MEMORY AS A SERVICE - LEARNING TO HACK TIME
Chris Dancy
Chris Dancy is touted as "the Most Connected Man on Earth," and the world is watching those connections carefully. For 25 years, Dancy has served in leadership within the technology and healthcare industries, specializing in the intersection of the two. Chris entered the public dialog concerning digital health as the media started to focus on wearable technology. He earned his moniker by utilizing up to 700 sensors, devices, applications, and services to track, analyze, and optimize his life--from his calorie intake to his spiritual well-being. This quantification enables him to see the connections of otherwise invisible data, resulting in dramatic upgrades to his health, productivity, and quality of life.
Chris Dancy, known as "the most connected man," explores
Learning to hack time to get through things that are difficult, or to slow things that are beautiful down, is the highest level cyborg skill you can do. You can hack time. You can change your life.
Summary
- Using a centralized digital calendar to aggregate environmental and biological data enables the visualization and searching of behavior through a chronological lens. - Modern technology turns humans into cyborgs by creating constant feedback loops that can be hacked to regulate biological functions like sleep, movement, and stress. - Algorithmic time in social media reorders human perception, creating a non-chronological experience that often increases stress and disrupts natural mental rhythms. - Reprogramming devices by renaming them after virtues or organizing apps by the feelings they evoke can shift focus back to personal values and slow down the pace of life. - Hacking the future involves sending intentional messages or data to one’s future self to mitigate anxiety, track long-term goals, and provide perspective on past fears.
Article
Memory As A Service: Chris Dancy’s Bid To Hack Time And Reprogram The Future
At Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki, The Self-Styled “Most Connected Man On Earth” Argued That Our Devices Need Not Trap Us In The Present. They Could Teach Us How To Escape It.
The modern crisis of time, Chris Dancy suggested, was not that life had become faster. It was that digital life had flattened experience into a relentless surface of alerts, feeds and demands, making every obligation feel immediate and every fear feel permanent.
Speaking at **Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki** on **13 October 2017**, Dancy, whose talk was titled **“Memory As A Service - Learning To Hack Time”**, offered a vision that was equal parts quantified-self experiment, philosophical provocation and practical survival guide. If technology had helped produce an age of scattered attention and ambient dread, he argued, it might also be turned into an instrument for memory, emotional regulation and even a form of personal time travel.
“**Digital technology flattens life out, and that is why it seems so overwhelming,**” Dancy said. “**Learning to hack time allows you to stand outside of it so you are no longer stuck in it.**”
From Medical Records To Machine Memory
Dancy’s argument began in illness, not abstraction. Trained as a SQL programmer and frustrated by conventional healthcare, he described how he started collecting his own medical history after discovering that his doctor would let him view records but not keep them. He took notes, digitised decades of files and paid workers to transcribe them, turning his health into a searchable database.
From there, the project expanded outward. He subscribed to local illness alerts, joined patient communities, tracked medications and, eventually, surrounded himself with devices, services and sensors. What emerged was less a gadget fetish than a radical act of record-keeping: a life converted into data points, then assembled into a system capable of showing patterns that ordinary memory could not hold.
By the early 2010s, he had reached a startling conclusion. His life was not primarily stored in doctors’ offices or even in wearable devices. It was in his phone.
That device, he argued, knew almost everything: where he went, how he spent money, whom he spoke to, what he listened to, how he worked, and what environments he moved through. The task was not merely to measure life, but to pull those fragments into a form that could be read, searched and acted upon.
The Calendar As A Repository Of The Self
The repository Dancy chose was unexpectedly ordinary: **Google Calendar**.
Into it he poured environmental, behavioural and biological data, using hidden feeds, automated triggers and connected services to make the calendar an index of lived experience. A jump, a raised voice, a stressful call, movement through space, even contextual information such as air quality or music could become part of a chronological record.
The elegance of the calendar, in his telling, lay in its familiarity. It rendered complexity visible. A single day could be read through colours, entries and clustered signals. A life could be searched by mood, person, event or place. The calendar became not just a planner, but a machine for reflection.
This shift was central to Dancy’s thesis. Once data was organised chronologically, memory ceased to be a fog of impressions and became something closer to an operating system. Human behaviour could be reviewed. Patterns could be surfaced. Feedback loops could be built.
