Today in Distopian Futures News...

November 22, 2018 3:37 PM

Not satisfied with merely calling your employees peasants on an insurance policy? Now you can have them microchipped, just like your pets at home!
posted by eviemath (44 comments total)

Have we considered guillotines for upper management as a cost-saving measure? It’s a tested technology and... very disruptive... according to early tests.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:51 PM on November 22, 2018 [44 favorites]

Last year, American company Three Square Market in Wisconsin made headlines when 80 of its employees got chips implanted. They use the little RFID chips in their hands (the size of a grain of rice, like the one in your cat) to scan themselves into security areas, use computers and vending machines.

Having an easily-hackable microchip that enables my employer to track my every move ("We noticed that you've been spending 8% more time on the toilet than the average worker at this firm") implanted into my body seems like a reasonable price to pay for the ability to buy a bag of chips without having to reach into my wallet for some change.
posted by The Card Cheat at 4:00 PM on November 22, 2018 [22 favorites]

seems like a reasonable price to pay for the ability to buy a bag of chips without having to reach into my wallet for some change

AND your employer can forward your vending machine habits directly to your health insurance provider, so they can proactively bump up your monthly premiums if you're wolfing down too many Funyuns or hitting the sugary sodas a bit too hard! WINS ALL AROUND!
posted by halation at 4:13 PM on November 22, 2018 [17 favorites]

So all those panicky Facebook posts I’ve been seeing about this are actually accurate?
posted by TedW at 4:17 PM on November 22, 2018 [3 favorites]

Have we considered guillotines for upper management as a cost-saving measure?

This is your regular reminder that the 1% are rich in essential nutrients. Many are organically fed, as well.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:23 PM on November 22, 2018 [40 favorites]

If this is true, it's a total flashback to all the "number of the beast" "here's how you'll know the Antichrist is here" stuff I read as a kid. All I need to know now is whether they're implanting the chips on their right hands or their forehead.
posted by clawsoon at 4:25 PM on November 22, 2018 [5 favorites]

Having an easily-hackable microchip that enables my employer to track my every move

They are not easily hacakble as they are just PIT-tags and are passive. The read range on the scanners is pretty small and it's trivially easy to mess them up, fyi.

But the tags do migrate around in your body. I wouldn't implant one in myself and I'm less thrilled about putting them into dogs and cats than I used to be too after seeing a couple migrate into muscle tissue.
posted by fshgrl at 4:26 PM on November 22, 2018 [20 favorites]

"...so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark." So a combination of the RFID chips and the Chinese social credit score.
posted by clawsoon at 4:26 PM on November 22, 2018 [6 favorites]

Seriously, do these people not know themselves enough to know what the hell is going to happen here. Right now they are all giving each other high fives and bellowing WOO at how they excited they are about this slam-dunk idea of letting people badge into restricted areas in a more controllable way. WHY do they think it will end there and that'll be it. THEY HAVE TO LIVE IN THIS REALITY TOO. WHY DON'T THEY KNOW THAT. They are all Serena-Joy from Handmaid's Tale, just knitting their own cages out of self-righteousness.
posted by bleep at 4:34 PM on November 22, 2018 [12 favorites]

We're probably all thinking it.
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:40 PM on November 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

WHY do they think it will end there and that'll be it. THEY HAVE TO LIVE IN THIS REALITY TOO. WHY DON'T THEY KNOW THAT.

A lot of them do. And that's a reality they want to live in. A lot of people wanted the first two world wars too. And celebrated all sorts of different versions of fascism. People are weird.
posted by treepour at 4:48 PM on November 22, 2018 [9 favorites]

>THEY HAVE TO LIVE IN THIS REALITY TOO. WHY DON'T THEY KNOW THAT.

