After a four year run, Bodyhacking Con, a biohacking convention popularly known as BdyHax, is shutting down.

“It is with heavy hearts that we must announce the end of BDYHAX, our flagship bodyhacking convention.” BdyHax founder Dustin Trammell announced yesterday.

Though sad, this announcement comes as no surprise to those familiar with BdyHax, as it had staffing issues and struggled to sell this year’s tickets – despite the attendance of the likes of legendary extreme biohacker Lepht Anonym.

However, BdyHax’s untimely demise does not mark the end of biohacking-related gatherings and events. Quiet the opposite. Dangerous Things, the creators of the VivoKey smart-card implant, have already stepped up to the plate and bought the biohackingcon.com domain in an effort to establish something to occupy the void BdyHax has left. And of course, BiohackThePlanet, a science conference hosted by biohacker turned cheese-maker Josiah Zayner, has began selling tickets for this year’s event, which will happen in late August at the Renaissance Hotel in Las Vegas.

So why did an event for a growing trend like biohacking have declining attendance during its entire run? The BdyHax founder explains that the reason is because of a small community and a nascent industry:

“The community isn’t big enough and the industry not mature enough to support an event as big and comprehensive as ours.” Trammell said, explaining why the event has been on the decline since its inception.

But this explanation could not be further from the truth. Self-aware and self-defined ‘biohacking’ as a community is still relatively small, but the fields that fall under biohacking such as bioart, citizen science, Maker culture, body modification, fitness, self-experimentation, psychonautics and transhumanism, have large enough and coalescent communities that would sustain biohacking both as a marketable culture and a profitable trend.

Though the community independent of its converging components may not necessarily be self-aware enough to have enough people self-defining themselves as ‘biohackers,’ the numbers are definitely there. It is the banner of biohacking that needs to be waved higher – for people and markets with parallel and converging interests – to see this banner and stand under it.

As for the maturity of biohacking as an industry, what applies to the community’s size also applies to its maturity: many of biohacking’s divergent components, converge from well established and stable industries that can provide biohacking with the necessary foundations to flourish as an industry. Half of biohacking is basically a DIY offshoot of the tech industry, so we are already half way there. Other industries parallel to biohacking like personal health and fitness can easily offer already tried and tested markets for biohacking. We really are, half way there.

And then when one steps outside of the America-centric bubble, one clearly sees how far consumer microchipping as a business model is making significant leaps in Sweden and the rest of Europe – thanks in part to the efforts of people like Hannes Sjöblad and Jowan Österlund of Biohax International. Even in risky markets like art, biohackers outside of the United States have established sustainable models to both market and pursue their human augmentation endeavors; perfect example being the Transpecies Society – the Barcelona-based cyborg art collective that was established by the cyborg trio of Neil Harbisson, Moon Ribas and Manel Munoz.

For something as interdisciplinary as biohacking, the “maturity of the industry” argument simply falls short. There are established parallel industries in whose markets biohacking can comfortably flourish. Heck, even the huckster scam-artist proponents of Bulletproof Coffee and Wellness pseudo-biohacking have this figured out by tapping into the more gullible portions of the fitness industry.

So why did BdyHax really fail to take off? Why did the Bodyhacking Convention not resonate with the public?

The first reason, which is not the main reason, is straightforward: In part, BdyHax did not take off because of poor marketing. Many tech enthusiasts and others who follow fields parallel to biohacking have never heard of BdyHax, yet anti-RFID implantation conspiracy theorists are usually aware of even the exact dates of the event. The word is out there somehow, but it’s unexpected ears picking it up.

The main reason BdyHax failed is because of the branding versus the expectations such branding created. BdyHax is branded as a convention and pitched as an expo, but apart from the first event four years ago, BdyHax has been anything but. What it became afterwards, is a panel of discussions at best, and a polite circlejerk at worst.

But there is nothing wrong with discussions, panels and all that, if expectations are set at the level of closed-in likely-tribal talks and not mass expos. At a niche event branded as a convention and an expo, where the speakers are people mostly only known within said niche community, unless the talks always end up with demos like the late Aaron Traywick taking off his pants on stage to cure herpes, the general public will simply never be interested.

Like stated before, in essence there is nothing wrong with talks (even if they seem endless) as long as the ambitions for hosting such talks are set at panel level and not mass expos level. But there is something completely amiss when these “talks” and “discussions” are almost entirely ethics and moral-speak; the bread and butter of BdyHax for the past two years.

Bioethics are great and all that, but until a biohacker successfully manufactures a contagion in their kitchen sink, there is no reason at all bioethics should be at the center of discussions involving biohacking. When it comes to biohacking, the public and the market are only interested in who is doing what using what, who has cured what using what, and who has implanted what up their what. Not self-indulgent moralism about inclusion in the home garage and safe spaces in kitchen lab.

It is a BITTER PILL to swallow, but people are simply not going to pay to travel across America to hear yarns about inclusion in tech. That may be just and moral, but it is beyond boring especially given the expectations that a buzzword like “biohacker” conjures up for a lay person not familiar with biohacking. Just imagine paying for a fitness expo and the focus of the entire expo ends up being the ethics of re-racking your dumbbells and inclusion in the squat rack. Try that business model for four years and see how that works out.

The focus on moral-speak centered panels at BdyHax brings back the argument against the claim by BdyHax that the industry is not mature enough, because at less than 4 years old, BdyHax had not matured enough to have the clout to pull audiences purely on talks and panels. The market and the industry expected an expo on human augmentation, cyborgs, pushing experimental boundaries, cool science like dragons and shit; but instead what they got was a Walmart version of TED Talks about ethics, ethics, ethics and more mind-numbingly boring ethics.

Having said that, BdyHax was a great experience for the few who attended, and it will be missed. The genuine bonds it created within the biohacking community will be very hard to replicate. Most attendees usually left BdyHax with a sense of community, and a warm, fuzzy feeling. But patting doggo for being a good boy at playing catch also leaves a warm and fuzzy feeling. Though a few crazed dog lovers might actually sustain a mini-market to repeatedly witness doggo wag his tail to a patting, no one will pay to sit through another panel on ethics when they expected to see someone to give live birth to a CRISPR baby on the BdyHax stage. BdyHax’s ‘warm and fuzzy’ model was simply not sustainable.