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Quantizing Humans And Tracking Supermen - RFID Chips Go Cyborg April 11, 2006

In a recent episode of Smallville, the TV show about young Clark Kent before he becomes Superman, Chloe and Clark are trying to find Lana Lang, who’s developed a deadly addiction to a drug made from Kryptonite. Chloe goes on about how she can find Lana if Lana is carrying her student id card. According to her, new college student id cards have tracking enabled.

I’m assuming that they’re talking RFID chips, and the show is of course fiction, but this is the first I’ve heard of such use of student id cards. Imagine, if you’re a parent, you could keep tabs on all the drinking establishments that your kids are spending your hard-earned bucks at.

But don’t fret. If you don’t have kids to track or are not yourself in college, you can still participate: insert an RFID chip into your body, similar to the chips our household pets have.

Before RFID chips, tracking humans was a difficult task. But these chips have allowed us to quantize individual human beings, making it relatively simple to track people. And some idiots are eating it up.

Canadian Amal Graafstra of txtGroups is one of a very small handful of people around the world, whose numbers include an American police chief, that have inserted an RFID chip into the webbed space between thumb and forefinger. In the Daily Planet (Discovery TV show) video that I saw, Amal seems like a rather down-to-earth sort. Which makes me wonder why he went all cyborg and inserted not one but two RFID chips - one per hand.

He claims that he inserted the first chip to reduce the need to carry around a large keyring. The second chip he implanted because it had a bit more range than the first. Excuse me but how lazy do you have to be to go through the discomfort of having a little tube of irritating plastic inserted into your hand? And do you really want to make it easy for anyone with an RFID reader to be able to track your whereabouts? I don’t buy the bullsh*t comment that if you aren’t doing anything bad, you shouldn’t worry about being tracked. Or maybe I’m just old-fashioned. All I ever did to my body was pierce my ear, get a tattoo, and shave a company logo onto the back of my head.

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