The first email was forwarded back and forth internally for a while due to a general sense of skepticism and a lack of clear interest:

From: S E <enjavi@gmail.com> Date: Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 1:12 PM Subject: Bichip Mark of the beast Hail Satan Hope you are all fine… I am writing to you since our Human Microchip company is having a big international event here in Copenhagen, November 26th. We are unveiling the cutting edge technology of human microchip implant with long distance read and internet data, for the first time in the history that is also known as the mark of the beast in the bible of Jesus and we have been facing opposition from churches and even been in the news for that: https://metro.co.uk/2018/11/22/transhumans-reveal-why-they-want-everyone-to-implant-chips-under-their-skin-8161505/ Anyway, here is the link to the event is bichip.com/event I wonder if you guys would like to help us promote the event which is actually free to attend? there are about 400 seats left yet and we can provide free VIP tickets to the temple members (Including free Flight and Accommodation) Best Simon Bichip, Denmark +4531751127

“Professional” emails lacking in basic details are, unfortunately, the norm. I receive emails from career journalists at major media outlets sometimes saying nothing more than that they would like to interview me. I get invitations to conferences that merely state that they seek my “participation,” leaving it to me to ask if they are asking me to speak, seeking sponsorship, or what, exactly? The fact that this email merely asked if we would help “promote the event” did not make it particularly suspect. The fact that there was apparently no cap set on flights and accommodations, however, was suspect, but could easily be seen as another common failure to specify. If one were to reply, one might then learn that a plus one is acceptable, but no more. It also is not unheard of for a start-up with delusions of grandeur to overspend on something like a conference. Still, they seemed to be offering too much while asking for too little.

Interestingly, the reference to “the Mark of the Beast” hardly caught my attention at all. Despite the email apparently referring the the biochip as the literal Mark of the Beast, I assumed it a matter of clumsy wording indicating the viewpoint that protestors were taking against the technology, certainly not the viewpoint of the manufacturers themselves. Still, I was not interested. I would not care to get the implant, nor am I horrified by the prospect of others carrying such implants in the future. The technology is not new, it is not terribly interesting, and the alleged controversy seemed a bit outdated in the social media age. In a world wherein nearly everybody willingly submits their most private information to Google and Facebook, and those companies work toward supplying face-recognition technology to public environments for the purposes of instant-tailored marketing, what does it matter if those using e-currency carry it always on their phone, a card in their pocket, or in a chip under their skin?

At some point, I was discussing current issues regarding social media and its regulation with our Ordination Director, Greg Stevens, when I remembered the BiChip email and forwarded it to him. Greg did a cursory investigation and replied to me:

As you know, I’m an enthusiastic supporter of transhumanism as an overall direction and love the idea of biotech. I’m looking forward to the day we have both the biotech and the AI to provide us with what I call “full phenotypic freedom” — the ability to augment ourselves to be whatever types of creatures we want, and to interface with computer and each other in whatever way we want. But, based on the material that I saw out there, “BiChip” is nothing more than a cute initial proof-of-concept in the early stages. Any details of BiChip as a company or its dealings aside, I like that promotion of the BiChip is something that can “get the conversation started” so that we can confront things like: what does it need to have to be useful? what are the risks and how do we build in protections against those risks from the beginning (instead of stumbling into abuses later and having to fix things after-the-fact). I would not get the “BiChip” as it’s been described. It’s simply not useful. I don’t make purchases using e-currency in day-to-day life. The only reason something like “ApplePay” from my iPhone or Apple Watch is useful is that the software can access whatever bank account or credit card I set it up for. I’ve never seen actual whitepapers for BiChip. I saw marketing material, and marketing material is always vague. But based on what I read, BiChip was inherently crippled in that it only operated in ecurrency and was limited in what it could communicate with. There is no “revolution” in this tech. The only thing exciting about it is that it was marketed as a product that might get people talking about what biotech may be able to do in the future.

This, of course, led to more in-person discussions and disagreements between Greg and I (I am far more the privacy advocate while he is more for cultivating a cultural adjustment to privacy’s natural diminishment through technology). Neither of us were against the concept of implants necessarily, though of course they would have to be implanted of one’s own free will, without undue coercive influence. For my part, I thought that the very topic of implants might make people begin to look more clearly at the privacy they abdicate daily, finally considering regulation regarding proper usage and retention. We again began to wonder what BiChip was all about, what their event was meant to entail, and how they imagined that we would “promote the event.”

