, as with a lot of emerging technology, it's still the simplest advances that have the largest impact.

"You know what? My Opal card is the sickest piece of technology I've ever put in my skin, and I think it will outshine most of the things that come to. Because everyone's like, 'How boring,' right? That's exactly what you want from this technology. 'How boring. You took a thing you do every single day and made it easier, why wouldn't you give yourself X-ray vision or something like that.' This is a whole super-human hacking thing. The most super things you can do are the most trivial."