In a sign of the times, RFID (radio frequency identification) chips are now used in workers’ hands for identification at Epicenter in Stockholm to unlock doors and operate photocopiers – and soon to pay for lunch in the cafeteria: Trends forecaster Faith Popcorn calls it ‘augmented humanity’

In June 1995, less than two months after Timothy McVeigh, radicalized after the Waco Siege and Ruby Ridge incident, killed 168 people when he bombed the Oklahoma City federal building, I covered a conference in Kingston, Ontario called “Take A Stand ’95: Defending Your Faith in the New World Order.” Gary Kah, of Indiana, and Eric Barger, of Texas, two of the rising stars of the televised Bible prophecy circuit, said it was tough going in the immediate wake of Oklahoma City.

McVeigh himself was a baptized Roman Catholic but self-professed agnostic, who would later receive the Roman Catholic Sacrament of Anointing of the Sick, formerly known as Last Rites or Extreme Unction, administered through a  Bureau of Prisons chaplain, minutes before his execution in the federal death chamber at Terre Haute, Indiana on June 11, 2001.

While it may have been tough going at the time in 1995, Kah and Barger are still going – strong, or at least, so it seems.

And the interesting thing is that much of what they talked about that June day almost 20 years ago has come to pass.

A “cashless” society, biometrics, including palm geometry and retinal scanning;  these things are no longer the stuff exclusively of the religious right and tin foil hat meme. I was reminded of this reading about Hannes Sjoblad, of BioNyfiken, a Swedish biohacking group, and the use of small RFID (radio frequency identification) chips, the size of a grain of rice, implanted under the skin of workers hands, embedded by a professional tattoo artist (sometimes at “chip-insertion parties” hosted by a Stockholm tattoo parlor) between their thumb and index finger, to allow Epicenter’s 700 tenants in Stockholm to  unlock doors, operate photocopiers or share contact information.  You can watch a 1m3s TomoWorld YouTube video of how it works at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUSje_XlzQ4

Epicenter is located between the central streets of Hamngatan, Brunkebergstorg and Regeringsgatan in Stockholm and managed by Result and Sime. It is part of AMF Fastigheter’s project Urban Escape Stockholm.

“We want to be able to understand this technology before big corporates and big government come to us and say everyone should get chipped – the tax authority chip, the Google or Facebook chip,” Sjoblad, Epicenter’s “chief disruption officer” and a member of BioNyfiken, told BBC News technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones last month.

Each RFID chip is encased in a small capsule, which also contains a copper antenna coil and a capacitor. The chip stores a unique binary number that is transmitted to the scanner. Along with allowing entry into the Epicenter, the chip also can open the doors of individual offices and makes the photocopier run. Soon, the RFID microchips, the use of which is voluntary at the moment, will be able to be used by workers to pay for lunch in the cafeteria and similar services.

“We call it augmented humanity,” 67-year-old trends forecaster Faith Popcorn, author of Dictionary of the Future, whose birth name was Faith Plotkin, told Meredith Engel, the online health reporter, of the New York Daily News. “We foresee a future in which everyone will have an implanted chip that will benefit our personal lives as well.” Popcorn, founder and chief executive officer of the marketing consulting firm BrainReserve, is best known for her 1991 book, The Popcorn Report: Faith Popcorn on the Future of Your Company, Your World, Your Life. Since 1974, Popcorn’s BrainReserve has forecast the future for companies including IBM, Bayer and American Express. Her supposed home run in 1991 was predicting the “cocooning” trend, where she forecast a coming penchant for Americans to spend time and money at home, which, in fact, only partially materialized for a time.

Implanted  RFID (radio frequency identification) chips … hmm … sounds kinda like something from the pages of a script for one of the late Iowa filmmaker Russ Doughten’s movies, such as his 1972 film, A Thief in the Night, followed by its three sequels – A Distant Thunder in 1978, Image of the Beast in 1980 and The Prodigal Planet in 1983. Doughten, who earned his master’s degree from Yale Drama School in 1954, died at the age of 86 in August 2013.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22