What is The Upgrade?
Part 2: What is Biohacking?
Biohacking is a relatively new movement, it began sometime in the early 2000s. It draws its ideological heritage from all across the world, with ideas from eastern medicine, to western transhumanist science fiction it’s something that’s hard to treat as one monolithic entity. But over the course of this article, I’ll explain what biohacking means to me, where it came from, and how I got into it.
I generally break biohacking down into three categories, those being implantable technology ( magnet implants, NFC chips, etc), chemical modifications ( nootropics, “smart drugs”, extreme diets, etc), and genetic modifications (genetic engineering, modifying other species, etc). These categories are based around the means used to accomplish projects but as a whole biohacking is sub-movement inside the wider citizen science movement. Generally, it acts with a transhumanist worldview but unlike the main transhumanist movement, biohacking is active it’s all about making things happen now. But it’s an extremely diverse and sometimes self-contradictory movement, I can only speak to what I’ve seen in the space.
If there’s one word that applies to almost all of biohacking it’s fringe. Most biohackers exist on the fringes of more mainstream things. In academia, biohacking is a fringe outcropping of researchers and professors trying to make biology and biohacking more accessible to normal people. In garage biohacking, more commonly known as grinding it was born out of the fringes of society. Trans-transhumanists with a strong emphasis on morphological autonomy, body modification artists with a fascination in technology, and academics who were no longer involved in academia. These are the people that created grinding. These societal outcasts created a whole new community based around their shared interest in pushing the human form to its limits.
Now while there is a significant difference in the stated goals of these two groups, there is a lot of overlap in the methods used by both groups. And there exists an even greater amount of ideological cross-pollination. Generally, there isn’t much personnel overlap although there are certain exceptions like Josiah Zayner who is very much involved in both scenes and is located closer to the grinders than to academia. This brings me to another huge difference between the two major types of biohackers; that being their cultural, and location differences. Most academic biohackers operate out of the Boston area, their generally more heavily affiliated/associated with the bigger biotech firms and are more moderate in their stated goals. While most grinder type biohackers are congregated in the Southwest, with only their garage labs and friends to help them get their projects off the ground, even so, their stated goals are generally much more ambitious and their views generally more extreme.
I got into biohacking the summer after 8th grade I think I heard of it first in a Youtube video on Watchdogs the video game. After that, I put the term into Youtube and clicked the first five videos that popped up. Most of which talked about magnet implants and RFID chips. I was interested in learning more so I put the term into google and started reading up on it. What I found was an active community of people trying to make the future happen right now. The first place I found with active people discussing biohacking was on the biohack.me forums. These forums are very firmly part of the fringe grinder type biohacking. Thus, my first and deepest connections are with this side of the community but as I learned, and traveled I’ve become very familiar with the other sides of the community.
