How biohackers are reimagining humanity.

It’s weird, living in the future.

Since the Victorian era, when science fiction began to coalesce as a genre, people have been thinking and talking and writing about what would happen right now, in our time. Past futurists set down wild visions, made outlandish projections as they contemplated life in what is our present. If you’ve encountered enough of this sci-fi imagining, living in 2019 can feel like existing partly inside someone else’s dream of what’s to come.

Altering human bodies with technology — an enterprise that blurs the line between science and science fiction past the point of mattering — is one of those possibilities past futurists found themselves contemplating. Since sci-fi’s early days, the genre has envisioned an age marked by human-machine hybrids (superpowered limbs, brains with onboard computers) that’s remained just beyond the horizon of scientific possibility. Their speculations in turn inspired real-world cybernetics research by scientists who, when asked about where the field is headed, start sounding a lot like science-fiction writers, sketching out ideas that are sure to change our world once we figure out the tech.

These scientists have already conquered problems that seemed insurmountable just a generation ago. They’ve helped the blind to see, the deaf to hear, and people with debilitating spinal injuries to get up from their wheelchairs and walk. Even if the latest generation of implants only offers relatively lo-fi sensory information and limited gains in mobility, these are still huge, miracle-level accomplishments.

Miraculous as they may be, there remains a wide gap between even the most advanced achievements in cybernetics and what sci-fi has been promising us for the past century or so. No matter how many people have had their lives drastically improved by inventions like cochlear implants, there will always be others wondering where their night-vision cyber eyes and mind-controlled computers are.

So, fed up with the lack of serious mainstream research into the more exotic fringes of cybernetic possibility, a surprising number of people, more hobbyists than experts, are conducting it themselves. They’re ignoring the ways of the scientific establishment — and what most people would consider basic common sense — and turning themselves into test beds for the next stage in techno-organic evolution. If we ever end up with night-vision cyber eyes, it’ll probably be because of them.

This anarchic field of exploration is part of a broader movement known as biohacking, and as its name implies, it has roots in hacker culture, where the motivating philosophy is that there’s nothing on Earth, from personal computers to our carbon-laden atmosphere, that can’t be improved with a little freestyle technological modification.

Like the early PC hackers who launched Silicon Valley, biohackers value improvisation and experimentation over more formal paths to progress. They get a kick out of repurposing off-the-shelf gear for purposes the creators probably never intended. They refuse to let traditional ideas of what’s possible and what’s not get in the way of their wild dreaming. The only difference is that instead of souping up computers, they’re trying to upgrade their own bodies.

Biohacking takes many forms, from the use of nutritional supplements to the recent Silicon Valley fad toward New Age-y practices like meditation and microdosing psychedelic drugs. Adding electronic peripherals to the human body is called “grinding.” It was born in the late nineties when two seemingly unrelated trends converged. The shrinking size of electronics had reached a point where it was realistic to start thinking about installing tech in the human body. At the same time, a fringe fascination with aesthetic body modification — traditional tattoos and piercings being only the tip of the iceberg — blossomed into a viable subculture that took root in places around the world, while new techniques developed to accommodate extreme visions like split tongues and subdermal horns.

In 1998, British robotics engineer and cyberneticist Kevin Warwick made headlines around the world by having an RFID chip implanted in his arm by his family doctor. RFID is a passive electronic system — meaning it doesn’t need a power source — that has grown increasingly commonplace the smaller the tech has gotten. Today, RFID chips are cheap, plentiful, and available in sizes as small as a grain of sand. They’re used in everything from credit cards, passports, and antitheft devices, to tracking shipments, keeping tabs on marathon runners, controlling locks, and just about anything you do by tapping a card against a reader. At the time, Warwick’s implant only allowed him to open doors, control lights, and a few other things that were probably just as easy to do without it. But it did give him legitimate rights to the arguable claim that he was the world’s first cyborg.

