A Doge in Every Wallet, a Chip in Every Arm

The spectres of dystopia are once again being raised in popular consciousness, though the question remains, have they ever subsided?

With the recent successful Neuralink implant in the brain of an unnamed patient who was later able to play chess using only the mind, seemingly every Elon Musk fan and techno-optimist is onboard for a new paradigm. Yet, so jarring is the new development that even the mainstream is raising the question that many have forgot how to ask, where do autonomy and freedom begin and end? Not only does a chip in everyone’s arm pose basic questions of who decides (who controls the information embedded in the chips, who benefits from such a scheme, and so on) and what are the ethics behind a possible universal chipping program and how will they change in time? But on the table may in fact be a deeper question regarding the changing nature of capitalism itself. Does a universal chipping program undermine the very thing on which much of what the chip represents is built (ie: personal autonomy and freedom, a new burgeoning economic driver, another horizon for capitalist enterprise, an industrial boon to corporations that will produce the chips and to the medical industry, etc)?

One is tempted to say no, because historically capitalism has allowed for a plurality of personal, political, social and economic stances. Capitalism allows even for a plurality of philosophical stances that are directly opposed to capitalism itself, because it is capable, adept and uniquely suited toward absorbing and transmuting opposing ideas to appear as capitalism’s own products. As a coherent ideology, it can only be undermined from within, in other words, by going too far. The problem here is that there is absolutely no way to actually know when capitalism has gone too far and why labels like ‘late stage capitalism’ offer no more political viability or means of resistance than a bumper sticker.

Universal chipping is probably still not an instance where capitalism has gone too far, but it does seem like one of the essential steps toward a fundamental mutation of its ideology. We may be standing at the proverbial Rubicon, the threshold beyond which there is no turning back. But it does beg the question, is it simply a matter of time?

When the Patriot Act indirectly established the Department of Homeland Security through the Homeland Security Act in 2003, the liberally-oriented public reacted with revulsion. The Patriot Act and the DHS expanded and entrenched the security state, tightened border control, and initiated a mass surveillance program through the expansion of cyber security protocols and the lifting of restrictions on domestic spying, counterterrorism and counterintelligence practices. The public felt these changes instantly by directly facing increased security measures by the TSA at airports and border crossings, but also by the preemptive offensive measures the Bush administration took in Afghanistan and Iraq. The result? An aura of suspicion blanketed (not just) Western society.

During the Bush years the DHS initiated a program of citizen surveillance and wiretapping through the collection of sensitive personal information, collected in ever-expanding dossiers made available to every government agency at the drop of a hat. Corporations followed suit. Pressured by the FBI and CIA to hand over painstakingly accumulated information, data collection became big business, as the same corporations found a way to monetize their efforts. Such unprecedented curtailing of basic human rights, as the topic was continually presented by mainstream media pundits, could only happen in despotic nations run by totalitarian regimes. Liberal democratic states could never, and would never, impose such limitations on its citizens, because … reasons. Almost twenty five years later the DHS is conducting home raids throughout the US and the TSA cattle corral is virtually unchanged. We still take off our shoes, get X rayed, and patted down. The sight of militarized police and the National Guard in the streets and subways of American cities is increasingly more common. Of course there were some changes. We no longer have to put tiny liquids in tiny Ziploc bags, occasionally we can leave electronics inside our bags, but most importantly, zealous conspiracists are no longer making a scene about being touched inappropriately by the TSA.

When mass surveillance was a hot topic in the post 9/11 era, visions of dystopia were never too far away. Mass surveillance reeked of 1984 and had no place in a free society. This was the story that brought many conservatives and liberals together. Mainstream media networks like CNN, MSNBC, FOX News and Air America, along with publishing giants NY Times and the WSJ ran a double campaign aimed at appealing to their audiences with pathos and patronizing deferentialty, while their sympathies were clearly moving in the direction of the security state. All of these networks were later seen selling spot ads for personal security surveillance systems. Reality shows rolled out about the first generation of helicopter parents who spied on their children using cameras and computer software. The era of surveillance normalization had begun.

