The Swedish Microchipping Phenomenon

Moa Petersén

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781789733587
• eBook ISBN: 9781789733570
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: IT Industry
• Index: Business

This book is an investigation of the Swedish microchipping phenomenon and seeks to explain why, despite its many negative connotations in an international context, microchipping is relatively popular in Sweden. The author maps out the movement, examines its key drivers, and delves further to discover why Swedes generally have a high trust in technology, and show little resistance to testing it. 

The Swedish case is studied from the three main themes of surveillance, science fiction and transhumanism, and is built around interviews with Swedes who have embraced the technology. The arguments for and against microchipping are contextualised culturally and explained against a background of the long established Swedish relationship with advanced technology, and with their unique level of trust in the government. The book will be of interest to undergraduate and graduate students in digital culture related disciplines.

1

WHEN THE CHIPS CAME TO SWEDEN

THE BASEMENT¹

In autumn 2014, 10 people met in a basement in Gamla Stan in Stockholm, Sweden, to put NFC chips into their hands. This is the first manifestation of, and the starting point for, the larger scale of Swedish chipping. Jens, 44, who was the convener of the meeting in the basement, had read articles about and been interested in human RFID chipping for a couple of years. When the meeting in the basement took place, experiments with human RFID implants had been around for some years within the global underground biohacking community. The first reported experiment with RFID implants was conducted by British professor of cybernetics, Kevin Warwick (2000), who had an RFID chip implanted in his arm in 1998, which he described in lengthy detail in an account published in tech magazine Wired in 2000. The experiment rendered him the nickname Captain Cyborg. In the US biohacker community, Amal Graafstra (2006) had been experimenting for years with RFID implants in humans, and also written a book on the topic. There were also biohacking groups in Australia and Germany who were actively experimenting with human chip implants, and some Swedish individuals engaged in the global biohacking community had already chipped themselves with RFID chips. Shortly before the basement meeting took place Jens had, together with three others, taken the initiative to form an official Swedish biohacking organization. Swedish chipping was part of this formation.

Jens found inspiration for the basement meeting in 2013 as he saw a project that the Seattle-based biohacker custom gadgetry Dangerous Things had published at the crowdsourcing site, Indie go go. The project was called The xNT implantable NFC chip and presented the idea that NFC chips could be inserted into the human body and used in whatever situation NFC reading was at hand. The entrepreneur Jens had been waiting for biohackers to take a step away from the obsolete RFID chips and turn to the NFC chips since he reckoned that the NFC chips would be able to apply at a larger scale. RFID and NFC are two similar wireless communication technologies. RFID, which has been used since the mid-1980s, is the process by which items are uniquely identified using radio waves, and NFC, launched as a standard in 2007, is a specialized subset within the family of RFID technology that communicates on the frequency of 13.65 MHz. In Sweden, the older RFID chip (communicating on a frequency of 125 kHz) and the NFC are used in parallel, and many of the 15 interviewees in this study have them both to cover as many frequencies as possible. The older RFID standard is used in key cards to enter apartment houses and most work places. The NFC is used in credit cards for wireless payment, in commuter cards for trains and buses, and in different member cards. Every chip has a unique ID and this ID is added to different systems in order for the chip to work. It is thus the system holders who allow for usage by admitting the specific ID into the system, and not the chip-owner who can decide if the chip is going to work. The chips that are implanted into humans are the size of a grain of rice, and consist of a biocompatible glass tube containing a memory chip that stores data plus an antenna that transmits these data to a reader once the chip comes close enough to one. The antenna in an NFC chip can only send these data out a decimeter, but the RFID is a little more powerful and its range is a few meters. Yet, both of them are passive chips that need a radio frequency reader to be activated. The NFC is more complex than the RFID since it cannot only write information to a reader – it can also read information and is thus a two-way communication tool. From the NFC chip it is thus possible to share information with another device.

After contacting Graafsta at Dangerous Things to import the chips, Jens arranged the first “chipper party” where he invited 10 people to the basement in Gamla Stan. Anna, 38, who was at the party, remembers the occasion as a “beautiful little ceremony including cyborg sisters and cyborg brothers, sharing a kinship.” After the party, the 10 newly enhanced cyborg sisters and brothers disappeared into the Swedish autumn evening not knowing they had just experienced what would be the birth of the Swedish microchipping phenomenon.

