On December 8, 2025, a YouTube channel called GMS Ancient Wine published a twenty-six-minute video titled "Amal Graafstra Is A Demon: Cybernetics, VivoKey, & The D£adly Implant !" (punctuation and pound sign theirs). The description offers supporting evidence: "Lowkey his name is Amalek !!! Graphos !"
I want to be fair to the genre, because it has been with me my whole career. By March 2007, when my IEEE Spectrum cover story ran, I was getting enough of this mail to have a shorthand for it. From my blog that week: "Lately I've been getting more emails from people saying I'm the devil and I'm a government puppet... 'the basics' as I've begun calling it."
In 2010 I wrote about the asymmetry that still amazes me. A Reuters story described a Polish priest who installed a fingerprint reader in his church so schoolchildren could log their attendance at mass, and a pupil called the arrangement comfortable. As I put it then: "people seem to have no problems with biometrics, yet shriek about 'Mark of the Beast!' when it comes to more tangible identification devices like RFID tags and implants." I doubted the situation would be deemed comfortable if pupils used RFID tags to track their attendance. Fingerprints for mass: fine. A glass-encapsulated transponder: apocalypse.
So this video is less a surprise than a twenty-year status report: the mail has become content. For the record: my parents named me Amal, nobody consulted the Amalekites, and the deadliest thing about my implants remains the paperwork.