Over a month had passed from the original email, so I reached out to see if they were still interested in discussing details:

On Wed, 16 Oct 2019 at 07.24, Dear Simon — We are very interested in the event. My own position is that Data Privacy is going to necessarily be an ongoing dialogue that will always change as technology advances. I do not think we need to declare privacy “dead,” but I also do not think that the convenience of a microchip implant poses a deeper threat to privacy than RFID, smartphones, and social media. The question is one of responsible retention and usage of data, not a matter of withholding technologies. Please let us know if you are still interested in our attendance and how we might help you popularize the event. Thank you Lucien Greaves Spokesperson, Cofounder The Satanic Temple

The reply came the same day:

Hi Lucien and friends The offer is still valid and we can provide free vip tickets and free flights and hotel to Denmark for the attendees. However we prefer to have important members/board members as the priority but we can book up to 100 of these tickets. Regarding the way you help out the event, you can come with any idea. I personally consider myself a member of the temple as i officially joined some years ago and maybe the time and money we are spending on this technology is directly a promotion for the satanist movement… I guess it is time that the temple considers Bichip as a partner and help us fight together. I recommend a direct call to Bichip president (Finn) on 004531751127 or to me 0013232180018 to speed up the process . Best Simon

Of course, this did not make any sense to me. An offer to fly some hundred members of The Satanic Temple (TST) to Denmark was grossly improbable even for a delusionally enthusiastic start-up. Further, the email again failed to be explicit in what Bichip would expect from me personally or TST as an organization. I lost interest entirely, but Greg’s interest was piqued. Attempting a further investigation into what the whole thing was really about, Greg attempted to contact the numbers provided only to find that they were inoperative numbers. Clearly, none of this was on the level, but it was difficult to understand what exactly the scam was.

On November 08 I received a Direct Message through Twitter, which I never replied to:

I simply forgot about the whole matter.

Then, on November 16, I was tagged in a reply to a bizarre tweet by the same account that had reached out to try and confirm my presence at the “international gathering.”

This dialogue, I came to discover, was in reference to an article that had just been posted by biohackinfo.com claiming that authorities had raided the Bichip offices for unspecified reasons and that the event I had been invited to was therefore cancelled.

Of course, by now it was clear that the event was never intended to happen to begin with, but it was still unclear what this whole scam was meant to achieve. According to the Biohackinfo article:

Two days ago on November 14, Danish police raided the Copenhagen offices of tech company BiChip. This was three days after we broke the story about BiChip’s bizarre Chief Technical Officer Simon Sallienjavi, who is also the leader of a growing satanic cult that fuses devil worshiping with biohacking and transhumanism. With all its operations shut down, BiChip has announced that all its offices are closed until December 29, and they have cancelled their much hyped November 26 event – that was to be hosted at the Black Diamond building in Copenhagen. At the event, BiChip was set to unveil what it claims is a revolutionary human microchip implant that is both distance-readable and internet-connectable. Christian groups in Denmark and elsewhere in Europe were planning on protesting this event – in part due to Sallienjavi’s notoriety in Denmark for converting Christians to satanism.

All of this was written without a single citation or hyperlink to any credible source that could confirm any of the claims made. No news articles about the police raid, no hyperlinks outside of those to other articles on the Biohackinfo page itself supporting the claims of Christian uproar, nor anything of any credible nature related to the very existence of “Sallienjavi” himself. The article went on to make even more extreme claims for which there are no reference anywhere outside of the Biohackinfo site:

Despite Sallienjavi’s eccentricities, despite his satanic cult, despite the bizarre claims he repeatedly makes in public about being the anti-Christ figure prophesied in the Bible, despite his questionable and borderline criminal activities – one of which includes the disappearance of a former cult member named Anna Smolar; Sallienjavi has high level security clearance in many bureaus of the Danish government including Denmark’s security services. Sallienjavi also oversees a Danish government-funded multinational called BEZH, which is the parent company of most of his numerous startups, including BiChip.

This was not a conspiracy theory. This was a conspiracy fantasy. The characters do not even exist in the real world. Searches for the story of missing cult member Anna Smolar yield nothing, and “Sallienjavi” is a fictional character. A significant population of people were credulous enough to believe the “PizzaGate” conspiracy theory which alleged that a small pizzeria in Washington, DC harbored underground tunnels where political elites engaged in human trafficking, but even that gullible audience (probably) needed at least the pizzeria in question to exist in reality before accepting claims of their covert activities.

