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Perched on a stool in one of the piercing
rooms, Österlund jams the needle into Claes
Radojewski and pulls it out again, leaving
a one-kilobyte microchip inside him, in the
fleshy part between his left thumb and index
finger. In a matter of seconds, Radojewski has
become a trailblazing biohacker, much to his
own surprise. “I have never even been inside
a tattoo parlor,” says the program manager
for MobilityXLab, an innovation center in
Gothenburg for the auto industry, run in
partnership with Ericsson, Volvo, and others.
“My girlfriend asked if it was some kind of
crisis because I was turning 30 soon.” In fact,
Radojewski says he has wanted a biochip
since he learned of the technology a few years
ago: “In Sweden, we like to use new tech in
our daily lives.”
Österlund, the needle-wielding entrepre-
neur, is convinced that there are millions more
around the world who will soon want chips im-
planted into their bodies. As proof, he points to
his Facebook messaging app, which is jammed
with unbidden requests every day from people
as far away as Australia and Mexico. He also
receives emails, he says, from curious investors
“on every continent except Antarctica.”
The enthusiasm of the curious notwith-
standing, Österlund’s progress has been slow.
He began the company in 2013, committing
to it full-time only in 2016, and its revenues
remain minimal. At the moment, he says, “I
get by. I am not getting rich.” Will he, I ask?
“Yeah. Oh, yeah,” he says. In fact, Österlund,
38, could be at the groundswell of a big wave,
in which more and more of the functions we
perform on our external devices will shift to
implants that we insert into ourselves. In
November, a report by MarketsandMar-
kets Research in India estimated that the
global biochip market would be worth about
$17.75 billion by 2020. And earlier in 2018,
no less a futurist than Elon Musk announced
he was backing a California company called
Neuralink, which would implant electrodes in
the brain to monitor thoughts.
Österlund’s Biohax is already making
progress on a small scale. It has “chipped”
more than 4,000 people in Sweden as well as
others across Europe. Though many biochip
projects are focused on health uses like heart-
rate or blood-sugar monitoring, Österlund is
so far marketing his chips to people with no
medical ailments. Applications range from
making purchases to opening locks to passing
through security barriers—anything, really,
that we’re already doing with chips on plasticDOWN A NARROW SIDE STREETin the Swedish
city of Gothenburg sits the Barbarella piercing
parlor, a regular haunt for locals who decorate
their bodies with piercings and tattoos, and
which claims to offer the area’s finest collec-
tion of ear discs and nose rings. But on a frigid
evening in November, the shop is the setting
for a very different kind of body enhancement:
biochips. As darkness falls on the port town
of nearly 600,000 people, Jowan Österlund
wanders in, wearing a baseball cap and T-shirt,
to meet two new clients for his small startup,
Biohax International. From his backpack, he
pulls plastic-wrapped syringes, each containing
a tiny, dark microchip that is barely visible from
the outside. Inside the unassuming package is
Österlund’s prized product, a window into what
today is a fringe tech obsession but which, he
believes, will one day be a giant industry. “You
are creating an entirely new type of behavior and
entirely new types of data that will be massively
more valuable than what we have now,” Öster-
lund says. “It is kind of a moonshot. But in the
long run, this is what is going to happen.”
BIOHACKING