When biohacker and magician Anastasia Synn holds her phone over her heart, it speaks: “This is the day I married my best friend.” Her wedding video begins to play.
A small, glass-encased microchip implanted under her skin holds close the memory of her marriage to fellow magician The Amazing Johnathan. Next to it, another implant holds his ashes. They were previously implanted in her arm, alongside a magnet, so Johnathan could keep performing his favorite trick after his 2022 death.
“After my husband died, I wanted to have his ashes implanted, and it just made sense to have our wedding video, have his funeral video,” Synn said. “I had a chip that told his favorite joke, and I have one in my hand that calls his phone. I don’t scan them all the time, because it’s emotional for me still.”
The microchips — more specifically, radio frequency identification tags, which operate without a power source — can be programmed to trigger different actions. Synn had her first chip trigger a fat noise on her phone. Some of her chips are functional, like the one that serves as her housekey.
Though functionality would become the dominant use of RFID chips, the first human implantation was an artistic endeavor by Brazilian artist Eduardo Kac in 1997. Kac implanted an RFID chip meant for animals into his ankle, and added himself to a U.S. pet ID registry in a project titled “Time Capsule.” He still has the implant today.
In 1998, University of Reading professor Kevin Warwick had a small RFID tag implanted in his arm for 10 days. He, not Kac, is commonly identified as the first human to receive such an implant. Because the chips are unpowered, they are limited in range. Still, Warwick’s chip could be programmed to open doors ahead of him and log into computers, both of which remain popular applications of RFID implants.
When the DIY-cybernetics community coalesced around implanted chips, they followed in Warwick’s footsteps, creating new ways to interact with their environment and devices. At home and in garages, they pursued a transhumanist vision by pushing the limits of human capability. It was in this environment that Amal Graafstra, who had his first chip implanted in 2005, decided to start Dangerous Things, now a leading RFID implant manufacturer.
“I started seeing a lot of people doing implant installations using stuff they were pulling out of car keys, doing it in a haphazard way,” Graafstra said. As a business, he wanted to “focus on two things: One, making sure the thing people are putting in their body is actually safe, and two, the way they’re getting installed is actually safe.”
Constructing body-safe chips was straightforward enough: Dangerous Things source their own materials before manufacture and do batch testing for quality control. Nothing goes in that isn’t vetted, and defects are caught early — Synn herself prefers Dangerous Things’ glass-encased RFID chips for longevity.
Safe installation would take a bit more work. Even the easy installs, like smaller chips that can be inserted with a needle, require sterility and a level of anatomical knowledge. Graafstra turned to piercers, attending the annual Association of Professional Piercers conference and explaining the technology.
Today, Dangerous Things has an array of installation partners — body modification artists who can safely install the chips. One of them is Katie Lynn Patterson, a Texas-based body piercer at Stubborn Anchor Studios, who does a few installations a month. While she doesn’t have implants herself, she sees biohacking as a natural extension of body modification.
“I was so in love with the idea that a human can customize themselves, push their bodies to their limits, and ascend to a higher state of mind,” she said. “That later came to include embracing the modern marriage between body modification and technology, and its relation to the future of biohacking.”
According to Patterson, healing and aftercare for the microchip implants is relatively fast — full healing usually takes up to four weeks with precautions like cleaning the implant site and minimizing movement. The wound itself typically closes within a week, but the body needs more time to create a pocket of scar tissue that helps anchor the device. While the procedure has similar risks to getting a piercing — rejection, infection, migration, irritation, and scarring — these can be minimized by proper, safe installation from an experienced artist.
Though Graafstra would eventually come to work closely with body modification professionals like Patterson, he didn’t consider himself part of the body modification community, at least at first. He had no tattoos or piercings, seeing them as an aesthetic addition he had no interest in. Shortly after his first implant in 2005 went viral, however, BME covered the story.
“It never really crossed my mind as a body mod in that way — it was, for me, just a practical, functional thing,” Graafstra said. “It really opened me up to the idea that there might be a philosophical and psychological aspect to this, rather than just the pragmatic aspect of enhancement capabilities.”
For Graafstra, the philosophical aspect now has a new dimension: With the rapid rise of generative AI, he’s concerned that verifying someone’s identity, or even humanity, online is growing increasingly difficult. While some have proposed biometric data as a better identification tool, Graafstra’s not convinced. It’s too easy to fake, he says, and erodes an individual’s ability to remain private — with gait analysis and facial recognition, any camera is a means for revealing identity. He argues that public key encryption, like that used for accessing Bitcoin wallets, could be a solution.
The biggest downside of such systems is their unbreakableness: “if you lose your key, you’re fucked,” Graafstra said. But if the key is stored on an implanted RFID tag, “your digital identity and your biological identity are together.”
It’s not something he expects to see anytime soon, if ever. But it is an inversion of a commonly expressed fear about microchip implants.
Even back in 1998, Warwick raised concerns about implanted RFID tags being used by employers to track employees, down to monitoring time spent in bathrooms. In 2004, after the Food and Drug Administration approved VeriChip, the first human-use microchip, similar concerns emerged about potential government tracking. According to documents filed with the Securities Exchange Commission, the company that owned VeriChip ceased actively marketing it in 2008 after sales lagged significantly behind projections. And during the COVID-19 pandemic, conspiracy theories about microchips in vaccines spread, often accusing global elites of planning the pandemic as an excuse to inject the world population with tracking devices.
The concerns have led to legal action: 13 states have issued preemptive bans on businesses requiring employees to get chipped. In 2019, Nevada went further, introducing an Assembly bill threatening anyone who established or participated in a voluntary implantation program with a felony conviction. Though it passed unanimously in the Assembly, it faced a harder fight in the Nevada Senate when local biohackers showed up to counter the bill.
Synn, who had just returned to Las Vegas after touring with her husband, attended at the urging of two biohacker friends. She was frustrated to see that misunderstandings of the technology seemed to be a major motivation for the bill.
“I babbled for, like, eight minutes straight without letting them get a word in edgewise,” Synn said. “And then I stopped. One senator looks at me, and she just laughs, and looks at everyone else. And she goes ‘ok, so, wow, thank you. We did not know any of that, thank you.’ And that senator voted against the bill.”
The law Nevada eventually passed only restricted coerced implantation, in line with other states’ bans, and even included language clarifying that it did not forbid voluntary implants. Synn was even invited back to talk to legislators about transhumanism.
It’s a moment she’s proud of. Synn herself had been somewhat skeptical at first, but quickly fell in love with the magnets and chips she had implanted. She now has so many she’s lost the exact count, but it’s somewhere around 54. And she’s always happy to “spread the cyborg love” by giving others their first implant.
“It’s fun just to make yourself something more than you are,” she said. “I don’t charge people for it, and usually I even give them the chips for free … so I feel like I’m the spreader of the cyborg myth. You want to become a cyborg? I got you. It’s free. I’ll help you out, right here, right now.”