They probably figure it's coming anyway, and if they help implement it they'll get a micro-apartment with a window slit.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 6:16 PM on November 22, 2018 [3 favorites]

Jeezus Murphy and Joseph. The revolution can't come soon enough and these guys deserve to be the first up against the wall.
posted by fimbulvetr at 6:30 PM on November 22, 2018 [5 favorites]

"As well as restricting access to controlled areas," The Telegraph said, "microchips can be used by staff to speed up their daily routines. For instance, they could be used to quickly buy food from the canteen, enter the building or access printers at a fastened rate."

Or you know, they could embed the chip in a little tag you wear around your neck or clip to your lapel. It could even have your Name, Picture and Department written on it so humans could read it and not just machines. And then on the weekends or when you quit you could just take it off.
posted by Mitheral at 7:21 PM on November 22, 2018 [55 favorites]

Nah, yer just a luddite. Chips fer all!
posted by fimbulvetr at 7:31 PM on November 22, 2018 [2 favorites]

"As well as restricting access to controlled areas," The Telegraph said, "microchips can be used by staff to speed up their daily routines. For instance, they could be used to quickly buy food from the canteen, enter the building or access printers at a fastened rate."

How are they selling this to employees as something that benefits them? Personally I generally appreciate the few moments of mental break when I get up and walk to the printer or what-not. Any project I've ever worked on where I was deeply stressed out by the few moments it took to enter a building, get something printed, or whatever, was a project that was not good for my well-being in so many other ways.
posted by DingoMutt at 7:47 PM on November 22, 2018 [8 favorites]

Wave of the future. Another few years or so, totally normal for everyone. Few years after that and it's "where's yer signal mate?"

Back in the 90s, I'd thought that fringe Christian evangels were kooky when they went on about bar codes & Mark of the Beast. Turns out that they were right and I was wrong about this thing.
posted by ovvl at 8:20 PM on November 22, 2018 [3 favorites]

So it begins.
posted by ocschwar at 8:21 PM on November 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

That's the thing, a security guard can't tell at a glance if you're authorized or not if all you have is an implanted chip. An ID badge is both visual credentials and electronic pass. There really is no upside for employees or employer, so I can't understand why this idea has any traction at all. Are lost badges really that big of a problem? Is this some kind of weird power Trip? Or a fetish thing? I just don't get it.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 8:23 PM on November 22, 2018 [8 favorites]

in Sweden where apparently they are much cooler about becoming the Borg than we are.

Who doesn't want to play awesome tennis?
posted by otherchaz at 8:54 PM on November 22, 2018 [12 favorites]

So all those panicky Facebook posts I’ve been seeing about this are actually accurate?

Some of them are. As to which ones, I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.
posted by el io at 9:17 PM on November 22, 2018

This is the dumbest fucking shit I've ever seen.

To me it's less dumb than having a google voice or Alexa or leaving your cell phone wireless or GPS turned on. These chips can only track you at antennaes that are not easy to conceal and they can't be re-programmed or do any of the dystopian things people here think they can. They're not spying on you at home.

They are pretty crap for security though as they can usually be read with commercially available scanners (like from Amazon for $100). So they're of limited use for security for sure.
posted by fshgrl at 9:59 PM on November 22, 2018 [3 favorites]

So, for a ... screenplay I'm writing... how many of these chips could you implant in a reasonably healthy exec without actually killing them? 500? 2000? more? Assume that the exec doesn't have to live forever, just long enough to have plenty of time to meditate on their life choices.
posted by Balna Watya at 10:19 PM on November 22, 2018 [6 favorites]

Have we considered guillotines for upper management as a cost-saving measure? It’s a tested technology and... very disruptive... according to early tests.

Boots Riley and The Coup have something to add on that. (And if you haven't already watched Sorry to Bother You, you should)
posted by knapah at 10:53 PM on November 22, 2018 [5 favorites]

So, for a ... screenplay I'm writing... how many of these chips could you implant in a reasonably healthy exec without actually killing them? 500? 2000? more? Assume that the exec doesn't have to live forever, just long enough to have plenty of time to meditate on their life choices.