In one example, if a phone call triggered stress, lights in his environment could dim. If his dogs became overstimulated, music could change to calm the room. Sensors did not simply observe the body. They altered the conditions around it.
The Cyborg In Time
Dancy’s deeper claim was that modern humans were already cyborgs, not in the cinematic sense, but because they lived inside constant feedback loops with machines. A phone buzzes, a watch vibrates, a map reroutes, an app predicts, a platform reorders what matters. Technology had not merely extended attention. It had changed the experience of time itself.
He drew on the Greek distinction between **chronos** and **kairos**. Chronos is measured, ordered, sequential time. Kairos is qualitative time, the felt moment, the season, the charged instant when something matters.
Much of digital life still pretends to operate in chronos. Calendars, clocks and timelines imply order. But social media and algorithmic systems increasingly operate in a kind of machine kairos, where relevance replaces sequence, and emotional force displaces chronology. Feeds are sorted not by when things happened, but by what a system decides should seize attention now.
That, Dancy argued, had profound consequences.
“**There is a direct relationship between what you do online and offline,**” he said. “**How they meet defines whether your life is overwhelming you or whether your life is being okay to you.**”
Algorithmic Time And The Manufacture Of Anxiety
One of the sharpest parts of the talk came when Dancy described how platforms had trained people to inhabit non-chronological time. Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook no longer simply delivered events in order. They trended, delayed, sorted and resurfaced content according to opaque machine priorities.
The effect was cultural as much as personal. Disasters appeared out of sequence. Crises piled on top of one another. Plans became looser, expectations more fractured, patience thinner. The social contract of time itself began to erode.
In this reading, contemporary anxiety was not only psychological. It was infrastructural.
Dancy’s diagnosis was striking because it refused the easy binary between “online” and “real life”. There was no clean divide, he suggested. There was only a hybrid temporal experience in which digital systems increasingly set the rhythm of emotional life.
Phones As Moral Mirrors
If platforms could disorder time, individuals, Dancy argued, could also redesign their own interfaces to recover agency. The smartphone was not just a distraction machine. It was a mirror.
“**Phones are really interesting mirrors into the type of people we are,**” he said. “**As you look at your screen, you can see how your values evolve and start to organize your life around the feelings you want to have.**”
That meant paying attention not only to what apps did, but to what they signified. A home screen could be read as a value hierarchy. Device names could be changed to reflect virtues. Apps could be grouped by the feelings they evoked rather than by function. Notifications could be stripped of metrics and social comparison. The point was not aesthetic tidiness. It was moral architecture.
Dancy urged his audience to build systems that reminded them not merely to produce, but to care for themselves.
“**Often we create to-do lists that do not have the fundamental things about being kind to ourselves,**” he said. “**Use your systems to remind yourself all day long to slow down and be more open.**”
Reprogramming The Future Self
Perhaps the most arresting idea in the presentation was Dancy’s insistence that technology could be used not simply to record the past, but to intervene in the future. If a tsunami stone could carry a warning across generations, then a modern device could carry reassurance across days, months or years.
He spoke of sending messages forward to himself, using software to create anticipation, perspective and emotional ballast. A future self, in this model, was not an abstraction. It was a recipient. Devices could be made to deliver notes, prompts, data and reminders at the moments they would matter most.
“**You can reprogram your future today by using technology to create a sense of anticipation and love for your future self,**” Dancy said. “**Use your devices to remind yourself that you are going to be okay.**”
It was an unusually tender proposition for a talk steeped in sensors and systems. Beneath the jargon of repositories and feedback loops lay a simple human wish: to leave evidence for oneself that panic passes, values endure and difficult seasons end.
Memory As Resistance
What made Dancy’s presentation resonate was not merely its technical ambition, but its emotional intelligence. He treated memory as more than storage and time as more than scheduling. In his telling, both had become contested terrain in an age when commercial platforms increasingly mediated attention, perception and feeling.
To build a searchable life log was, on one level, an extreme act of self-quantification. On another, it was an attempt to reclaim authorship from systems that sorted the world on our behalf. The point was not to become more machine-like, but to become more intentional inside the machine.
At **Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki**, Chris Dancy did not promise transcendence through gadgets. He offered something stranger and more grounded: a way of using technology to slow panic, surface values, remember tenderness and negotiate with the future.
In a culture obsessed with optimisation, that may have been the more radical hack.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki