The Juice Is Loose

The first thing to know about Grindfest is it’s in hot, rural Tehachapi, California, so you’ll want to carpool if you’re like basically everyone else coming from the Bay Area. The second thing to know about Grindfest is that this weekend gathering is for the biohacking subculture’s chaos contingency. Its sixty or so attendees—a motley, nerdsome clientele of tinkerers who stick each other with RFID chips and show off their homespun cyber embellishments—like to think of themselves as pushing the boundaries of what is human. These are the actual transhumanists, not the billionaires with boy blood transfusions. Here, everyone knows all people are already cyborgs—might as well push it as far as it will go. It is, in other words, the Comic-Con crowd with scalpels. Mixing philosophical discussion with cosplaying Johnny Mnemonic, this subset of biohacking called grinding is about real implants, experimental prosthetics, aspirational technologies, and human experiments. It’s fun too. Grinders have a deeply playful sensibility; melting down your transit card to retrieve its antenna and inject it into your hand isn’t necessarily the most useful experiment, but it sure is funny. So is the annual electric knife fight, which is what it sounds like.

“I lost in the best way possible,” recounts one combatant through giggles whom I’ll call Nadia. Participants remove the guts of common tasers and electrify random objects, turning them into fairly painful instruments of harm. Inside a ring hastily composed of hay bales, electric blue arcs glowed in the night as grinders cheered. Nadia’s opponent wielded an electrified belt on a stick, snapping the makeshift whip around Nadia’s electrified broom, yanking her close, and dealing the final blow on her back to everyone’s delight. A perfect end to a cyberpunk gathering vending healthy mayhem. But looming over Grindfest in recent years is the specter of something decidedly un-punk: VC funding.

As ABC News reported earlier this year, the 2024 Grindfest featured a talk by its founder, Jeffrey Tibbetts, fresh from a trip to Honduras, where a special economic zone with lax regulations and oversight called Próspera is attracting health and medicine entrepreneurs looking to conduct research that may be difficult, if not outright illegal, in the United States. “They’re creating environments where we have regulation friendly to what we want to do,” explains Tibbetts, who goes by his handle Cassox, but not everybody in the biohacking community shared his excitement.

“Every time I hear of ‘special economic zone,’” says Nadia, “it raises some concerns.” With financial backers like Peter Thiel and Sam Altman, Próspera left a bad taste in some grinders’ mouths and for good reason. Próspera’s conception goes back to a 2009 military coup in Honduras and a 2012 “technical” coup. Forcing the creation of Employment and Economic Development Zones (called ZEDEs locally) against widespread opposition across the country, the Honduran Congress, led by the future right-wing president of the country, Juan Orlando Hernández, illegally dismissed four Supreme Court judges who had found ZEDEs unconstitutional and replaced them with pro-ZEDE judges. The groundwork had been laid and privately run cities became legal in 2013, right before Hernández’s ascent to power.

In 2024, the new government under Xiomara Castro declared ZEDEs unconstitutional and now faces a deluge of lawsuits from the prior narco-dictatorship government’s entanglements with various domestic and international companies. The three companies that make up the investor group called Próspera are suing the Honduran government for nearly $11 billion for failing to uphold the corrupt deals of its now-incarcerated former president—a lawsuit that could financially ruin the country. But Próspera continues to expand, annexing territory around the island of Roatan, denuding forests, and threatening to expropriate more land from the community of Crawfish Rock. Cassox, who I could not reach for comment, seems to code switch between the grinder community and the billionaire longevity bros. His biohacking lab on the island, Augmentation Limitless, recently started to inject under-skin crypto wallets activated by NFC keyfobs (yes, I said that). A co-tenant of Próspera includes MiniCircle, which provides experimental gene therapy for the ultrarich. Gabriel Licina, a longtime figure in the biohacking movement and friend who helped Cassox set up his lab in Tehachapi, says for Cassox, “The ends justifies the means,” even if that means being connected to Peter Thiel. In the end, he says, Cassox wishes he could be the head of a 1970’s-style cult. “He just wants to be in charge.”

The shudders Próspera evoked at Grindfest, a mostly left-wing gathering of queers, is indicative of a shift within the biohacking subculture at large. Around ten years ago, DIY biology was gaining traction as a community-oriented response to the failures of American medicine. Biohacker labs were cropping up in major cities around the world, helping the general public do things like analyze their own DNA without corporate middlemen like 23andMe. The ideological core of this wave of biohacking is bodily autonomy and mutual aid, as well as independence from science in the service of capitalist interests. As Janna Shaftan wrote for The Baffler earlier this year, some labs are nodes in a global open-source project to create a new recipe for insulin in hopes of driving down costs.