Size of a grain of rice and inert. You could swallow hundreds of them of you didn't chew or implant as many as they'd let you inject into them I'd guess.
posted by fshgrl at 12:51 AM on November 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

What amuses me is people who are aghast at the privacy/social control/heavy-handed satire implications of this who nonetheless are happy to have Google or Alexa listening in to everything they say in their home, because that's the way things are nowadays/it's so convenient/Google already knows everything about you and besides they can't be too evil.
posted by acb at 2:54 AM on November 23, 2018 [8 favorites]

Chips are great for pets because it allows you to identify them when they can't easily communicate and when other ID may have managed to go missing or be forgotten.

Chips in people are probably only worth it when you also need to identify them when they can't easily communicate and other ID may have managed to go missing or be forgotten. (This means medical ID detailing important conditions your paramedic will want to know about, or maybe as a substitute for military dog tags, and not a fat lot else)
posted by edd at 3:55 AM on November 23, 2018 [3 favorites]

You better put it in deep, because I've got a bottle of whisky and a pen knife.
posted by lucidium at 4:58 AM on November 23, 2018 [4 favorites]

The chief experience officer at Epicenter, Fredric Kaijser, told press: "People ask me, 'Are you chipped?' and I say, 'Yes, why not?' And they all get excited about privacy issues and what that means and so forth. And for me it's just a matter of I like to try new things and just see it as more of an enabler and what that would bring into the future."

Bolded sections are points where the subject earns a dickpunch.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:10 AM on November 23, 2018 [7 favorites]

This reminds me of the Blurb Corporation luncheon episode of Arrested Development. The sheep follow the path, get on the bus as expected and are dropped off in a field just like sheep. Now, just alternate what doors and hallways an employee is let to go down in realtime, and not only.cam you force employees into walking wherever you want them to (and tentatively whenever you want them to).

So now, just start paring them back until you have one person at a time fed into a chute, then quickly slap a cable around their ankles, place the electrode to their temple, quickly pick up the cable with a hook! Now you can wait while until they stop flailing or tap them again if you have to (carefully, as they are likely confused and quite dangerous). Now you begin the bleeding process, open them up and remove the offal, and begin the full process. Generally with one line you can impact about 1 employee every 20 seconds. Operate two lines and that lets you operate at about 1 employee every 10 seconds. At this feed rate, you will be slaughtering employees at the efficiency rate of a typical slaughterhouse! Congratulations, Soylent Green is now a secondary revenue stream! Disruption!
posted by Nanukthedog at 5:11 AM on November 23, 2018 [4 favorites]

The chip should include an accelerometer. Because having it embedded in your hand could track some other non-productive behavior. Well, non-reproductive that is. Then people could compete to get the best metrics.
posted by srboisvert at 7:17 AM on November 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

It is not the chipping itself that needs monitoring it is the way they are used.
There are many industries that should be using chips - if they aren't.
Many of the security violations are because people "forgot" their passes - which they didn't have in the first place.
posted by Burn_IT at 7:21 AM on November 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

Sigh.. Blooth... damn you autocorrect.
posted by Nanukthedog at 7:31 AM on November 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

An ID badge is both visual credentials and electronic pass. There really is no upside for employees or employer, so I can't understand why this idea has any traction at all.

I can think of situations where it would be advantageous, but they are outside of normal office-tech-worker scenarios.

Clean rooms, surgical suites, or places where CBN contamination is possible, aren't conducive to traditional badges. Badges have the "doctor's necktie" effect, where they go from sterile to nonsterile areas and aren't frequently cleaned. Displaying badges when you're wearing a bunny suit or CBN gear is sort of a challenge; most places just punt on it, figuring the number of people is small enough that it doesn't matter, or have disposable badges or something, or put the security perimeter outside the decon/scrub area.

