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him that an electronic fob unlocks my apart-
ment building in Paris. “Yeah? Let’s see it,” he
says. When I fish it out of my purse, he swipes
it across the near-field-communication (NFC)
reader embedded in his smartphone and then
holds up the screen to show the string of data
that unlocks both sets of doors to my build-
ing, 950 miles away. “I can clone this in five
minutes,” he says.
Biochips are far more secure in some ways.
To break into Dromi’s nearby house, for ex-
ample, you would need to physically drag him
there, demand to know where on his body his
biochip is implanted, and move his hand across
the NFC reader mounted on the doorpost.in his hand, and who sits on the advisory board of Hack for
Sweden, the Swedish government’s organization aiming to embed
big data into all the country’s public services. I saw that effort in
action when I hopped aboard a Gothenburg-bound train with
Österlund from the seaside city of Helsingborg, where Biohax is
based. As the conductor came down the aisle, Österlund held out
his hand, in which his ticket was embedded on his biochip. She
swiped it without a thought: Sweden’s entire national rail network
is now biochip-capable. So too are many of the 172 gyms run by
Nordic Wellness in Sweden, where gym members and staff can
open the secure turnstiles and lockers with their hands and view
their exercise profiles on monitors. Of course, electronic cards do
the same thing in gyms around the world, but the biochip enables
members to exercise without carrying anything on them.
Over espressos in Gothenburg, Dromi tells me he is convinced
that millions of people will eventually have microchips in their
bodies—perhaps in the near future—simply because it makes
sense, at the very least in order to store their passwords and make
keys redundant. Plus, he says, it is more secure than the items we
currently lug around in our wallets and purses. I protest, telling
GUINEA PIGS: Claes Radojewski and Annie Kjellson
got “chipped,” fulfilling longtime dreams of being on
t he c u t t ing edge o f t echnolog y. “ In S w eden w e lik e t o
use new tech in our daily lives,” says Radojewski.