This same spirit lives in other, less public groups, such as Four Thieves Vinegar Collective, which publishes resources to teach people how to compound their own medicines at home: radical DIY in a way that makes sense in a country without universal health care that severely curtails the ability to acquire safe, cheap pharmaceuticals. Four Thieves is the kind of resource that’s good to have in case shit really hits the fan and you need to put a bunch of Ball jars together to make drugs in your garage. Take Jasmine, a trans woman in the Bay Area who is compounding her own estrogen at home, for whom biohacking means taking your health into your own hands rather than being at the mercy of WebMD.

Like many in the biohacking space, Jasmine, whose name has also been changed to protect her privacy, encountered baffling health issues stemming from a case of long COVID. Doctors were fixated on the timing of her onset of debilitating fatigue and the start of hormone replacement therapy and ultimately decided they were linked, urging her to discontinue her medical transition. “I was bedridden for probably three to four months of, I think this was 2022,” she explains, “I was the happiest I had ever been in my life.” Quitting estrogen was not an option.

After a great deal of research into cis women with Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, Jasmine hypothesized that her symptoms were a result of very low testosterone or very high estrogen. She immediately wanted to try taking progesterone, but the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which publishes standards of care for trans patients, says there’s no solid evidence that progesterone can help trans women. Eventually, Jasmine convinced her primary care doctor to try it anyway, which got her out of bed. But flare ups of extreme fatigue would return occasionally, especially during heat waves in the normally cool Bay Area. Frustrated, she found experimental trials for a drug called Ibutamoren, or MK-677, which is given to elderly patients after hip replacement surgery. It stimulates the release of growth hormone and increases lean body mass, along with a bunch of other potential benefits for sleep, all of which make it attractive to bodybuilders and athletes. But MK-677 is only available in clinical trials (and the black market), is illegal to sell in the U.S., and is banned by international professional athletic associations. Here come the Ball jars.

Jasmine now mixes up regimens for a handful of friends who have had similar difficulties getting doctors to experiment with them or settle on a treatment plan that doesn’t exactly align with WPATH guidelines. It’s about supporting one another and trying to get trans people the care they need. Which isn’t to say she doesn’t also do the normal quirky biohacker stuff like fill her and her friends’ hands with strontium aluminate so they glow in the dark. Jasmine’s a complete package.

Gabriel Licina, who first gained media attention for developing night vision eye drops in 2015, says that over time biohacking and bodyhacking have been conflated as the idea that you can “hack” the body like a computer moved into the mainstream. If the body is a machine, there is code. If there is code, there is a hack to be made. “Bodyhacking is doing all the shit your mom said you needed to do—don’t look at screens after dark and eat a sandwich,” says Licina. With “bodyhacking” falling out of use, these are the kinds of biological interventions that (primarily) men working in tech, swimming in a culture of self-optimization, have come to call biohacking. Think intermittent fasting and drinking Soylent. Biohacking gives people—techies especially—the permission to tinker when the medical establishment fails their needs or falls short of their desires. That’s how health and wellness founders capitalized on the biohacking movement. “They swooped in,” says Licina, “I watched everyone slide into consumerist bullshit.”

The American approach to medicine, especially toward chronic illness, has left millions to their own devices, and open to the idea of biohacking. Instead of grinders sharing tips on how to put magnets in your hand, r/biohackers is mostly full of the rise-and-grind class comparing supplement regimens—their “stacks,” as they call them. Meanwhile, r/DIYbio is a ghost town. P. D., who works in education in Pennsylvania, is a self-professed biohacker who came to experiment with herbal medicine, acupuncture, and polyphasic sleep while suffering chronic pain throughout his teens. He says he’s tried nearly all the hacks short of off-label drugs and that the biohacking ethos provides a “challenge” to be undertaken. “You start with a theory, and then you prove you can do it even when people say it can’t be done,” he tells me.

The grinders are now an increasingly vulnerable subspecies, as the biomechanical ethos has been popularized by longevity hustlers such as Bryan Johnson. Community-supported biolabs still exist, but laboratory experimentation and mutual aid have taken a backseat to personal enhancement, trying out new health trends, or getting prescriptions for off-label purposes like anti-aging. Biohacking, says Licina, has drifted towards “more atomization, more individualism in society as a whole.”

