I’d like to live forever, but mostly out of spite.

Transhumanist Party candidate Zoltan Istvan has made the quest for immortality the central issue of his quixotic Presidential campaign, because that works on both sides of the aisle, apart from the End of Days-ers. The novice politician has been indefatigable in his mission despite only making small ripples in the mainstream waters thus far. I don’t always agree with his reasoning, but I do wish his ideas would get a public hearing.

At Vice Motherboard, Istvan has published “The Drug Lords of Tomorrow Will Be Biohackers,” a piece about the new drug, a non-drug, which is a chip (for the brain), not a pill. The article looks at the topic from all sides: medicinal, drug abuse, hacking, etc. The opening:

Through various sources—mainly transhumanist biohacker friends—I’ve been hearing about how some drug traffickers might be taking an interest in cranial implant technology.

If scientists can get a brain implant to give neural stimuli that affects our perspectives, moods, and behaviors, then the future of drugs could be totally different than what it is now. In fact, in such a future, drug creation would become the domain of engineers and coders. This could become the next major frontier of the so-called drug market.

About half a million people already have chips connected to their brains. Most of these are cochlear implants to aid against deafness, but some are also deep brain stimulation (DBS) types, sometimes used for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, and epilepsy.

Generally speaking, DBS cranial implants work by firing electrical impulses via electrodes into certain regions of the brain. In the case of epileptic patients, they help control seizures.

But improving forms of brain implants may use more EEG technology—a part of the brain-computer interface field—where they can distribute brain waves over a certain portion of the brain. If this portion is one that affects mood—thought to be determined mostly by the amygdala—maybe they’ll be able to give us a real high.

Thync is already an external device claiming to work something like this.•