In 2012, a young Steve read an article in The Verge about body hacking. He began with an anecdote about a piercing shop in Pittsburgh that implanted neodymium magnets into the fingertips using nothing more than ice cubes as anesthesia. This, to my fifteen year old brain, was the coolest thing in the world.
Of course, my parents forbade me to go to Pittsburgh to have the procedure done, and they were probably right: those magnets get weaker over time, removing your sixth sense and leaving only a scar on your fingers as a memory. But the concept of body modification, of taking this ramshackle bundle of organic matter and making it betterplus ablenever left my mind.
So if someone implants an experimental chip in his hand to act like a car key, I understand. The embedded video below starts at 31 seconds to demonstrate the chip’s function and skips the implantation procedure, which shows a man’s hand being surgically severed to place the microchip inside.
Granted, “experimental” may be overdoing it. The chip is a multipurpose NFC, currently in beta, soon to be a production model. His tester is Brandon Dalaly, a Tesla owner and apparent body modification enthusiast. And while his chip is a new design, he’s far from the first person to implant hardware to control a Tesla into his body.
In 2019, USA Today published a story about software engineer and body modder Amie DD and her chip to open a Tesla. Amie DD’s work predates Dalaly’s beta chip, but takes an alternative approach: The engineer ripped the NFC tag out of the car key card and encapsulated it in a biosecure polymer before implanting it in her arm.
Amie DD worked with a company called VivoKey to make the NFC chip implantable, which led to a product called TeslaFlex that could be bought in the well-known biohacking shop Dangerous Things. But the TeslaFlex had problems: it could only unlock the Tesla, not operate it.
Tesla keys run software called Java Cardwhich is used for secure communications between card and car. So VivoKey went back to the drawing board and developed a new implantable chip capable of running those applets. The result? VivoKey Apex: The same beta chip that Dalaly installed and demonstrated.
Sure, using the back of your hand to unlock your car isn’t much more convenient than a key or a phone. But the idea of extending the human body, making it capable of things far beyond what evolution or biology can achieve, remains incredibly interesting and appealing. If we go to living in a cyberpunk dystopiawe can also get the fun benefits of this high technology.