On Tuesday, December 13, 2022, I was a guest on Dr. Phil, in a syndicated CBS episode titled "I Got Chipped: Are We Ready for Technology Under Our Skin?" The panel was built for sparks: me; Anastasia, a cyborg magician, transhumanist, and biohacker with 47 implants; and a critic identified as "R," who believes human microchipping is harmful and must be stopped.
The show put a number on the table: over 50,000 people worldwide with microchip implants. Then it let us argue about what it means. "R" made the case against: "Surgically implanting computers into humans is dangerous. Just how dangerous? We don't know yet." My answer was the boring truth about passive transponders: "These devices are passive...they're dead. They're inert. They have no energy whatsoever." And on the biocompatibility question: "We've used this exact material since the '70s. There's been almost zero evidence of any kind of irritation."
Dr. Phil himself reached for the risk-benefit frame, citing 1.43 million pacemaker users and 200,000 people with brain implants for Parkinson's and other conditions. That is the right frame. The argument is only ever about which implants, for whom, and who controls them.
Fox News wrote the segment up two days later as guests sparring over microchipping, which is fair enough. Sixteen years after the 2006 media blitz, the questions had barely changed, but the audience asking them had grown far more familiar with the idea.