The Button Monster: the human microchip

By our guest columnist. 

If you were to receive a letter tomorrow, summoning you by an appropriate Authority, that you must be compulsorily chipped within a week, you are unlikely to have it done unless forced to do so. However, if the process of chipping citizens is taken step by step, the chances of your resistance fading quickly diminish. And therein lies precisely the danger.

The microchip is now a creeping reality that has been used for more than a decade. People are not yet ready, says a trendsetting continent, to chip detainees. This project was called off in the first decade of 2000. Resistance was still too high.

Meanwhile, they do chip patients (with the patient's approval), with the aim of administering drugs drop by drop remotely. Tens of thousands of patients are involved. Furthermore, the media are promoting chipping of Alzheimer's patients, for instance, because the patient often no longer knows his/her name. Through a microchip, name, address, but also other data can be read very easily and efficiently.

This product does not just lend itself to medicine. The chip can also contain data that can then be remotely controlled and read. Behind the scenes, hard work continues. For instance, the PSID microchip is being further developed together with Microsoft Health Vault (Nasdaq listed) and Google Health (Nasdaq listed). This human microchip is, yes you guessed it, also Nasdaq listed. And take note: developments are moving fast! No doubt soon the cost-benefit argument will come up as a selling point to convince people that society has become too expensive and complex to treat everyone adequately. Hospitals are getting bigger and bigger, and therefore much more cumbersome and have more and more people to "process". That takes time and time is money. But that is really nonsense, because you can become a millionaire in a minute, if you were to believe the State Lottery. In the stock market, you can also make a killing. However, others (most of us) work hours, days, months for paltry wages and never get rich.

The government is not sitting still. According to the dog-chipping information site, it will become a legal requirement to chip dog puppies by 2011. In fact, the shelter is already working on this. If you pick up a dog from the shelter, chances are very high that the dog is chipped. Experience shows, says the dog-chip website, that the chip is only the size of a grain of rice and sticks to the skin, so does not float around in the body. You don't see any of it at all. The chip costs about €27.50 and lasts a dog's lifetime. The chip is tamper-proof (we did not know dogs could cheat!), the chip is unique and can be read easily. Salient detail: animal chips are also Nasdaq listed.

It is our Government that legally requires chipping dogs. How long will it be before the Government makes human chipping a legal requirement? After all, the dog trial garden provides our Government with interesting information on feasibility. In case the medical sector does not prove to be an adequate means of collectively chipping citizens, terrorism is surely a good excuse to still legally chip citizens collectively.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the ocean, two states prohibit by law the implantation of a human chip, sensor, transmitter or any other tracking object. It would be fancy if our Government takes responsibility for Dutch citizens and passes the same law as in the above two states. After all, to govern is to foresee. Or would the Government be a (major) shareholder? It should be prohibited by law that all chips for living beings, including related medical components, are listed on the stock exchange. This increases prices and makes Dutch society untreatable and therefore even sicker. Do you know who will soon be pushing the buttons and taking your information?