At around the same time, body-modification artist Steve Haworth was experimenting with increasingly radical alterations, using his background in designing medical devices for cosmetic surgeons to create subdermal implants that gave the appearance of horns, bumps, or other simple shapes under the skin. This would lead him to collaborate with body-art icons like the Enigma and the Lizardman. But it was while working with jewelry designer Jesse Jarrell on an idea for implanting subdermal magnets to allow for even more elaborate attachments that he spoke with a friend who had a piece of steel trapped under his skin. The friend claimed this steel allowed him to sense magnetic fields when they tugged at the metal. Inspired, Haworth implanted tiny, powerful neodymium magnets in his fingertips and Jarrell’s.

Haworth soon discovered that the fingertip magnets didn’t just pull toward other magnets he encountered; its subtle vibrations actually let him “feel” the contours of magnetic fields surrounding electrical outlets, computers, refrigerators, and pretty much anything with a current running through it. When Wi-Fi routers started popping up everywhere, he could feel their signal, too. “We discovered a whole realm of possibilities and realities around the magnetic implants in the fingertips that we didn’t know existed,” he explained in a 2013 interview.

Pretty much all of grinding has been built on Haworth and Warwick’s early experiments. Their willingness to turn their bodies into test sites has emboldened a legion of successive grinders to follow them. Implanted magnets and RFID chips remain the two most popular grinding projects, and most people in the scene have started with one or the other. (The fascinating anarcho-DIY grinder Lepht Anonym’s first project was self-implanting an RFID chip using a vegetable peeler sterilized with vodka.) They also offer a relatively low-risk way for dilettantes like tech writers and startup bros looking for a hint of cyberpunk edginess to literally dip a fingertip into the scene.

RFIDs and magnets are also handy stand-ins for two diverging modes of thinking that are starting to emerge out of the grinding world, a place that’s become unexpectedly populous in recent years.

On the one hand are practical biohackers, represented by implanters of RFIDs. Their approach prizes utility and functionality — enhancements that do stuff. RFIDs have proliferated since Warwick put one in his arm at the turn of the millennium, and implanting one (usually in a hand) is slowly becoming more useful. Now you can program them to do things like unlock your car, unlock your phone, and share virtual business cards. It’s not a lot, but there are enough people who want them — even if it’s mostly for the geek-schtick novelty factor — that entire companies are now mass-producing chip implants.

Implanted chips conjure a world where the keys-wallet-phone check is obsolete, since you’ll be carrying all your information inside your hand.

Haworth’s magnets represent a different kind of motivation: the “whole realm of possibilities and realities” that he discovered at his fingertips. His spiritual descendants are as much artists as technologists, creating and installing enhancements that don’t “do” anything other than expand the senses of users. An antenna that translates light frequencies to audio frequencies, allowing a colorblind artist to “hear” color. A gadget that gives you an awareness of magnetic north similar to that of birds. Implants that rumble whenever there’s an earthquake anywhere on the planet.

Practical biohackers — and companies like Grindhouse Wetware, which makes a high-level chip implant with both Bluetooth capability and LEDs that light up through your skin — have instrumentality on their side. And by most traditional metrics, they’re vastly more successful. When implanted tech finally breaks through to the mainstream, it’ll probably be because you can actually start doing more with a chip in your hand than send GIFs to someone’s phone (and not, say, because it suddenly became cool to always know which direction is north).

Practical grinders have created implantable earbuds that work through bone conduction. In Sweden, some offices already offer employees chip implants in lieu of keycards, and chip-equipped commuters can use their implant to pay for train tickets.

But the RFID model can feel oppressively mundane. It says a lot about our obsession with work and money, and how much of our identity hangs on them, that we’re using the cutting edge of cybernetic science to literally incorporate them into our physical being. There’s an acutely dystopian sensation to reading about a person implanting a chip in their hand and programming it to wirelessly share their LinkedIn profile, as a strategy director at an Australian media company did, or companies — even presumably well-meaning and charmingly Swedish ones — chipping their employees. There’s something even more blandly sinister about the way employees enthusiastically went along with it.