THE STRUGGLE WITHIN SWEDISH BIOHACKING

The general meaning of “biohacking” has greatly changed since the term was first used, described, and discussed in the US media in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The persons involved in the practice were then called “amateur genetic engineers,” and their interest was to do with so-called “wet ware hacking,” that is, experiments with organic material in a do-it-yourself laboratory environment (Katz, 1990; Schrage, 1988). But it was not until mid-2008 that biohacking organized on the level of general society, then under the name of DIY-biology in Boston (Delfanti, 2013, p. 114). In the same year, Rob Carlson (2005) wrote a famous article in Wired called “Splice it yourself,” which contributed to make the subculture known to a general public. The first books on the subject were published in 2011 and 2013, and describe the movement as concerned with genes, gene modification, and molecular biology in garage labs (Charisius, Karberg, & Friebe, 2013; Delfanti, 2013; Wohlsen, 2011). Both in the earliest descriptions of the movement in the Wired article, and in the first books on the movement, biohacking is a synonym to what we today call DIY-biology or citizen biology – amateur scientific experiments made in wet labs, challenging the institutional ways of doing biological science. But somewhere around the time of the book publications, the biohacking movement underwent a shift as several interest groups using new wearable technology (Fitbit released their first product in 2009) that could display body data, inscribed themselves into the label of biohacking. The general understanding of what biohacking is today is a scattered movement consisting of several different subgroups with one, very broad, common denominator: they are all dealing with biological components to some extent. DIY-biology (the original biohacking) is still present, as is grinding (coming from the piercing world with interest in human implants), and quantified self (which is a movement where the members use wearables to collect body data that are used as a base for experimenting with personal health and stamina). In the last few years, experiments with dieting and its effect on health has become a new branch of the biohacking tree – a branch which is established as body hacking. The many different movements and also ideologies collected under the banner of biohacking can thus be very different. The concept of biohacking is constantly morphing, and subcategories vanish and appear. The movement tends to change along with new possibilities that emerge at pace with biotechnological developments, innovations, and general access to those.

Many studies of biohacking generalize the movement as if it was possible to talk about a global biohacker community, or global biohacker trends. In my opinion it is not. First, it is impossible to generalize about a movement that is constantly moving. Second, this movement happens in different directions within different cultures. There have been attempts made to explain the differences within different regional biohacker movements. Scholars have, for example, argued that the US biohacking movement differs greatly from the European one, as the movement in the United States is oriented toward market-driven entrepreneurship and personal enhancement. The same study argues that the European biohacking version is focused on social empowerment, frugal science, and community building, with the main goal being to help people in developing countries. The US group is, according to the study, focusing on finding alternatives to established healthcare practices (Keulartz & ven den Belt, 2016). The generalizations that these conclusions are based on are too stark. We, for example, see a diversity of biohacking ideologies with different central foci within Europe. Also, within Scandinavia the differences are big. If compared, for example, to the Danish scene, where frugal DIY-biology is strong (Biologigaragen, n.d.), Swedish and Finnish biohacking is closer to what, in the above mentioned study, is characteristic for the US model of biohacking that has traditionally been engaged with implants, and lately is focused on diet and food. Further, the differences between Finnish and Swedish biohacking concerns are also large. To the Finnish biohacker community the focus on dieting, cold ice bathing, and finding nutrition in the wild has been central for the last couple of years. The 2015 Biohacker Summit in Helsinki, Finland, aimed at using food and cooking techniques as a measure to enhance the human body and mind, but was also tinged by a certain alchemical or mystical attitude toward preparing and consuming the “upgraded dinner” that was served as part of the summit occasion (Berg, Fors, & Eriksson, 2016). Even if dieting has recently become popular within Swedish biohacking as well, this transcendental or mystical dimension is generally absent in the Swedish context. Whether what branch of biohacking becomes popular in a certain country tells us something about the culture, society, and values of that specific country is an interesting question that could be investigated through particular case studies. In the following investigation, I will depart from the idea that the Swedish cultural and political context has affected the formation of the Swedish biohacking movement, and the microchipping as an element within it.

