Christian Schneider

Opinion columnist

Imagine talking to someone from the 1980s and telling them the type of behaviors human beings would be engaging in just 30 years later.

Tell them that everyone would carry devices with them that had access to all the world’s information base, and yet they would use these miraculous devices to send each other pictures that never should be viewed outside their urologist’s office. Or that on trips, people would stay in total strangers’ houses, reassured solely by the fact that the homeowner has the same app on his or her phone. Or even weirder, imagine explaining Donald Trump was elected president.

But we have now reached the most inexplicable modern “advancement:” businesses implanting microchips into their employees, allowing those businesses to track these workers’ movements and purchases.

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Three Square Market, a western Wisconsin company that specializes in vending machine technology, has offered employees the chance to voluntarily have the chips implanted under their skin, which would allow them to access certain areas of the building and pay for items with the swipe of their hands. Unbelievably, around 50 employees have agreed that being constantly monitored by their employer seems like a pretty swell idea.

Of course, any type of new technology is bound to provoke some “the government is turning our frogs gay with chemicals” style of conspiracy theories. But the whole idea of humans being implanted with a chip to control their behavior has been the stuff of cautionary science fiction for decades. Way back in 1966, Philip K. Dick wrote a short story about a man with a chip implanted in his head that the government used to turn him into a trained assassin without his knowledge. And I don’t want to become a trained assassin, as it sounds exhausting, and it rarely comes with dental coverage.

Naturally, Three Square Market has assured its employees that the information stored within the microchip will be used only for the powers of good. But while the technology of the chips may remain the same, the technology in the world around them may change rapidly.

Who’s to say some rogue company won’t develop a chip reader of its own to scan people as they walk down the street? What if a big box store starts reading you and mailing you coupons based on what section of the store you spent the most time in? What if your employer wants to monitor how much time you spend in the bathroom, or at lunch? Ninety percent of the time, I’d rather people not know where I am — I have no desire to live within The Matrix.

Employees who have had the chip implanted delight at the “convenience” of it all — imagine being able to purchase snacks at the company cafeteria by simply waving your hand! But have we really regressed to the point where the process of extracting a wallet from your trousers to exchange currency has become too much of a burden for common workers? Has anyone complained to their daughter, “Sorry, sweetheart, I’m not going to be able to make it to your piano recital tonight, I’m going to be busy picking up some Combos from the work vending machine”?

Yet employees still insist they’re willing to go along with it because they think they’re simply riding the unavoidable wave of time. Soon, those of us who find the practice horrific are going to be cast into the lot of retro fetishists, like people who currently buy records, go to movie theaters and talk to their children in person.

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“In the next five to 10 years, this is going to be something that isn’t scoffed at so much, or is more normal,” software engineer Sam Bengtson told The New York Times. “So I like to jump on the bandwagon with these kind of things early, just to say that I have it.”

But I subscribe to the immortal words of Robert Frost, who counseled:

“Ah, when to the heart of man

Was it ever less than a treason

To go with the drift of things … ”

And thus, someone is going to have to implant a microchip in me over my dead body. (Which will probably be caused by a microchipped government assassin.)

Christian Schneider is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors and a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where this piece was first published. Follow him on Twitter @Schneider_CM.

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