Image provided by: Melissa Farlow
Much like digital story telling, biohacking is a technological advancement that has built up a more popular stand in these past couple of years. What does it mean though, biohacking? Biohacking is a practice of engineering together biology with the hacker ethic. It encompasses a wide spectrum of practices and movements ranging from “Grinders” who design and install do-it-yourself body-enhancements such as magnetic implants to do-it-yourself biologists who conduct at-home gene sequencing. For those who are currently involved in the process of further developing biohacking, work is being done on barcoding plant DNA and 3D printing organic tissue that will soon make it possible to have organs created on call.
Biohacking to some people can seem rather extreme or quite too extraordinary to comprehend and envision. I’ve always been fascinated by the thought of incorporating the human body with todays technology, but for those in the medical industry they look at biohacking as unethical, and at these early stages of wearable technology, there is only so much we are actually capable of testing and improving on ourselves. Our own human evolution is already struggling to keep up with that of technology as it is. It makes sense for some people to want to evolve along with it, if not for our own evolutionary benefit.
I always come back to saying this but I’m really sure that with the modern thinkings of today’s society, with the added improvement into biohacking and it’s research, wearable technology could be or become the science of optimal living. Most if not all bio-hackers do what they do to they’re bodies because they believe it will assist them to preform at the level they want or expect to. I think what biohacking does is it finally lets us have that control over technology we always yearn for and equalizes it by integrating it into ourselves physically. And with the way that things seem to be progressing in the field, biohacking could possibly become more accessible to everyone in later years to come.
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