The Methaphone Is a Phone (That’s Not a Phone) to Help You Stop Using Your Phone

Earlier this year, Eric Antonow was in a coffee with his family when he felt the familiar and nervous feeling of reaching his phone. He patted his pockets to relieve – the fine and fine slab was still there. He joked in his family that, like a Jesing addict for a blow, he would one day need a medical quality solution to detoxify himself on his phone. Opioid drug addicts had methadone. IPhone drug addicts would need … Methaphones.

“It was a joke, but I had two laughs from my two teenagers, which is gold,” said Antonow. “I said to myself:” I’m going to get involved in the song. »»

Antonow, a former Marketing Director of Google and Facebook, has been committed on bits for half a decennia, doing what he calls “insane toys. “His online store offers projects like a”listening switch“To indicate when you pay attention and a Vinyl for silent meditationWith 20 minutes of silence recorded on each side (disc player not required).

Thus, a few days after his last joke, he had enlisted Chatgpt to make fun of an image of a gadget in the form of a phone, without all the content: a translucent rectangle that one could look or through. From this original generative sketch, a more made design: a 6 -inch transparent acrylic plate with rounded corners, such as the iPhone and green edges that looked like glass. Antonow has placed an order of samples and started a Indiegogo campaign For methaphone: “Leave your phone without desires or withdrawal”.

The first methaphones were sold for $ 25 thanks to a crowdfunding campaign.

With the kind permission of Eric Antonow

The dilemma of the smartphone is that we all want to use our phones less, but few of us do it really. Apple and Google offered some life conservatives in 2018, in the form of self -regulation tools as screen time limitsBut most of this came out through the window during the pandemic years when the screens have become a window on the outside world. Now, a person hoping to recover his attention is trapped between two unattractive choices: downgrade to a minimalist “stupid phone”, or go to the drop of dopamine of infinite content. Anyway, the phone wins.

In response, a cottage industry has emerged to offer detachment tools. There are applications with symbolic names, such as Freedom And To focusThis block of distracting content. Startups like Brick And Get by Offer physical NFC “keys” to lock and unlock addictive applications. (The co -founder of UNPLUQ, Jorn Rigter, says that people also use the device to block social applications, like Instagram, and work applications, like Slack, which have become just as sticky.) YondrA lockable pocket to prevent the use of the phone in the hearing rooms and concert halls. And there is a growing range of “stupid phones”, some at postmodern prices of superior quality.

You can buy stickers that look like application icons.

With the kind permission of Eric Antonow

Unlike these solutions, the methaphone does not do much. It’s no longer a declaration: This is not a phone. But in a culture of technological excess, the project has largely resonated, like the Ozempic in a screen obesity epidemic.

In May, when the first batch of methaphones arrived, Antonow sent them to a dozen friends to obtain their reactions. A recipient was Catherine Goetze, who quickly published a video on the methaphone at her 400,000 subscribers on Tiktok. In the videoGoetze lines up in a Boba store in San Francisco, leaning like everyone else – but instead of scrolling through her phone, she scrolls … a clear acrylic plate. Commentators were unleashed with speculation. Was it a Nokia prototype? A Black mirror trailer? In five days, the video had more than 53 million views.

After Goetze’s video, Antonow says that the “massively sold” methaphone. (He initially ordered a series of 100 units, sold as A limited version, for $ 25.) Although he plans to restock, he says that the future of the methaphone concerns less individual purchases than experiences on a larger scale – talk, a restaurant that offers a methaphone on the menu so that people can dinner without distraction. Telephones are more than portals for other people, they are portals of another dimension. “So the counterweight must also be more important than simply,” Oh, I must remember not to use my phone at the table, “he said.