Push hard on my skin, and you’ll find that the source is two lumps of glass, metal, and plastic embedded in my right hand: a years-old magnet in the ring finger and a newer NFC chip in my thumb webbing. I first heard about magnet implants in college, but I didn’t seriously pursue one until my colleague Ben Popper got his for the piece that would become Cyborg America. At a Brooklyn tattoo parlor in 2012, I watched someone cut along the top of my finger, tear open a pocket with a dowel, and slide in a dark rod about half the size of a sunflower seed. I began to catalog sensations: the vicious pinch of picking up a Buckyball, the jitter of using a microwave, the sense of floating when I hovered my hand above another magnet.
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