I have been having some conversations with people outside the biohacking sphere recently which have highlighted the lack of information about our community and it’s makeup. I want to start making more information about biohackers as a group publicly available, to help get the general public more comfortable with the idea of improving your body through technology.
With that goal in mind, I would appreciate your assistance with this poll. How many implants do you currently have, and how many implants have you ever had? It doesn’t have to be implants purchased from Dangerous Things, in fact I would include medical and aesthetic implants. Anything inorganic that you have had intentionally inserted under your skin. I’m not fishing for big numbers here, just data points. A fledgeling biohacker with one implant is just as valid as a veteran grinder with a dozen.
How many implants do you currently have?
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How many implants have you ever had?
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Thanks for your participation!
EDIT: Wow, Discourse maxes out at 20 options. Okay, well if you select 20 for either option I will interpret it as 20+
I marked one and one (single chip), but I’ve got a spring / clip thing left in from a gall bladder removal surgery. Don’t know if you want to count that kind of purely medical stuff.
Pacemakers?
Artificial lenses? (in eyes)
Artery stints?
I’m interested in counting all of the things you listed. They are all implants. I would imagine the “average” person who is skeptical about biohacking has more inorganic material in their makeup than they think.
It would be very difficult for anyone to be sure of a “No” answer to that question because the future is uncertain. If I’m polling a group like this, I’m just going to assume most of the respondents are planning to get more or do not know.
Discourse has a very basic poll functionality. If there are more questions that need to be asked, I would do them in another poll, probably using a anonymous polling service that could break down the data.
My primary goal here is to get a few hundred responses to these questions from biohackers, so that we can get a reliable average. Then I’ll run the same poll among non-biohackers and we’ll see how different the averages are (spoiler, probably not much)
I’m interested in counting all of the things you listed. They are all implants.
My definition of an implant is whatever is fully inside your body (hence the “in” root in “implant”), that can’t get there by natural ways, that’s identifiably man-made when your body is done rotting away in your grave.
I already have a Next chip implanted and I’ve got a vivokey spark on hold at the moment as I’m waiting to see what developments there are in the pipeline with it.
That’s really cool @JennyMcLane, we’re at 14 implants & running out of places to put them.
We have 1 magnet, 2 xGlo, and the other 11 are various RF chips (xEM, xNT, xM1, xBT).
We still want to get a couple xLEDs in as well. We have an HF here that we haven’t installed yet, but want to get an LF as well when they’re available.
May I ask where you installed them all? I only have two, but I’m looking for the cleverest and safest place to implant my third outside of the webbing between my thumbs and my index fingers. I have a couple of ideas, but I’d love to know where serial implanters have implanted theirs before deciding.
Note (*): Our first xEM got scrambled and is currently unusable, and one xM1 has failed completely. We haven’t removed either of these dead chips yet.
There’s actually lots of room on the forearms for implants, but we have microdermal piercings on the topside of both, which limits our space for more implants there. Inside of the forearms isn’t too bad if you avoid veins and stuff that’s in there.
p.s. couldn’t remember them all, had to check our notes lmao.
Thanks for the details! It confirms that using inter-metacarpal spaces is a usable (and used) option. Side question: have you ever sustained heavy enough blows to the back on your hand(s) that made you worry for the integrity of the implants?
I wouldn’t do it on the blade of my hand though: I use it far too often to hit things forcefully, being that I spend a lot of time working with machine tools. For somebody like me, it sounds far too unsafe.
I have the xG3 between my 4th and 5th. Well it was there. Now it’s between 3rd and 4th, almost on top of the 3rd. It’s been slowly migrating. Mine has created a pocket that will travel from my knuckle to my wrist. It never settled down. I attribute this to sticking my hand in my front left pocket to get my phone out. The edge of the pants pocket would constantly apply force for it to move towards my wrist as I put my hand in, and towards my knuckles as I took it out.
While I don’t fear it breaking, I have had a few times that force or impact was applied to the back of my hand which resulted in slight discomfort.
I suspect a 2mm implant would have a better chance of encapsulating. Also there isn’t much “meat” on the back of my hands so not much to work with.
I would not put anything blade edge for the same reason you list. I’d end up hitting something not remembering about the implant but plenty of people do it successfully.