Grinders on the artsier side of the discipline are pointing a different way forward — one that doesn’t so strongly suggest a grimly beige nightmare future where we’re all walking around with Microsoft Outlook delivering work emails directly into our brains. To people of a more utilitarian bent, the work of the artistic grinder can seem silly and unserious. For instance, the practical applications of an implant that senses earthquakes — vibrating every time one of the many seismic sensors scattered across the globe is jostled by the planet’s ever-active crust — are extremely limited. They can’t predict quakes or help you get to safety faster. All that Moon Ribas, the artist who conceived of this implant and had one inserted into her arm, will claim about her device is that it gives her a deeper connection to the Earth. Depending on your personal preferences, that may or may not seem worth having a foreign object inserted into your body.

But the impracticality of projects like Ribas’s is what makes them art. There’s a mystery at the center of her seismic implant that verges on magic. Superficially, there’s the knotty question of why someone would go through the trouble of designing, manufacturing, and implanting a piece of technology with a single esoteric function. But on a deeper level, Ribas’s ability to essentially invent a whole new sense for herself, one that nobody else on Earth has, seems half conceptual art piece, half sorcery. Ribas choreographs dances based on the seismic feed from her implant, and watching her move in sync with a collaborator that no one else but her can sense — seeing her commune with the planet on a level that literally none of us can imagine — is spooky and profound.

Nor does grinding of this more abstract kind lack real-world value. One of biohacking’s great breakthroughs so far is this realization that it’s even possible to expand our senses in such a way. Biohackers have demonstrated that our brains have incredible flexibility when it comes to interpreting data the rest of our nervous system provides. Neil Harbisson, a colorblind artist with a sensor embedded in his skull that turns color into sound, said it took only a few months after getting his “eyeborg” attached before he stopped having to consciously translate the audio frequency into the color-wheel hue the sound represented. Before Ribas’s seismic implant, she had a device that used sensors and a rumble pack to give her an experience of 360-degree spatial receptivity akin to what bats gain from echolocation. Her brain quickly learned to interpret the implant’s vibrations, which magically enlarged her awareness in space.

These kinds of experiments open a door to a much different set of possibilities for future biohacking. Implanted chips conjure a world of convenience where the keys-wallet-phone check before you walk out the door is obsolete, since you’ll be carrying all your information inside your hand. Ribas and Harbisson’s work imagines one where freelance hackers design new ways of perceiving the world around us — not unlike the way hackers design novelty cryptocurrencies today. Harbisson’s latest eyeborg upgrade lets him sense color outside the visible spectrum for humans, making him the first person to be able to “see” in ultraviolet and infrared without goggles or screens.

What grinders of all stripes agree on is that their fringe interest is going to go mainstream sooner or later, with the odds favoring sooner. Once big corporations decide to support RFID-style chip implants and make them useful for something beyond nerdy parlor tricks, they’ll almost definitely attract a sizable user base, despite the inevitable Book of Revelation freak-outs from the Christian right and objections from anyone who might have reservations about giving Apple or Amazon or whomever rent-free space in their bodies.

It also seems likely that there will be some big sensory-expanding, implantable innovation that’ll reshape our interior world the way the Walkman did in the eighties. Maybe the ability to sense magnetic fields, or some kind of induced sight-to-sound synesthesia like Neil Harbisson has, will be as commonplace as headphones.

And obviously people will invent ways to use cybernetics to get you off, just as with so many other technologies. It’s almost certain that Utah grinder Rich Lee’s Lovetron 9000, an implantable rumble pack that sits under the pubic bone and turns your penis into a vibrator, is only the tip of that iceberg.

Between the sense-expanding potential that implants have already shown, and the increasing amount of research into electronic interfaces for the brain, it doesn’t take much imagination to picture someone eventually figuring out how to hack a way to get cybernetically high, too.