Anyway, in those situations I can see how having the badge embedded in your body would be advantageous. Not sure it's advantageous enough for me to actually want to do it, mostly because there are lots of possibilities for biometrics that would facilitate the same thing without getting microchipped like a dog at the animal shelter. (Facial recognition, gait recognition, iris or retinal scans are all good and don't require contact; fingerprint sensors are probably better but require touching a surface.)

FWIW, a lot of high security installations are moving to a 3-part combination of photo on a badge (human readable, checked by a guy with a gun), RFID embedded in the card itself to do a cryptokey exchange with a reader (makes the card difficult to forge), and then a fingerprint reader (makes sure you're the person who's supposed to have that card, and not some body double / evil twin). There are still definite advantages to the physical card, mostly because it enables a low-tech verification, which the other mechanisms reinforce.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:15 AM on November 23, 2018 [4 favorites]

There really is no upside for employees or employer, so I can't understand why this idea has any traction at all.

apart from the appealing invasive-tracking aspects, you'd no longer have to replace lost credentials (or, in high-security environments, worry about someone doing something dumb like leaving their contractor pass in their briefcase on top of their car and then losing it somewhere on the highway for anyone to find and why yes i know of at least one instance where that is a thing a contractor did in fact do)
posted by halation at 11:19 AM on November 23, 2018

NO, my employer does not get to put anything into my body. JFC.

I'm so happy I can retire in 4 years. (Although I don't actually see this taking off in academia.)
posted by Squeak Attack at 11:30 AM on November 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

halation: "apart from the appealing invasive-tracking aspects, you'd no longer have to replace lost credentials"

Course in high security environments you have to worry about bad guys mugging your employees to dig the chip out of their body.
posted by Mitheral at 12:07 PM on November 23, 2018 [2 favorites]

For a lot of the potential use cases there's not much reason why the chip couldn't simply be glued to the body under the clothing. Could easily last a week or two but be removable without much difficulty. A long lasting RFID band aid.
posted by edd at 12:16 PM on November 23, 2018 [2 favorites]

or, in high-security environments, worry about someone doing something dumb like leaving their contractor pass in their briefcase on top of their car and then losing it somewhere on the highway for anyone to find and why yes i know of at least one instance where that is a thing a contractor did in fact do

Wouldn't work, there are millions of RFID readers out there and you could dupe this type of tag easily. There is literally an app for it on Android.
posted by fshgrl at 2:31 PM on November 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

there are millions of RFID readers out there and you could dupe this type of tag easily. There is literally an app for it on Android.

True, but the management types to whom this stuff is likely to be pitched as a Security Solution™ won't necessarily think about that part...
posted by halation at 4:02 PM on November 23, 2018 [2 favorites]

Rewriting someone's under skin tag with random data could make some unfortunate person's day go rather poorly. One hopes that anyone using implantable tags use the write-once versions.

A surprisingly large number of modern readers try to rewrite detected tags as a matter of course in an ultimately futile effort to protect against cloned tags. Of course it only helps against the cheapest, most unsophisticated attacks possible.
posted by wierdo at 4:50 PM on November 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

edd: "For a lot of the potential use cases there's not much reason why the chip couldn't simply be glued to the body under the clothing."

Like a birth control patch.
posted by Mitheral at 6:40 PM on November 23, 2018

What happens when a chipped employee leaves the company? Is the employee looking at a little outpatient surgery to remove the chip? Or does it just become deactivated and remain in the employee?

Also...if that employee goes to another company that also requires chips, can the chip that’s already in the employee be repurposed for the new company? Or, will workers end up with multiple chips in them as they jump from job to job?
posted by Thorzdad at 7:17 PM on November 23, 2018 [2 favorites]

You can remove them if you can find them. They migrate around and can move a long way even if implanted correctly, that's why I'd never get one for any reason.
posted by fshgrl at 1:42 PM on November 24, 2018 [1 favorite]