Going Bionic, at Home

Transcending the Human, DIY Style

Lepht Anonym wants everyone to know the door to transcending normal human capabilities is no farther away than your own kitchen. It’s just going to hurt like a sonofabitch.

Anonym is a biohacker, a woman who has spent the last several years learning how to extend her own senses by putting tiny magnets and other electronic devices under her own skin, allowing her to feel electromagnetic fields, or — if her latest project works — even magnetic north.

Since doctors won’t help her, she does it in her own apartment, sterilizing her equipment (needles, scalpels, vegetable peelers) with vodka. Good anesthetic is largely impossible to buy, so she screams a little, and sometimes passes out. But it’s worth it, for what’s on the other side.

Kind of a neat idea, but I don't think I could do it. I did cut a wart off myself once.  That was enough.

For decades, transhumanists have argued that science and technology are approaching (or have approached) the point at which humans can take evolution into their own hands. They can transcend limitations of sensation or movement or even lifespan that are purely the accident of evolution. Some thinkers focus strictly on the “post-human” physical body, while others write of evolved social systems, as well.

Can I get X-ray vision, you know, like in the back of the old comics?

An American body-modification artist of a similar mindset has created small metal discs of neodymium metal, coated in gold and silicon, which give off mild electric current when in a electromagnetic field. When inserted under the fingertips, this current stimulates the fingers’ nerve endings, allowing the bearer to literally feel the shape and strength of electromagnetic fields around power cords or electronic devices.

 OK, now that might come in handy for doing electrical work, but it's not as cool as X-ray vision would be.

But it isn’t for everybody, this cutting yourself up in your own kitchen. She’s the first to warn people that it hurts. A lot. Every time, you don’t get used to it. Afterward, people may not be inclined to understand, to put it mildly. (“Avoid normal people,” she warns. “They’re stupid.”)

Well, maybe not stupid, just normal, and content to stay that way.