Security was the hottest industry in the early 2000s, metaphorically, realistically and spiritually. Corporations and governments rushed in to fill the demand for exponentially increasing feelings of insecurity among the population, despite the evidence that crime rates and criminality have been on the decline for the better part of the 1990s and early 2000s. Nine eleven, the era-defining event, was enough to transform not just an entire industry, or an entire country, but the whole capitalist enterprise. Today just about everyone knows that their devices are spying on them, their smartphones listen in on their conversations, Roombas map their homes and Alexas locate precisely where they are in that home just by the volume levels of their voice. Most people are fine with it. They voted with their wallets and invited big tech into their lives in ways that would have terrified them only a generation ago.

But corporations have become very adept at exploiting the shifting capitalist paradigm, often with the support of the federal government. They use progressive and conservative tendencies to roll out products and content in increasingly devious ways, couching sales pitches in appeals to common sense, self-improvement, security, and the greater good, softening the edges of very unpopular ideas and policies.

Is it surprising then to find out that insurance companies use data collected from Teslas, Chevy Bolts and other EVs to raise premiums or cancel policies of drivers based on their performance and behavior? Depending on what side of the technological divide one stands, the answer is probably no. Corporations use technology in ways that would put to shame any 20^th century Eastern European totalitarian state, but because what they do is under the auspices of good business practices, preserved and protected by law and sanctified by the ideological matrix of capitalism (what is good for the company is good for the investor, profit motive isn’t the same as state coercion, and so on), these practices tend to become background noise after the initial public outcry has dissipated. In the case of EVs what is recorded isn’t public knowledge per se, but it is de facto sold as public-private information. Drivers may request to see the data collected about them through the data broker LexisNexis, which reveals how many trips were taken, “start and end times, the distance driven and an accounting of any speeding, hard braking or sharp accelerations”.  The collection of this sensitive data is rebranded through the automakers’ apps like Smart Driver, which gamify the users’ driving experience in order to ‘help’ them “become a better driver”.

The appeal of universal chipping is fairly obvious, less so their unintended consequences. The obvious benefits are to people who can literally purchase a second chance at life, the blind will be able to see again, the deaf will hear, and chip implants will one day aid in remedying a variety of disabilities stemming from serious congenital diseases or accidents. Security benefits to the general public include very desirable things, such as the elimination of identity theft (with a chip implant authorities will know you are you and no one else) and crime in general (everyone will be tracked everywhere, all the time). Society will benefit from targeted health benefits (chips will know your pulse, blood pressure, body temperature, etc).

Who in their right mind would not want to eliminate crime in such a radically innovative way? Who among us would deny feelings of security to others? Yet this is precisely where we ought to be concerned as ethics and morality plays enter the fray. As we’ve already witnessed during the pandemic, a universal imposition of a treatment for various social threats and ills based on coercion is almost certainly doomed to failure and is always the wrong ethical position if notions of autonomy, freedom and self-determination are at stake. If Western liberal democracies (whatever is left of them) are to remain liberal democracies, these questions ought to be resolved through anything else but the coercive capacities of corporate and state power.  

The imposition of mass surveillance and the dawning of smart cities with millions of CCTV cameras did not stop crime, it simply made it more visible. Criminals are caught in the act on cameras all the time, yet this does not tend to hinder their crimes or often does not result in their prosecution. Every day we can watch new brazen and lurid violence by the drug cartels who murder and kidnap people in broad daylight. We witness countless horrors, human rights violations, and wars crimes (Haiti, Gaza, Yemen, Ukraine). Cameras do not stop crime, they record it. And to add insult to injury, in the changed post-nine eleven capitalist paradigm the recorded evidence often favors the perpetrator. Recorded evidence can be manipulated and edited, narratives can be changed and war crimes redefined in favorable language as humanitarian interventions (the greatest ‘innovation’ of the Bush war era). With the advent of AI and the smartphone, the camera has thus in recent memory been reinterpreted, changed from the objective tool it once was, to the subjective element it plays in daily communication and interactions. It has become difficult to distinguish fantasy from reality. Artists of the early 20^th century knew full well the subjective and terrifying potential of technology, when they experimented with photography, changing the camera from a simple yet powerful recording device to an object of creative experimentation and manipulation. The general public is slowly catching up.

