Sweden puts vaccine passports under our skin
By Alexandra Marshall
Swedish startup Epicenter has created a microchip to store Covid vaccine passports. The device is inserted under the skin on your forearm and read by the same technology as contactless payments.
Hear that? It’s the clamour of so-called conspiracy theorists smashing their keyboards and shouting ‘I was right!’ at the internet.
The inevitable marriage between vaccine passports and the holy grail of technology – human microchips – has arrived at the altar and there’s no one willing to stand up and object. Whether tyranny is imitating conspiracy, or the Swedes are simply attracted to digital slavery, humanity may be microchipped like pets in the immediate future.
We know what the public used to think about this sort of idea – madness. That’s why it was dismissed as conspiracy when social media sounded the alarm twelve months ago. Who would line up to get a chip in their arm that denies them access to civilisation? Pre-2018, the answer was no one.
In 2022, there will be millions of hypochondriacs desperate to put Big Brother under their skin in the ultimate act of virtue signalling. We have a name for this – ‘transhumanism’ – where technology permanently alters humanity. This is not to be confused with artificial devices used for medical procedures. These are passive tools that do not interact with the social, political, or legal framework of a citizen and their society.
Transhumanism started as the desire to cheat mortality by augmenting with technology. It centred around the artificial extension of life and its accompanying philosophical argument about when and if we cease to be human. Others wanted to skip ahead of evolution by expanding the limitations of the body.
This grand debate has been reduced to a petty game of ‘control’ by the world’s suffocating bureaucracies. Instead of chasing godlike immortality, transhumanist technology has devolved our humanity into slavish adherence to government systems. How ironic that the first mass implementation of transhumanism is to be in the interest of limiting, rather than advancing, our species.
Österland began experimenting with microchips in 2013 when he modified implants to pair with his Samsung 5. After a few attempts, he managed to make the chip inside his arm call his wife when the phone was picked up. This success led him to contact Hannes Sjöblad from the Transhumanist community in Sweden, who then invited him to hold a demonstration at Epicenter.
The pair implanted microchips over ‘chips and beer’ evenings where Österland described the microchips as ‘cyborg applications’. This all sounds like fun – and that is often what technology is like in the experimental stage. The worries come later when government knocks on the door of ‘science’.
As was correctly pointed out at the time, there is a world of difference between tech enthusiasts exploring voluntary biological integration with wearable tech, and the power imbalance of an employer microchipping factory staff by force. ‘Are you a person being paid for your work, or are you the property of the company you work for?’ asked Urs Gasser, the Executive Director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.
The situation facing us in 2022 is far worse than the factory scenario. The government is not proposing to be our employer, it wants to be our master.
In Epicenter’s recently aired microchip vaccine passport commercial, Hannes Sjöblad – who is now the company’s Chief Distribution Officer – waves his smartphone over his arm and it brings up his vaccination status.
Why get a microchip embedded for a ‘temporary’ pandemic set to end in 2022? Surgery seems an extreme step up from carrying around a green tick on your phone – no? These questions have an obvious answer…
The Australian Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt has ordered in excess of a hundred million doses of Covid vaccines with boosters to be administered to the double-jabbed at the three-month mark, meanwhile Australian states have built quarantine camps instead of hospitals. These actions suggest this situation is permanent – a ‘new normal’.
‘In case your phone runs out of battery, it’s always accessible to you. So of course, that’s how we use this technology today, next year we are going to use it for something else,’ said Sjöblad, promoting the benefits of an injectable vaccine passport.
Citation: Alexandra Marshall, 28 December 2021, “Sweden puts vaccine passports under our skin”, Spectator: Australia, https://www.spectator.com.au/2021/12/sweden-puts-vaccine-passports-under-our-skin/
Disclaimer: I was not interviewed in the context of this article.