Who Are The Founders of the Biohacking and Grinder Movements?
Hello, everyone! Over the past few weeks, I have become progressively fascinated and interested in biohacking and cannot wait to get my first mod. I am very happy to be here and it is awesome to get a chance to meet so many other radical, like-minded individuals. Anyhow I digress, onto the topic of this post:
I am a journalist in training and would like to do my part in helping the community by writing an article about it; specifically about the rise of real world biohacking and the grinder community itself. From what I have seen so far it seems like Steve Haworth really blew things up in the 90's and stuff has just exploded from there, but I know there has got to be more folks involved in the creation of communities like this besides Mr. Haworth. Could anyone point me to some other people who pioneered the technologies and ideologies that have resulted in this, the real world beginnings of the transhuman era?
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Yes everyone does do a lot for moving this forward, but bottom line is (For the better) progress is slow, we do stupid and crazy shit, but it is a calculated risk not Russian roulette. If you want to see something we put together as a community look at the wiki. Also another community project that came up was a newsletter but that I think has been lost....
That said we all have our little projects that we are working on, like I am working on a EEG guitar to play so fast that the listener will have auditory hallucinations (theoretically) unique to them. Something on a much smaller time frame is to put something together to help my singing.... I don't mean everyone that's not ranking brass is a mindless idiot, but that said lots of people come here for nootropics or magnets.
Someday I hope I'm actually doing things too. X3
Neil Harbison
Moon Ribas
Mark Gasson
Steve Mann
Rob Spence
Frank Swain, Klint Finley, and Zoltan Istvan are media figures who've wrote and contributed to this sort of thing over the years. Of course no research into this would be complete without citing the media exposure of Rich Lee, Tim Cannon, the the crews from grindhouse wetwares, science for the masses, cyberise.me and dangerous things. Outside this forum Haworth, Saampa, and Lepht Anonym have also made headlines.
You could also look to the QS movement as a cousin-faction, there's a lot of intersection. Chris Dancy's work makes for an interesting tie-in, but it may be a little too new age-ish.
Like Rich says, spend some time with the archived discussions. Lots of famous people there and interesting research points.
You guys missed Hans Moravec and Max More too! It's a great starting point.
An important thing is: When do you consider the marker of of the modern movement? Steve Mann, Stelarc, Warwick and others are doing things since the 70's (or 80's I'm not sure), is there a braking point in between? Or you're considering only those who really changed their bodies?
I'm kinda new in the biohacking area, so if you have any other references please do share! (I'm working on my master thesis about cyborgs and prosthestics, it would be awesome to have another point of view ;) )