Only weeks before the first chipper party in the basement, Jens and another attendee at the basement meeting had met together with two others to find Sweden’s first biohacking organization, BioNyfiken. The aim of BioNyfiken was to create a platform for people with an interest in biohacking’s different manifestations, with meet-ups once a month. The four men of the founding circle were all between 25 and 40, and living in Stockholm. Jens and Kim, 34, were the two who fronted the organization, and the other two dropped out not long after the establishment. Kim’s main interest was DIY-biology and experimenting in the lab. Jens was interested in biomicrochipping as transhumanist technological enhancements of humans. These two focal points were both included in the Swedish biohackning movement from the beginning. In the press release the broader scope of biohacking was addressed as the new established platform that was planned to work as an intended “meeting place for people interested in DIY-biology, smart body implants, and development of the personal physical and intellectual capacities with the help from technology.” The split between the grassroot DIY-biology trace and the human technological enhancement trace is seen in the press release, and also in the two included statements about BioNyfiken’s purpose made by Kim and Jens, respectively. Kim’s statement stresses that the aim is folkbildning (popular adult education) about synthetic biology, while Jens stresses the importance of increasing the knowledge in a general population about the powerful modern biotechnology. Jens’ standpoint is transhumanist – a standpoint that I will explain in detail in Chapter 3. For now it can briefly be described as a movement whose members advocate enhancement of human bodies and human intellect by making technology widely available and applied. Following from Kim’s and Jens’ different interests, the result of their joining forces was a divided movement with grassroot biology taking place at one end, and technological human enhancements at the other. I have followed the developments of Swedish biohacking since 2015, and my observations of an organization’s difficulty to maneuver because of split interests are confirmed by Kim in an interview. Kim tells me that the formation really never worked out as he found the differences too great, which made him separate the laboratory from BioNyfiken by the autumn of 2015. Recently Kim dropped out of the organization for good. One of the reasons for doing that, he tells me, is since he does not approve of how transhumanists have appropriated the term biohacking: “I call transhumanism transhumanism. I don’t call it biohacking. They already have a term for what they are doing. It’s unnecessary to call it biohacking.” Kim thinks that the chip implants have played a large role in the appropriation he refers to. Once the chips were successfully implemented in Swedish society, Kim argues, the transhumanist context around the chips disappeared. The more transhumanist part of BioNyfiken, which also fronted the microchips, thus became the core of BioNyfiken from 2015 and onwards. The Swedish biohacking scene was then saturated by transhusmanist ideology and ideas, but without the word transhumanism explicitly visible. My observations, not only of the Swedish scene, but also of large parts of the global biohacking context, confirm what Kim is saying. As an example, since 2016 European biohackers organize an annual event called Summit, and in 2018 the summit was held in Stockholm. The current Swedish transhumanist focus of interest is reflected in the list of presentations of the Stockholm summit, which had the theme “Optimal Recovery & Peak Performance” (Biohacker Summit, 2018). Biohacking today, both in Sweden and globally, is almost never defined as the DIY-biology it was born as. Instead it is defined as improvement of the human body through technology – transhumanism – although the word transhumanism as such is rarely mentioned.

MEDIA COVERAGE² AND THE CHIPS AS BUSINESS

Microchipping is a story that is loved by the media, regardless of the reporters’ prejudices or perspectives. Skeptical reporters use the sci-fi associations and references around chipping to warn about dystopian developments. Optimistic reporters highlight them as a possible first step into a future where humanity has progressed toward an upgraded version of itself. In any case, the science fictional narrative that chipping is embedded in leaves the writers with a rich metaphorical material to construct fascinating, curious, or anxiety-tickling contextualizations out of. After Jens had introduced the chips to a Swedish audience, the business started rolling pretty fast. Jens tells me that he had great help from media to spread the ideas, which made the demand increase, and the chipping service soon professionalized into two companies performing chip implants, one run by Kim and the other by Olle. Kim, Jens, and Olle all mention as absurd the amount of attention the chips get from media in proportion to what they can really do. As Olle states:

It is no big news really, but it gets a really big impact when it is distributed every sixth month. It goes Bam! in the headlines every time. And that without us doing anything really.

Olle, 38, had been interested in implanting chips in humans ever since 1998 when he first read about Ken Warwick’s experiments. He had been following the heavy grinder Tim Cannon in Pittsburgh who, among other body modifications, implanted a deck of card-sized battery-powered implants in his arm in 2013. Before Olle saw the Dangerous Things campaign, which also became the starting point for Jens’ import of chips as mentioned above, Olle had been working with other kinds of body modifications, such as 3D and silicon implants. Separate from BioNyfiken and Jens, Olle started to import the NFC chips from Dangerous Things in 2014 and started an implant business in southern Sweden. In the autumn of 2014, he and Jens made contact, and the two of them started to collaborate, introduce, and commercialize the chip in Sweden and internationally. Olle and Jens were successful in washing away the subcultural stigma the chips were carrying from the US biohacking scene where the idea had originated. As mentioned in the Introduction, there are possibly a large number of chipped persons within the US biohacking scene, but what is so special about the chipping in Sweden is the level to which the entrepreneurs have been successful in commodifying, normalizing, and loading the chips with progressive values. The big and trendy technology hub in Stockholm where Jens worked early on became an ambassador for the chips in the national and international media, as a majority of the employees at the hub chipped themselves. This contributed greatly to the washing of the chips into a defused and trendy future-oriented alternative to keys and cards.

Once Jens began to promote them in Sweden in 2014 and 2015, the chips attracted considerable interest in the media. The first story that covered the Swedish chip initiative, and that made it go globally viral, was published by BBC News in 2014. The article is written in a neutral tone describing Jens’ predictions about the future possibilities of the human chip implant technology. Since then a vast number of articles have been written about the Swedish microchip phenomenon. The vast majority of international articles are written in a skeptical and warning tone, often concerned with possible big brother-scenarios of society and loss of integrity. In the independent media the tone is even harder, exemplified here by Futurist Magazine:

So, we get it, Sweden – you’re populated by futuristic cyberpunk bad asses while most of us are still stuck with humdrum brass keys and overstuffed wallets that bulge like a recently-fed snake. But without additional safeguards, and guarantees of online privacy, the microchipping fad may quickly become a digital security ni...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Author
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. When the Chips Came to Sweden
• 2. Sweden and Technology
• 3. Chipped Swedes
• Concluding Discussion
• References
• Index