Opportunistic longevity and performance enhancement telehealth clinic startups are the individualist trend’s consumerist new face. Eden, AgelessRx, and Healthspan are just a few of the online-only pharmacies that have cropped up in recent years. Here, anyone can find a willing prescriber of Metformin, a diabetes medication that has grown in popularity for off-label use to slow aging and increase lifespan. Same for Rapamycin, a drug prescribed to people after organ transplants that has become a favorite in the anti-aging community. You can also get Sermorelin, a peptide that encourages the release of human growth hormone—once only prescribed to children with delayed puberty, now yours for a little extra pump in the gym.

Tara Sklar, faculty director of the Health Law and Policy Program at the University of Arizona, explains that these direct-to-consumer telehealth clinics do not typically bill to insurance, helping them avoid regulatory oversight. While off-label prescribing is legally up to provider discretion, “because [these clinics] are not drug manufacturers or distributors, they do not have to follow the fair balance test required by the FDA.” Absolved of the responsibility to tally adverse side effects alongside supposed benefits, online pharmacies paint a picture of miracle substances. The longevity market reached almost $20 billion in 2023, and is only expected to explode. Biohacking marketed to regular people is big business.

The venture capitalists and CEOs behind these outfits are, predictably, an unsavory and unhinged bunch. AgelessRx CEO Anar Isman posts side-by-side photos of celebrities in their youth and their appearance today captioned: “Look at what aging does to even the smartest of us. If a foreign enemy did this to us—#1 priority would be to defeat this enemy. The enemy is aging.” Longevity has come to thoroughly dominate the biohacking scene, bringing with it the money and ideology of tech billionaires looking for a scientific means to abolish death.

According to Gabriel, that’s how Cassox drifted toward Próspera—with the promise of longevity bro funding. It was possible to see this coming. In 2017, one user on biohack.me asked, “Um. Does Transhumanism have a fascism problem?” Cassox, without reading the article included in the post, jumped into the replies to argue it doesn’t. “Every group,” he says, “attempt[s] to answer, ‘What do we do with the people who have incompatible world views?’” This isn’t a problem unique to transhumanism, he says; it’s simply a problem of always vilifying those outside of a social movement. “We should try to keep transhumanism open and accepting . . . And we should look hot and cool as fuck while we do it,” he writes. The original poster pushed back. “I disagree with Cassox’s take,” they write, “there’s always going to be disagreement between groups of people about how best to run the country. But this isn’t liberal vs. conservative; leading transhumanists are specifically arguing that large sections of the population have no social value.” Cassox dropped off, seemingly not as interested in OP’s call to “identify fascistic ideas in transhumanism and be prepared to call them out.”

One sign of the times at Grindfest has been the appearance of “crypto bros” in recent years. One memorable presentation was titled “No One is Worthless: Harvesting Organs for Fun and Profit.” Another’s pitch seemed to be about commodifying the grinder community. So much for fun with implants; the incipient right wing of biohacking is more interested in affirming what is seen as natural. “Enhancement” has long been a conservative project: see Alex Jones’s Infowars Life Super Male Vitality supplements or RFK Jr.’s push for wearables. One user on r/biohackers recently asked if they can “rewire” their asexuality. The most popular response rails against “woke bullshit,” tells the poster the reason they feel this way is “environmental toxins,” and that “we live in a sick world and a sicker society, but healing yourself is very possible.” Biohacking was never supposed to be about conforming to gendered definitions of “health.” Where’s the experimentation in that?

The fascistic and individualist sentiments have always lurked beneath biohacking’s surface. But with some of the movement’s originators, like Cassox, sitting on the fence rather than taking a stand, it remains to be seen if more of the biohackers will follow suit. Meanwhile, Jasmine is delighted to turn herself into a “llama girl,” having discovered that llama livestock tracking chips were pretty inexpensive and an accurate indicator of body temperature. But this sort of monitoring is nothing like the mainstream emergence of wearables and health tracking. “The goal isn’t to make me like a better human or healthier or whatever,” she says, “It’s just my body is my body, and I’m gonna have fun with it.”

There’s no tech company involved, no subscription service, it’s tech that’s literally in her hands—err, underarms. For Nadia, the cultural tension between subsets of biohackers is between those who want to live as long as possible and those who “are exploring, fucking around and finding out . . . It’s a difference of focusing on the future versus focusing on the now.”