So the question really ought to concern us, would the imposition of a universal chipping program’s negative consequences outweigh its positive benefits, such as potentially eliminating crime? I’m here an absolute pessimist. Not only would such a scheme not eliminate crime, it would possibly make crime easier to commit. This state of affairs would depend entirely on the working definition of crime itself. We’ve seen over and over that shifting social norms and expectations are exploited by corporations, governments, opportunistic politicians and influential individuals. Criminality is subject to the same shifting opinions, norms and expectations. What constitutes a crime is as much a result of public opinion as it is of the courts and the judicial system. Crime and law are constantly shifting horizons.  This is just as often a good thing as it is a bad thing. For example, decades of activism led to the legalization of cannabis in many United States, Canada and large swaths of the European Union. But it was another sort of activism and capitalist opportunism that led to its criminalization in the first place. The argument could be made that it was also capitalist opportunism that ultimately resulted in the legalization of cannabis, including the most recent shift in Federal law that is set to move cannabis from a Schedule 1 controlled substance, where it currently sits alongside Heroin, Fentanyl and Cocaine, to Schedule 3.

The economic opportunity behind chip implants is evident. The ethical concern over them less so. If a microchip can be surgically implanted, then logically it can be surgically removed. With the imposition of a mandatory universal chipping scheme, there would inevitably rise an entire industry of medical ‘professionals’ who could sell their expertise in removing these devices. Chip removal services would surely be used by organized crime syndicates, cartels, and yes, governments, corporations, and the very wealthy clientele who have shown they do not wish to participate and share in society’s travails, leaving the common person in the lurch yet again. Entire populations would go ‘dark’ upon the imposition of such a government mandate. If a microchip is implanted in the arm for example, there is nothing stopping a criminal from cutting it out of a victims arm. The potential for a different sort of violence is always included in every social innovation.

In wrapping up I’d like to exit the stage with more questions rather than myopic visions and half-hearted conclusions. Questions of criminality and who decides if all of us ought to be micro-chipped, can be answered briefly, because only governments have the authority to define and combat crime, and only governments may impose and enforce such a program. Whether in a free or an authoritarian society, citizens tend to act on their personal and familial beliefs first (more on this in a separate essay), before they act on the mandates of their governments. This will present a unique problem for the agencies and ruling bodies that wish to impose these kinds of blanket policies, because the question of universal chipping raises not only questions of ethics, it also resurrects the specters of slavery. The counterargument that people have been micro-chipping their pets for decades, reopens the conversation of humans as property, a conversation seemingly put to rest with the dismantling slavery in the United States.  A pet owner who microchips their dog does so because the dog is effectively property of that owner, but also because they love their pet. Can we ascribe the emotion of ‘love’ as a qualifying reason for the activity of the state who wishes to impose a universal chipping program? Does the micro-chipped human become the property of the state, or of the corporation? Are we willing to submit ourselves to the whims of state and corporate power through the direct control of our bodies? And how do ideological notions of trans-humanism lead directly down the path of a new form of the totalitarian state?

It could be that none of these questions will matter in the end. We can expect a change in attitude toward even the most regressive policies after enough time has passed, meaning that there will be a time, if implant chipping becomes truly universal, when most people will simply accept and forget. It took a concerned citizen to eventually find out what was already happening behind the scenes in the EV data collection scandal. We can expect that these types of micro-chips will one day run in the background like the algorithms that influence our online existence. For better or worse (but mostly worse), we will accept to love the meager personal benefits of implanted micro-chips, learn to live with their negative social consequences and to ignore the massive increase of state and corporate power in our daily lives. And that, my friends, is the scariest thing of all.

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