Microchipping

As King Midas was condemned to turn everything he touched into gold, so capitalist social production relations work to turn all human relations into monetary transactions and all workers into mere machines for the production of surplus value for the capitalist. Given this deep alienation at the heart of capitalist society, it was only a matter of time before the dehumanisation of wage slaves should find its logical expression in their physical cyber-branding.

So the revelation by Swedish company Biohax that British companies are planning to implant its microchips into the hands of its employees should come as no surprise. The Telegraph quotes Jowan Österlund, founder of Biohax and “a professional body piercer, as claiming his company is in talks with a number of legal and financial firms in Britain, including a major financial services firm with ‘hundreds and thousands of employees’, with a view to implanting human chips in their staff. Österlund claims that 4,000 people have already been chipped, mostly in that haven of ‘European values’, Sweden” (see Ellie Zolfagharfard, ‘Major UK companies preparing to microchip employees’, The Telegraph, 10 November 2018).

Not to be outdone, a British firm called BioTeq has already implanted 150 of these chips in Britain, some of them in staff employed by financial and engineering firms. BioTeq is also reported to have implanted them in employees of a bank that was trying out the technology, whilst the chips are also being exported to Europe and Asia. In 2017 Wisconsin tech company Three Square Market became the first in the US to microchip its workers – all on a ‘voluntary’ basis, of course…