It would be a really cool thing if I could register my ID as officially a cyborg.
As well. I think it’d be extremely important that this become the beginning of Cyborg rights. That we have protections to prevent abuse in the future.
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I dunno how big it is, but would HAI theoretically be able to act as a legal supporter of this niche?
This is 100% showing ignorance btw, apologies.
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One man was actually able to do this - Neil Harbisson was allowed to wear his cyborg “eye” antenna on the photo for his passport and was officially recognized as a cyborg by a government. Still quite a difference to an implanted chip, but hey, it’s possible at least 
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I’m not too sure about that. It’s kind of like the few people who managed to get their ID photos taken with a colander on their head, on the grounds that it’s a protected religious headgear (pastafarian). Sure they’re right, and sure they point out the absurdity of legally protecting anything religious. But at the end of the day, the reality is that most people view them as idiots who waste everybody’s time over pointless technicalities.
I think it really depends on where all that stuff is going… It might be good to have a legally accepted base to work on, so to say. I can only compare this to bodymods, for there are currently several cases around the world, where the more unusual stuff (implants, tongue splitting etc…) gets banned, people actually are going to jail for doing this (to customers who were satisfied with everything, not because something went wrong!), so it might be good to have laws that simply say that all that stuff is okay, as it enhances your body - either funcional or aesthetical.
It might be just another aspect of body autonomy, in a way, and I would definitely support that.
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Still salty over how BBC did Samppa dirty like that.
Have to research that, the case I was referring to was Dr. Evil in Great Britain… the judges said that it was “not in public interest that a person could wound another for no good reason”… goddamn idiots. He did extreme stuff, but he did nothing wrong (meaning, no drama or infections or whatever)
The BBC basically had a journalist pose as someone interested in a split, then crammed all kinds of recording devices in/on themselves to show that he was using anesthetic illegally.
Sigh. Makes me pretty sad / angry… things like these should be allowed if hygiene etc. are fine. It’s okay to modify your body to have silly great breasts, but not a split tongue… morons.
Simply let the government take care that the studios and procedures are clean, that the people there know what they’re doing, and everything would be fine.
I don’t know if those damned journalists even consider what amount of damage they’re inflicting, to single people and the scene as a whole…
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Couldn’t have happened to a more fitting person if you ask me (don’t ask). Suffice to say, he’s not a “friend of Dangerous Things”. After a protracted dispute with him because he wanted exclusive rights to be the only artist to sell or work with the m31 magnet (before failures took them off the market), he ended things by telling me “Biohackers are trash and should stay out of our industry.”
I’ve not spoken to him since.
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Personal differences set aside, such crappy “journalism” deals a lot of damage to the whole bodymod-scene, and, since people in politics don’t differentiate a lot in areas they don’t know anything about, it might as well deal damage to biohacking and everything remotely connected…
It’s absolutely okay and maybe understandable, that you don’t like that guy (I won’t judge, for I don’t have enough infos for that^^), but still, it would be far better for everyone to stick together and build some kind of lobby for all aspects of body autonomy - just my humble opinion 
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Not surprised, I hear he’s got history with just about everyone in the industry, it seems. It was less the person it happened to than the way it happened in general. Similar the way Vice handled the way they pushed out Naomi Wu’s personal shit after explicitly saying they wouldn’t.
It was more of a “Media using our community for ‘edgy’ stories”, rather than normalizing the community type of frustration.
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I see no problem with this. He is not allowed to use anaesthetic, as he’s not trained (no matter how he represents himself as gods gift to body mods… At least he must think he’s that with the prices he charges).
He was the one breaking the rules - can’t get mad at the people who proved it.
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Problem is, there is no way for a bodymod artist to even get a training in this. So maybe they should just put up classes where the basics of simple, subdermal anaesthetics can be learned, the side effects, problems that may arise, all that stuff, with a nice little certificate. Maybe one that you have to repeat every two years or whatever. Because some bodymods are hardly possible without anaesthetics… and since no “officially licensed” doctor will do them, we all go to bodymod artists. Which is fine for me, I trust them a lot more, but there has to be a way for them to do their work outside that “legally grey” area.
Doing so to make people more happy with the way they look, in a sterile and safe environment (yeah, and to earn money fur sure). Sounds okay for me.
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I personally have had run-ins with Sampaa and don’t like him much - he doesn’t like biohackers as we do our own things.
This of course isn’t official advice, or standing of anyone here but me.
The rules might suck, but he’s still under obligation to follow them.
I don’t know him personally - from what I have read, he has quit a big ego, and I guess there are several people having their problems with him… but again, I won’t judge that, got too little info about all that.
But nevertheless, he seems to make a good job…
Biohacking is sometimes regarded as “unprofessional” in parts of the bodymod-scene, simply because several procedures bear a lot of similarity to the way the bodymod-scene was about 20, 30 years ago - self-implantation, not-exactly-sterile environments, people implanting others in their living rooms. And when something goes wrong, it always has an effect on both scenes, so that’s a problem…
Personally, I would be happy to see the biohacking-scene profit from the experiences the bodymod-scene already made some decades ago
Again, guess we should all work together in a better way…
And to that point - I’m really curious how anyone in the UK is going to get a flexNeXT implanted without any anaesthetic… might be a tough thing, I guess
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……and plenty of it.
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The rule isn’t that there’s no anaesthetic. It’s that someone who isn’t a doctor can’t inject you with it. A topical cream is okay. You can also inject yourself with anaesthetic as I understand it (but this is not a representation of advice)
In the UK, I dunno. But here in Finland, yours truly will be doing exactly that in a little over a month. I’ll let you know if I survive 
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