How I learned to Time Travel
Timeless
Chris Dancy (USA)
Mindful Cyborg
Chris Dancy is touted as “the Most Connected Man on Earth,” and the world is watching those connections carefully. He has been featured in Wired, Mashable, TechCrunch, the Wall Street Journal, and Businessweek. Interviewed by NPR, the BBC, and Fox News. Purveyor of TED talks. Subject of TED talks. And now headlined by Showtime’s Dark Net.
Timeless shares how he "hacked a time machine" from his
We live in a world of big data and little wisdom. You don't get better by accounting steps; you get better by taking them. You don't need an alarm to go to the bus; you need an alarm to be nice to each other. Hack your heart.
Summary
- Time is categorized into two forms: Chronos, the ordered chronological data of daily life, and Kairos, the qualitative feeling and unstructured experience of the "right" moment. - A temporal design algorithm involving collection, triggers, filters, and feedback loops allows for the intentional manipulation of how time is perceived through technology. - Slowing time perception is achieved by removing quantitative metrics from social media and organizing digital home screens by personal values and feelings rather than urgency. - Reliving the past involves using sensory anchors like music, maps, and environmental cues like scent and temperature at a subtle intensity to trigger mental time travel. - Future behaviors can be engineered by sending positive messages to one's future self and using context-sensitive reminders to prioritize kindness and mindfulness over efficiency.
Article
How I Learned To Time Travel
At Biohacker Summit 2017, Chris Dancy Turned Wearables, Memory, And Design Into A Provocation About Time Itself
On 19 May 2017, at Biohacker Summit 2017 Stockholm in Sweden, Chris Dancy, appearing under the name Timeless, delivered a talk with the disarming title *How I Learned To Time Travel*. It began with nerves, self-mockery and a warning that what he was about to describe might sound absurd. By the end, it had become something stranger and more compelling: a manifesto for biohacking time not by bending physics, but by redesigning perception.
Dancy, the American “Mindful Cyborg” once marketed as the “Most Connected Man on Earth”, did not claim to have built a machine of gears and light. What he proposed instead was more intimate and more unsettling. The time machine, he suggested, was already there, hidden in the feedback loops between body, screen, memory and desire.
Chronos, Kairos, And The New Battle Over Experience
At the heart of the presentation was a distinction drawn from Greek thought. “Chronos is the ordered minute by minute where days equal years, while Kairos is the unstructured time when we experience things and how they feel,” Dancy said.
That split gave the talk its architecture. Chronos was measurable time: calendar entries, heart rate, air quality, movement, appointments, weather, transactions. Kairos was felt time: intuition, atmosphere, emotional weight, the sense that a moment was either dragging or disappearing.
Dancy’s argument was that modern life had become saturated with chronos while starving for kairos. Sensors, apps and platforms generated endless data, but little wisdom about how life was actually lived. He described building systems to track almost everything, then mapping those signals against Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in order to distinguish what was essential from what was merely loud.
It was a familiar quantified-self instinct, but Dancy pushed it somewhere more philosophical. Enough data became information, enough information became knowledge, and enough knowledge, over time, might become wisdom. Yet the digital age, he implied, had trapped many people at the bottom of that pyramid.
A Calendar As Archive, A Self As Database
Much of Dancy’s experiment rested on an obsessive act of documentation. He spoke of feeding years of personal data into Google Calendar, creating a life that could be searched, sorted and replayed. Alongside that archive came images layered with metadata: weather, posture, gait, music, temperature, location.
This was not memory in the old sense. It was memory scaffolded by machines.
The result, he suggested, was not merely better recall but a transformed relationship to experience. The more intimate the data, the more powerful its grip on time. Private signals, bodily measures, financial traces, environmental cues: these changed how moments were felt and remembered. Time was no longer just passing. It was being annotated.
The Temporal Design Algorithm
The boldest part of the talk arrived when Dancy described what he called a temporal design algorithm: collect, trigger, filter, feedback, change the experience.
