Who Are The Founders of the Biohacking and Grinder Movements?

edited July 2016 in Community
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?


Comments

  • Amal and Kevin Warwick are a couple more.
  • I would add all the admins and cassox mostly admins do 3/4 of the development here.... Chrionex and Alex in particular....
  • That being said, JohnDoe, would you consider the members of this board in general to be a large and influental part of the current grinder movement and community?  I was actually more looking for info on the folks who got us to this point but your comment has actually made me realize that I probably will be tying that into where things are nowadays, so I very well may bring up things like cyberise.me and dangerousthings.  Other than the Firefly Tattoo (which is incredible, btw) are there any prominent or unique mods, techniques, procedures, or products that were invented by folks around here?  I know that Alex runs Cyberise and created the Firefly Tattoo but I do not know as much about Chrionex and Cassox I am afraid.  
  • I'm Cassox. Hey, don't forget about the Grindhouse Wetware Guys and Rich Lee.

  • I feel that the following people have had noticeable influence on the history and current state of biohacking:

    Steve Haworth - first person to implant magnets?
    Kevin Warwick - from Coventry University, has done a bunch of advanced implants
    Lepht Anonym - DIY magnet implants, media coverage for biohacking
    Warren Ellis - wrote Doktor Sleepless
    Cassox - runs a lab in CA, designed the first TiN coated magnets
    Amal - runs dangerousthings, made advances with RFID implants
    Tim Cannon - leader at  Grindhouse Wetware, implanted the circadia
    Glims - created science for the masses
    Myself - runs cyberise.me, made advances with RFID cloning, designed Firefly implants

    maybe I've forgotten people?
  • @TheDiabeticGM
    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.
  • I wouldn't be afraid to throw @chironex in here. ^^ Also perhaps Sampaa Von Cyborg(?)

    Someday I hope I'm actually doing things too. X3
  • ThomasEgi needs to be on the list for sure. 
    Sovereign Bleak too
    Lukas
    Ianmathwiz
    lot's more
    Basically look at some of the original threads and check out those users
  • pibpib
    edited August 2016
    Some more reference points for your research:

    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.
  • Hello!!

    You guys missed Hans Moravec and Max More too! It's a great starting point.




  • I don't know about Moravec and More. I think that's overlapping with transhumanism a bit more. If it was a transhumanist list.. then for sure. Maybe I don't know enough about them. That's like busting out Stelarc though.. sure he's a god but I don't know that he's a founder of the modern movement exactly.
  • btw just as a fun experiment I found the first user on this forum as far as I can tell it was SovereignBleak he created the first post and joined instead of being approved like everyone else
  • @Cassox, hmm I don't know if we can nominate a founder for sure, there are lots of people from science and "off" science that do lots of stuff about the transhumanism/cyborguism, there's also Donna Haraway, but she is probably more in the philosophical side of this (maybe?).
    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 ;) )
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