Esquire met with a British biohacker who wants to give humanity a new feeling with the help of a chip.
On December 14, 2016, two people stood in a London apartment, bending over a tiny - the size of a postage stamp - a microchip wrapped in biocompatible silicone.
The device did not work. Rather, it worked, but somehow out of place: on the table, in pockets, and even in the hands, it functioned properly. And where it was originally conceived - being attached to the human body - no. The founders of Cyborg Nest implanted thin titanium rods under their skin in the center of their breasts a month ago.
In a couple of hours, they were to go to St. Barnabas House, a mansion in downtown Soho that was taken over by a charity to help the homeless in 2013. An unusual audience gathered in the interiors of the Rococo era - journalists, futurologists, biohackers and simply lovers of body modification. They were waiting for the appearance of those two - people who managed to expand the range of feelings and methods of perception available to them with the help of technology.
Liviu Babić, one of the founders of Cyborg Nest, connected the device to a smartphone and re-calibrated the sensor, and then attached it to the pins protruding above the skin surface. He began to rotate around his axis, and at the moment when his body turned strictly to the north, he felt a vibration in the chest area. It worked. It was possible to run in Soho for a presentation. It is believed that people learn about the world around them with the help of five senses. Sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste - we learn this list by heart in early school. This is not so: in fact, there are more senses and organs of perception. For example, we have thermal perception - the body's ability to perceive heat. Or proprioception - a sense of the position of the body in space. But the feelings of animals are much more varied:whales and dolphins navigate in space using echolocation, sharks boast electroreception, and bees see the world around them in ultraviolet light. “We perceive only a small part of reality,” Liviu Babic explains to me a month and a half after the London presentation, sitting in front of a laptop at home. - We do not see an infinite number of colors around us, do not hear all sounds, do not feel magnetic fields - in general, we miss a lot of information that surrounds us everywhere. Even in this very room. To correct this injustice and allow people to feel the invisible, my colleagues and I founded Cyborg Nest. We want to merge with nature, explore it much better than was possible before. And do it with the help of new technologies. "“We perceive only a small part of reality,” Liviu Babic explains to me a month and a half after the London presentation, sitting in front of a laptop at home. - We do not see an infinite number of colors around us, do not hear all sounds, do not feel magnetic fields - in general, we miss a lot of information that surrounds us everywhere. Even in this very room. To correct this injustice and allow people to feel the invisible, my colleagues and I founded Cyborg Nest. We want to merge with nature, explore it much better than was possible before. And do it with the help of new technologies. "“We perceive only a small part of reality,” Liviu Babic explains to me a month and a half after the London presentation, sitting in front of a laptop at home. - We do not see an infinite number of colors around us, do not hear all sounds, do not feel magnetic fields - in general, we miss a lot of information that surrounds us everywhere. Even in this very room. To correct this injustice and allow people to feel the invisible, my colleagues and I founded Cyborg Nest. We want to merge with nature, explore it much better than was possible before. And do it with the help of new technologies. "we do not feel magnetic fields - in general, we miss a lot of information that surrounds us everywhere. Even in this very room. To correct this injustice and allow people to feel the invisible, my colleagues and I founded Cyborg Nest. We want to merge with nature, explore it much better than was possible before. And do it with the help of new technologies. "we do not feel magnetic fields - in general, we miss a lot of information that surrounds us everywhere. Even in this very room. To correct this injustice and allow people to feel the invisible, my colleagues and I founded Cyborg Nest. We want to merge with nature, explore it much better than was possible before. And do it with the help of new technologies."
Talking to Babich, I understand that this is not an ordinary person in front of me. If you try to find some information about him that relates to the period until 2015, when he just started to get involved in biohacking, you are unlikely to succeed much. Liviu Babic is used to leaving no traces behind. In any case, under my real name. For five whole years, his life resembled a Hollywood action-packed film: surveillance at night, playing cat and mouse with the intelligence services of authoritarian African states, constant risk and a miniature spy camera in his pocket. All this time he worked for the human rights organization Videre, founded in 2008 by two Israelis. Their goal was to collect video evidence of human rights violations around the world: Videre agents flew to authoritarian states and recruited volunteers there,willing to risk their lives to document evidence of repression and military arbitrariness.
Working for an NGO, Babich remained a true technology fanatic. He dismantled Chinese spy cameras for parts in order to develop his own devices: Wired magazine, in 2013, wrote about the activities of Videre (of course, all the heroes of the material were hidden behind pseudonyms), said that once Babich made a spy crucifix with an inconspicuous lens in the center of the cross.
In a sense, it is logical that work in a human rights organization, humanism and passion for technology eventually led Babich to open Cyborg Nest.
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The first (and so far only) Cyborg Nest product is called North Sense - a chip hidden behind a layer of non-irritating silicone, plus a titanium mount system. In a sense, this is a very simple thing: no buttons, lights or speakers - just a USB connector for charging the battery. North Sense does not connect to the Internet, does not save data about your movements, does not speak to you - the device only vibrates when you turn your body to the north. “It is only governed by nature itself,” Babich notes, laughing.
In general, my interlocutor is not the first or even the second cyborg on planet Earth. One of Babich's partners in Cyborg Nest is Briton Nih Harbisson, a famous man with an antenna on his head, suffering from a rare form of color blindness. A camera at the end of the antenna converts the colors of the surrounding world into sound vibrations and transmits it through the bones of the skull to the inner ear. Thus, Harbisson not only can distinguish colors, but also hear them - a very exotic skill. His girlfriend, Catalan dancer Moon Ribas, implanted a seismic sensor in her elbow area back in 2013, allowing her to feel earthquakes in different parts of the planet. Companies like BeBionic have been developing and selling advanced thought-guided bioprostheses for disabled people for a decade.and hundreds and even thousands of cyberpunk fans around the world are implanting special NFC chips, sealed in compatible glass capsules, under their skin.
But Liviu Babić refuses to put North Sense on a par with bioprostheses, drawing a clear line between mind change and body modification. “We wanted to give the user a new experience and focus on a new, additional feeling, but without the need to physically change the body. And it worked. Our product is not a tool that can be used for any practical purpose, such as navigation. It is a real feeling that shapes our perception of reality in the most magical way. When you walk on the ground, you don't feel exactly how your foot touches the ground? In any case, do not pay any attention to these sensations. This information is processed by your brain in the background so you can focus on more important things. It's the same here: I've been wearing North Sense on my chest every day for over a month.and my perception of reality has become much stronger."
The founders of Cyborg Nest are confident that we are at the beginning of a new era, when technology will allow us to understand the world much better and live in much greater harmony with it. “Until December 2014, there were only two people in the world with additional organs - Neil Harbisson and Moon Ribas. Now I and my partner Scott Cohen have joined them: the number of such people has increased by 100%! " - Babich laughs. But in the coming months there will be many more such people. According to pre-orders, the North Sense kit, worth $ 350, was sold out in the amount of more than 250 copies: it seems that such figures were not expected by the inventors themselves. “We had no idea what the demand would be,” admits Liviu Babic. - But now we see how the device is ordered by people of all ages and professions - lawyers, accountants, futurologists, astronauts (!) And representatives of the information technology world. We have an impressive proportion of customers over 40 and 50. Look at my partner Scott Cohen: he is 50 and has never had any tattoos or piercings. But he has been walking for a month and a half with a "feeling of the north," and in complete delight."
There is such a popular question that children, geeks and fans of high-budget superhero blockbusters especially like to ask each other: "What superpower would you like to have?" If Cyborg Nest succeeds, then many of us will be able to answer this question in a new way: "I already have one."