The average height of men is 172 cm, of women - 159 cm. The heart, on average, manages to make about 2.7 billion contractions in a lifetime. Statistics know everything about everyone, but it will not say anything about an individual concrete person: you can only know yourself on your own. However, technologies help here - gadgets and big data of total life monitoring.
Breathing and heart rate, websites visited and music listened to, calorie consumption, sleep phases and movement tracks per day - a total of 700 parameters of his state and behavior are monitored by American IT specialist Chris Dancy. These data allow him to see his own life objectively, as it really is - and even change it.
Russian "Wikipedia" calls Chris "the ideologist of the Quantified Self movement." Its members really pursue similar goals, trying to carefully record different aspects of their behavior. However, Chris's relationship with them did not work out: scientists from the Quantified Self look askance at enthusiasts from the outside, especially if they are not ready to follow their strict protocol. “They try to focus on a narrow, specific issue,” Chris told us. "They didn't really like my principle of continuous automated monitoring of all aspects of life."
In the fall of 2019, he performed at the Rocket Science Fest, the Moscow biohacking festival. Here we managed to talk: we found out where this strange hobby began and what new Chris learned about himself thanks to big data. “I was a terrible person and led a disgusting lifestyle,” he admitted from the very beginning.
You often mention that for many years you smoked two packs a day. Can monitoring really get rid of a bad habit?
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- It's a really curious story. When I started monitoring, I discovered that there are certain drinks that do not taste well with smoking. For me it is water, milk and orange juice: they make the smoke so tasteless that for a while the cigarette does not attract at all. In addition, I was able to identify situations in which smoking is especially strong: in the morning, while driving and after eating. At such moments, he began to drink a glass of juice or milk to delay this desire. I took my time and the whole rejection process took a couple of years. However, after a year my consumption dropped to a pack a day, and for the eighth year now I have not smoked at all.
Although it all started not at all because of smoking: several events coincided at once. Firstly, even then, in 2007, I actively ran pages on social networks and was constantly tormented by how difficult it is to find anything needed in the feed of old entries - both my own and my friends. Secondly, I somehow opened the "history" of my browser, and realized that it has accumulated step by step the complete chronology of my online life - complete, you know?
At first, I did not plan anything more: I just wanted to keep a detailed journal of my notes and Internet history. But when I superimposed this data on the days of the week in the calendar, completely obvious patterns emerged in them, patterns of my own behavior, which I had no idea about. It immediately became clear when and how much time I spent in front of the monitor, what exactly and where I was doing. Accurate records showed that my life was not at all what I had imagined. And it literally blew my mind.
Six months later, I began to record the music I listened to and the films I watched. By and large, this is not too difficult: once you start tracking one thing, you gradually get into a rut and then you just add new and new sources of data about yourself.
How do you manage to cope with this flow of information? The analysis of such arrays should take a lot of time
- My principle is that monitoring should take place imperceptibly, without much effort on my part. Take a traditional paper diary, for example. It requires a lot of attention, you need to remember about it in time, make an effort to sit down and take hold of the handle. Now everything can be automated: I just use a computer, a smartphone, and most of the monitoring work is done by programs.
There are many convenient applications that can combine and summarize data sets. The Gyroscope aggregator has proven itself to be excellent. It can collect statistics on the use of the Internet and entertainment, physical activity and physiological state (according to the readings of the heart rate monitor and other sensors), keeps track of movements, records the use of different types of transport, etc. - and presents all the data in a visual and convenient form. It remains only to manually fill in the "Mood" column on a regular basis.
All logs that I keep outside of this aggregator are saved in the Airtable application. It is a cloud-based database and spreadsheet service. Its main advantage is the ability to compare and find links between information from different sources. For example, you can find out the correlation between the time of day and the music you listen to. It is also important that, while writing in a diary by hand, you cannot be completely objective.
Whether you want it or not, everything moves by itself, as if there is no free will … I think if you knew at least what your smartphone already knows about yourself, you would also feel anxiety.
Smartphones really know almost everything about us. But you also offer to help them in collecting data. Doesn't a person have the right to isolation? The right to lock yourself in the bathroom and be all alone?
- In my opinion, the private life we are accustomed to is nothing more than a short-term historical accident. Turning to the past, it can be seen that for thousands of years people existed in close tribal groups, in peasant families, lived in a common economy and were almost never left alone. And they didn't have bathrooms either. There was no electricity, no developed communications, but people constantly saw each other, talked and gossiped. Everyone and everything knew about everyone. Therefore, the new data openness is a continuation of the old, but in a modern way. And in the future, lying will be the only way to maintain personal privacy. It will be necessary to create a fake image, an informational "foggy curtain" * behind which a person cannot be seen by the "eyes" of neural networks. This is inevitable, so I prefer not to move against the flow,but ride the wave and use it.
The more information, the better. For example, now I have about a dozen devices with me (all fit in a small bag) plus three gadgets that are almost constantly on me: a smart watch, a smartphone and an oxygen consumption sensor. It is difficult to say how many types of information they collect, though.
Three levels of monitoring can be distinguished: the level of devices, sensors and software applications. A smart watch is one device, but it has several sensors: a thermometer, a GPS tracker, a heart rate monitor, etc. The smartphone is also one device, but it has about a dozen applications installed that record certain aspects of what is happening. I think that in total they keep track of about 20 parameters of my life without interruption. At home, of course, there are more of them, and monitoring is more versatile. The data collected can also be divided into three levels. The top one is the logs of "external" events that are committed more or less consciously and are usually known to others. For example, visiting Facebook or flying to another city. Then an intermediate level follows: this is personal data about processes that a person already has little control, such as heart rate or body temperature. Finally, the deep level numbers provide information about the basic indicators of the body: these are blood glucose levels, brain electrical activity, genetics, etc.
Over time, I began to appreciate them. I see what fundamental changes are taking place, how they affect the state, the intermediate and outer levels. Moreover, modern sensors allow such monitoring to be carried out without special costs and difficulties: there are devices for every taste and wallet. Some gadgets, of course, are still missing. I have been very interested in eye tracking capabilities lately. Modern smartphones already support such functions **, albeit in a very limited way. If you expand them, you can track the user's focus. It would be interesting to know: where do I look more often and for longer? What do I focus on and why, and when do I fail to concentrate? Perhaps this will help and work on managing attention.
Gigabytes of digital "dossier" allowed you to get to know yourself better - but what was the most unexpected of this?
- Perhaps the most unexpected thing was that I am a very closed and reserved person. That it is not so easy for me to open my life even to close people. And that we can work on this too.
* Already today there are applications that allow "masking" in this way. For example, ad blocker Ad Nauseam invisibly "clicks" all the offers, whatever websites display to him, not allowing him to compose a certain portrait of its owner.
** On iOS phones with Face ID, this feature is called Attention Aware Features. It allows you to automatically change the volume of notifications and screen brightness depending on the direction of the user's gaze - for example, while you are using your smartphone, notifications will sound quieter.
Roman Fishman