The premise was deceptively simple. Gather data from devices and environments. Attach those signals to triggers such as location, mood, activity or biological state. Filter them so they appear only in the right context. Then build ambient feedback loops subtle enough to alter behaviour without overwhelming the mind.
This was less a gadget than a method. A reminder delivered at the right place. A prompt withheld while driving. A visual cue that slowed a reaction. A future message sent back into the present.
Dancy’s claim was not that technology had to dominate the self, but that it could be rearranged to produce different temporal realities. The machine did not need to command. It only needed to nudge.
Slowing Time In An Age Built To Accelerate It
One of the more arresting insights of the session was that many technologies sold as tools of efficiency also speed up the internal experience of life. Obey every notification, trust every optimisation promise, keep urgency at the centre of the screen, and time begins to collapse.
Dancy’s response was almost monastic. Remove the calendar from the front page. Hide the battery percentage. Strip the phone’s main screen back to emptiness. Introduce friction before entering social media, even if only a forced breath. Organise digital space not by urgency but by values.
“You shouldn't connect to iPhone when you can connect to love,” he said. “Name your devices after things you value as a subtle reminder of what is important to you.”
It was a line that might have sounded glib in other hands. Here it became a quiet rebuke to the emotional vocabulary of modern hardware, in which every interaction is framed by speed, productivity and demand. Dancy urged his audience to rename and reorder the objects around them so that their tools reflected virtues rather than compulsions.
Memory As Sensory Reconstruction
If one half of Dancy’s theory concerned slowing the rush of the present, the other concerned reliving the past. Photographs alone, he argued, were blunt instruments. Better were layered sensory anchors: maps, playlists, light levels, scents, humidity, temperature.
Used delicately, these could become portals. A song tied to a city. A smell tied to a room. A subtle shift in lighting that brought back a season. The key was restraint. Recreate a memory at full force, he warned, and the brain rejects the illusion. Do it softly, at perhaps thirty percent intensity, and the mind begins to move backward.
This was biohacking as stagecraft, but rooted in an intuitive truth. Experience is not stored in one channel. It returns in fragments, and those fragments can be composed.
Living In The Future Before It Arrives
Dancy was at his most provocative when speaking about the future. “As your life becomes more automated and you allow technology to do more, you literally could live in the future if you knew how to access it and harness it,” he said.
His examples were not science fiction. Music queues, calendar previews, weather forecasts, health projections, location-aware alerts: systems that already reveal what is likely to happen next. To most people, these are convenience features. To Dancy, they were primitive forms of temporal displacement.
The deeper move was psychological. He described sending messages to his future self and engineering the language those messages contained. “I started engineering the words I used with myself in the future, and when those messages came back to me, it started changing my behavior now.”
It was a striking reversal. The future was not only something to anticipate. It was something that could speak back, if properly scripted.
Against The Tyranny Of Optimisation
For all its technical vocabulary, the moral centre of the talk was unexpectedly human. Dancy warned against total optimisation, against the flattening of life into metrics and efficiency. The point was not to become a better machine. It was to resist one.
“Don't be optimized; learn and see something new,” he said. “You meet more people by doing things you didn't expect than anything else.”
That insistence on surprise mattered. In a culture that rewards prediction, Dancy argued for serendipity. Take the slower route. Break patterns. Leave room for encounter. If time feels shorter when life is automated, then novelty may be one way to stretch it back open.
A Strange, Persuasive Vision
There was an eccentricity to Chris Dancy’s presentation at Biohacker Summit 2017 Stockholm, and he seemed to know it. He joked, wandered, confessed embarrassment and veered between quantified-self rigor and near-mystical language. But beneath the theatricality was a serious proposition.
Time, in his telling, was not only what clocks measured. It was what systems amplified, what bodies registered, what environments cued and what technologies taught the mind to notice. To redesign those systems was, in a meaningful sense, to time travel.
Not through wormholes or impossible engines, but through attention, memory, friction and care.
That may have been the most unsettling part of the talk. The future, Dancy suggested, was not arriving all at once. It was already here, humming quietly in calendars, watches, playlists and prompts, waiting for someone to recognise that perception itself had become programmable.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2017 Stockholm