But it might turn out that we’ll have to start upgrading ourselves just to keep up with the other technology we’re so busy inventing. With Wi-Fi-connected processors popping up in a bewildering array of consumer goods, from refrigerators to sex toys, the Internet of Things is spreading so deeply into our lives that it might start making sense to be able to connect your own self to the network, too.

More importantly, there’s a sense among biohackers that their work is part of the next step in the evolution of the human species. The comforts of modern life, like medicine and modern food production, shield us from most of the survival-of-the-fittest stresses that drive natural selection, so however Homo sapiens evolve from here on out is basically up to us. Biohacking is a way to put your hand on the wheel of human evolution. Nowhere in the biohacking movement is that clearer than in its latest and possibly most radical new wave: the quest to alter ourselves on the genetic level.

DIY gene editing may sound even more fantastical than implantable technology, and until very recently it was almost entirely theoretical. For all the advances over the past few decades, genetic engineering is still very much in its infancy.

Up until a few years ago, making even minor tweaks to an organism’s genetic code took a lot of money, a lot of sophisticated lab gear, and a lot of trial and error. But in the past decade, geneticists have figured out how to use an ancient bacterial DNA sequence called CRISPR to edit genes in living organisms — even intricately coded humans — with an ease and accuracy that many scientists in the field never expected to be possible.

With wi-fi-connected processors popping up in a bewildering array of consumer goods, the internet of things is spreading so deeply into our Lives that it might start making sense to be able to connect your own self to the network, too.

Now, for $159, you can buy a CRISPR editing kit that’ll let you play around at home with the most powerful gene-editing tool ever conceived. Cheap CRISPR editing has taken the power to manipulate our genetic code out of the hands of big, slow-moving institutions bound by certain legal, ethical, and practical constraints, and put it in the hands of home-brew hackers who aren’t afraid to dream big and recklessly.

They aren’t afraid to experiment on themselves, either. While money and tech aren’t the hurdles they once were to dabbling with the genetic code, getting results still takes a lot of experimenting, so some daredevil DIY geneticists have turned to self-testing CRISPR hacks. In 2017, a biohacker named Josiah Zayner injected himself with CRISPR-encoded DNA designed to build his muscles. Around the same time, Aaron Traywick, the self-taught CEO of a genetic therapy startup called Ascendance Biomedical, injected HIV-positive programmer Tristan Roberts with what he claimed was a CRISPR-based cure for HIV. A few months later, Traywick injected himself with another CRISPR-based genetic cocktail he said would cure him of herpes.

These experiments flamed out, and the men have stopped self-administering genetic “cures.” Zayner failed to grow mega-muscles and has since emerged as a voice of caution in the biohacking scene, arguing that “people are going to get hurt” if they keep testing gene therapies in such a rodeo fashion. Roberts’s viral load actually increased before he publically gave up on alternative HIV therapies. As for Traywick, his herpes cure didn’t seem to work, and in spring 2018 he was found dead in a sensory-deprivation tank in Washington, D.C., the cause not a gene hack but drowning after taking the sedative ketamine.

Needless to say, injecting yourself with untested implants and gene-editing therapies is high-risk behavior, but as biohackers are quick to point out, the stakes as this revolutionary technology develops are also extremely high. Whether it’s genetics or electronics, we’re on the verge of a new level of technology capable of modifying and enhancing the human body and mind. How the power to do so is distributed will have massive societal implications.

Imagine if Apple puts all of the power of an iPhone in an implant but also keeps its restrictive user agreements? Or even easier, imagine that someone actually comes up with a way of genetically enhancing human health and intelligence but the global economic elite decide to keep it for themselves. Before his death, Stephen Hawking suggested that we might be heading toward a future where our species’ next evolutionary step is reserved for the wealthy, resulting in two distinct human populations on two different evolutionary paths.