The article carried on for a bit longer detailing Sallienjavi’s underhanded international dealings and associations with intelligence services. Common conspiracy villain resume material. Then, remarkably, the article went on to indict both the Church of Satan and The Satanic Temple:

The abrupt cancellation of the November 26 event, is going to be met with much anguish and grief from some of the people who were unexpectedly invited like American satanists from both the Church of Satan and the Satanic Temple. The latter in particular, could not wait to attend, and according to our source inside BiChip, Lucien Greaves, the founder of the Satanic Temple, which BiChip has been donating to for years, practically begged Sallienjavi to let him attend the event. “Please let us know if you are still interested in our attendance and how we might help you popularize the event,” Greaves had pleaded in an email to Sallienjavi. Although Sallienjavi wants to absorb both the Satanic Temple and the Church of Satan into his growing cult, he has little to no respect for the Temple and merely regards them as ‘useful idiots’ and thralls. Sallienjavi however has respect for the Church of Satan, and BiChip had even invited Peter H. Gilmore, the current high priest of the church, to speak at the November 26 event as a “secret” special guest speaker. BiChip paid Gilmore with 10 bitcoin in advance, a book deal, and $15000 for his flight to Denmark. Gilmore also has an invite to the opening of Sallienjavi’s cult’s church.

The most nonsensical part about this, from my perspective, was that the Biohackinfo Twitter account reached out to me directly to taunt me with this article, thus bringing this whole farce to my attention. The claim that BiChip had heavily donated to The Satanic Temple was accompanied by a hyperlink to an image of a document with the TST letterhead at top. The text of the document stated, in embarrassingly poor English, that thanks were in order for the large donations to “our church,” imploring the donors, Finn and Flemming, to “reach out into your network of trans humanists and pull others into the donation circle.” The signature read, “Kind regards, On behalf of Jacob McKelvy, T.H.”

The letter, of course, is a fake, and that is why Biohackinfo’s enthusiasm in pointing this all out to me was perplexing. Why on earth would anybody create a story so absurd and then immediately send it to somebody who can immediately debunk it? Turns out, Jacob McKelvy is the name of some slob who pretended to be a Satanist for a while only to make a display of converting to Christianity in hopes of marketing himself to Evangelicals. He never had anything to do with TST. It is as though some fool merely Googled “Satanist name” and went with whatever sounded good at the time. Was Biohackinfo the gullible victim of somebody else’s bizarre misinformation campaign? This seems unlikely, as in another article on the Biohackinfo site about the same fictitious Sallienjavi cult, the author writes again of my pleading to attend the international conference stating, “This desperate plea by Greaves the self-professed progressive, is despite the fact that in his communication with Sallienjavi, Sallienjavi had made crazy statements to the tune of ‘privacy is dead’ or privacy should be done away with.” In fact, my only communication with the hoax conference (above) expressed my opposition to that perspective, a fact that Biohackinfo revealed to be fully aware of when confronted. When I replied to Biohackinfo, via public tweet, that I was confused by the extreme incompetence in their conspiracy-creation, the Twitter account responded saying, “Don’t lie” followed by an image of my email reply to the hoax conference. And this was not an image of forwarded text from the email. It was clearly an image from the email account itself, indicating that Biohackinfo was in fact the same person behind the conference outreach email to begin with. I am hard-pressed to think of any other time I have seen something so elaborate also be so poorly-thought. This seemed to be the work of somebody who was not terribly bright, who was also quite convinced of their superior intelligence, acting in ways being mistaken for clever toward people who were being mistaken for severely mentally impaired.

Anyway, the fact that Biohackinfo was openly lying about the content of my email reply indicated that they were hardly gullible innocents being misled by another source. However, in a fit of tweets that again indicated the source to be at least partially fooled by the lies they were propagating, Biohackinfo soon began to post screenshots illustrating that they were uploading their files to Wikileaks, apparently believing that this would be of genuine concern to me

The Twitter account also began taunting the Church of Satan (which is actually little more than a Twitter account itself) with screenshots alleging to be a text correspondence with their “Magus,” Peter Gilmore. Gilmore, according to Biohackinfo, had accepted a speaker’s fee to deliver a keynote at the conference.

For their part, the Church of Satan denied that the correspondence was legitimate, and it certainly does not approach any reasonable vision of authenticity. For one thing, the correspondence suggests that monies were actually paid, which certainly never happened. Yet, here was Biohackinfo insistently sending these screenshots to the CoS Twitter, revelling in their whistleblower victory. The whole thing grew more confusing by the moment. If somebody is going to make up false accusations, why accuse somebody of something that is not even illegal, nor is it even clearly, in any way, immoral? When I asked Biohackinfo how Gilmore could have been faulted for accepting a speaking gig at the conference, if in reality he had (which he clearly did not), they replied that the effort to produce the “literal so called ‘mark of the beast’” was “wrong.”

