“The question isn’t ‘Do you have a microchip?’ ” Kramer says. “It’s more like, ‘How many?’ We’ve entered the mainstream.”
When NTEB first started back in 2009, we would occasionally do a story on human implantable microchips and their relationship to the coming Mark of the Beast as prophesied in the Bible. I say occasionally because, honestly, there was just not all that much happening. This is absolutely not the case now in 2018. In fact, biohackers around the world have made human implantable microchips a multi-billion dollar per year industry, where the demand is outpacing the technology.
"And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name." Revelation 13:16,17 (KJV)
Time was people who used terms like 'cyborgs' and 'transhumanism' were relegated to that tiny fringe group of conspiracy nutjobs blogging in the dark from their mom's basement. Not any more. Now technology companies making the implantable microchips proudly offer you the opportunity to ' become a cyborg'. As we have always told you, there can be no Mark of the Beast without the Beast, and that will take place after the Pretribulation Rapture of the Church in the time of Jacob's trouble. But boy oh boy are things heating up, and fast.
FROM BLOOMBERG: Patrick Kramer sticks a needle into a customer’s hand and injects a microchip the size of a grain of rice under the skin. “You’re now a cyborg,” he says after plastering a Band-Aid on the small wound between Guilherme Geronimo’s thumb and index finger. The 34-year-old Brazilian plans to use the chip, similar to those implanted in millions of cats, dogs, and livestock, to unlock doors and store a digital business card.
Kramer is chief executive officer of Digiwell, a Hamburg startup in what aficionados call body hacking—digital technology inserted into people. Kramer says he’s implanted about 2,000 such chips in the past 18 months, and he has three in his own hands: to open his office door, store medical data, and share his contact information. Digiwell is one of a handful of companies offering similar services, and biohacking advocates estimate there are about 100,000 cyborgs worldwide. “The question isn’t ‘Do you have a microchip?’ ” Kramer says. “It’s more like, ‘How many?’ We’ve entered the mainstream.”
Research house Gartner Inc. identified do-it-yourself biohacking as one of five technology trends—others include artificial intelligence and blockchain—with the potential to disrupt businesses. The human augmentation market, which includes implants as well as bionic limbs and fledgling computer-brain connections, will grow more than tenfold, to $2.3 billion, by 2025, as industries as diverse as health care, defense, sports, and manufacturing adopt such technologies, researcher OG Analysis predicts. “We’re only at the beginning of this trend,” says Oliver Bendel, a professor at the University of Applied Sciences & Arts Northwestern Switzerland who specializes in machine ethics.
Biohacking raises a host of ethical issues, particularly about data protection and cybersecurity as virtually every tech gadget risks being hacked or manipulated. And implants can even become cyberweapons, with the potential to send malicious links to others. “You can switch off and put away an infected smartphone, but you can’t do that with an implant,” says Friedemann Ebelt, an activist with Digitalcourage, a German data privacy and internet rights group.
Those safety and privacy concerns haven’t stopped some businesses from embracing biohacks
Tesla Inc. founder Elon Musk, who says people must become cyborgs to stay relevant, has raised at least $27 million for Neuralink Corp., a startup developing brain-computer interfaces. Neuralink is planning an announcement that’s “better than probably anyone thinks is possible,” the ever-self-promotional Musk said in a Sept. 7 video podcast where he was seen smoking marijuana. And last year, Three Square Market, a company in Wisconsin that makes self-service kiosks for office break rooms, asked its 200 employees if they’d be interested in getting chipped. More than 90 said yes, and they now use the implants to enter the building, unlock computers, and buy snacks from the company’s vending machines.
Digiwell’s microchip implants run from $40 to $250, and Kramer charges $30 to inject them, either in his Hamburg office or while traveling (he did Geronimo’s implant in the lobby of a Berlin hotel). His clients include a lawyer who wants access to confidential files without remembering a password, a teen with no arms who uses a chip in her foot to open doors, and an elderly man with Parkinson’s disease who once collapsed in front of his house after trying for two hours to get his key into the lock. He now uses a chip in his hand to open the door.
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