We also might have to hack ourselves to keep up with the artificial intelligence we’re creating. From Alphabet/Google to Chinese mega-retailer Alibaba, most of the big global tech corporations are researching AI. With advances in processing power and machine learning, it’s looking more and more like we’re on the path toward an AI as smart as, or smarter than, humans.

The sunniest outcome is that benevolent super-smart AI will help us untangle the knot of the extinction-level dangers humankind has created, from economic inequality and overcrowding to global environmental collapse. In this scenario, we might want an implant to give us a direct line from our brains to altruistic AI sages. Scientists and tech gurus have been looking to sci-fi for clues as to how that might play out. In his Culture novels, the late sci-fi writer Iain M. Banks imagined humans living in a post-scarcity utopia, communing with godlike AI through neural interfaces embedded in our brains. Elon Musk has borrowed from Banks’s novels for his secretive startup, Neuralink, founded to research the possibility of brain/computer interfacing, or “neural lace,” in real life.

Many of the predictions surrounding AI have a darker, more apocalyptic edge. Super-smart AI might not value humans, in which case we’d need to supercharge our brains just to compete with it, or else risk the extinction of our species. Then again, maybe we’d embrace the idea of humans going extinct.

There’s a large overlap between biohackers and transhumanists, who believe the next evolutionary step will involve erasing borders between ourselves and technology. Transhumanists predict a Singularity where we essentially become one with computers. That might mean uploading our minds to computers in some sort of digitized Rapture, or it might mean collaborating with AI to create a genetically enhanced, technologically upgraded species to replace Homo sapiens and usher in a new world where everything about people and our society is different, and hopefully better.

Out at its fringes, biohacking can start to resemble an end-time religious cult (although these days the same could be said for pretty much any community in this country organized around a common interest). People casually talk about the end of humankind as we know it, in blog posts with titles like, “On the inevitable extinction of the human species and the creation of the posthuman species.” Things get so comic book-y and over the top that it’s easy to ignore the fact that we might actually have to deal with the questions they raise.

Once we figure out how to put a computer in someone’s head, will that person be more than human, or less? How much can you alter a person’s genome before they become something different from Homo sapiens?

Whether it’s genetics or electronics, we’re on the verge of a new level of technology capable of modifying and enhancing the human body and mind.

Humans have been speculating about such developments in science fiction and comics for so long that the idea they could turn out to be actual issues in our current lives is hard to fathom. It’s like those movies where a beloved character from a children’s cartoon manages to cross the membrane from fiction into reality — except here we have to wrestle with the possibility that humans as we know them might one day be obsolete.

We could be on that trajectory already. Even with all the stunts and self-surgery and doomsday predictions, biohackers aren’t all that different from the rest of us. In fact, we’ve all become something like biohackers. If you were to watch a time-lapse movie of the evolution of personal computers over the past four decades, you’d see big beige boxes shrink down, smooth out, and finally make the leap from the desktop into our hands, where our smartphones now live. If you fast-forwarded the movie you might see the phone morph into a wristwatch, and then see that watch shrink down even further before it finally slides under the skin, completing a journey that was still strictly sci-fi just a few years ago.

We already live with computers stuck to our hands, and we’ve already transformed ourselves in huge ways because of them. Think about all the data in your head that only exists as shortcuts to where you can find more complete information on your phone — contact lists of numbers and email addresses, maps to places we should really remember how to locate without GPS, a Wikipedia-like world of knowledge at our fingertips to satiate our most trivial cravings for information. We aren’t addicted to our phones simply because we’re hooked on social media and the little serotonin kicks we get from internet likes — we need our phones because they provide access to parts of ourselves we’ve scattered throughout the cloud.

Whether we like it or not, we’re all a little cyborg these days. If grinders seem strange to us, it’s not because they’re so alien — it’s because they’re so familiar, men and women who exist as a strange amalgam of person and machine, just a few steps further down a path we’re already walking.