I know that both Peter Gilmore and myself have imposter accounts manifest on a regular basis from Nigerian scammers looking to collect “membership fees” in our names. Is it possible that Biohackinfo was both trying to constuct an idiotic conspiracy theory about the Mark of the Beast while simultaneously being duped by an imposter Gilmore account? But what about the $15,000? Well, we don’t know where the conversation went before or after that, but it looks as though the money was said to be “in the mail,” and the would-be scammer talking to the hoaxter may well have been skeptical, but what did they have to lose?

Interestingly, the Biohackinfo site is ostensibly a site advocating for Transhumanist agendas — the technological augmentation and improvement of human biology — but chip implants are a fairly mundane Transhumanist technology, and certainly not one any Transhumanist would be expected to refer to in superstitious fear-mongering language. Is it possible that Biohackinfo is a paranoid, ridiculously inept, religiously superstitious attempt to infiltrate and discredit the Transhumanist movement?

On October 22nd, 2019, the official website of the US Transhumanist Party published an article naming Biohackinfo in the creation of slanderous allegations against them:

The United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party (USTP) unequivocally condemns the false, invented, and malicious allegations contained in two recent articles – one by the pseudonymous authors Glyph and CyphR on the yellow-journalism “Biohackinfo” website, and another by the pseudonymous Nick Sobriquet, published in the Trigger Warning magazine edited by Rachel Haywire. These articles are part of a deliberate, coordinated attack on the transhumanist movement and the many decent, distinguished, accomplished, and benevolent people working within it. These articles also contain numerous outright lies and other half-truths and cherry-picked facts distorted beyond recognition.

The article reveals that the people behind Biohackinfo ran in the recent USTP Electronic Primary, speculating that it was their loss in that election that prompted them to “sow chaos and exact vengeance.” The Biohackinfo candidate, “Rachel Haywire,” apparently did not accept her second-place defeat gracefully, prompting the site to fabricate a story in which the USTP was connected to Jeffrey Epstein and intertwined in a massive web of nefarious special interests. Given that the simpletons of Biohackinfo could even make a credible run for the Transhumanist Party candidacy, my guess is that they are not very well connected with any established political players, nefarious or otherwise.

The next day, I received a Direct Message on Twitter from the legendary Sallienjavi himself:

I looked through the feed of the account. No mention of BiChip. Poor English. Various posts about President Trump that can not seem to decide whether the character of Sallienjavi is for him or against him. A few Tweets to indicate Satanism, not to mention he follows 666 accounts and has 666 embedded in his user name. Obviously, Metro.co.uk were duped by a press release when they interviewed “Simon,” who they then stated “only uses his first name” and “doesn’t appear on camera.” The account was created in 2012. What kind of deranged fool would maintain this account for this long? Whose bitter antagonism could sustain such prolonged motivation for so long? There were no interactions on any of the posts of this alleged CEO. His followers appear to be nothing but bots and instant follow-backs. Why were these Biohackinfo clowns now messaging me from this account asking me to ignore them? My guess is that they were upset by the way I easily poked holes in their ludicrous story. At one point, the night before, they seemed to be trying to offer an olive branch so as to entice me to desist in my mockery of their infantile scheme:

Shortly thereafter, I received, also via Twitter DM, an unrelated piece of lunacy

And with that, I felt, “normalcy” had returned. This was a return to pure paranoia — the likes of which I regularly receive — without flagrant willful and grossly inept attempts at deception.

This Biohackinfo episode is easily the most elaborate and complicated display of absolute ineptitude that I have ever witnessed. I can only assume that they actually think their ploy is clever and that it will somehow prove convincing to a wider audience. They just may even be delusional enough to truly believe that their manufactured revelations will cause — as they put it — a “geopolitical shitstorm,” though to what end I can only still just speculate. One would pity them for their troubled idiocy if it were not so visibly stained with antagonistic malice. They created marketing materials for a fictitious product. They created a company and a villainous CEO. They managed to get media to pick up a press release. They manufactured a hoax conference. They put a massive amount of work into a complicated plot that was simultaneously so absurdly poorly-thought.

There is clearly more to this story for anybody who cares to look. That somebody is not presently me, but please let me know what you come up with…

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