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 such as a “listening switch” to indicate when you pay attention, and a vinyl for silent meditation, with 20 minutes of silence recorded on each side (disk 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 launched an Indiegogo campaign for the methaphone: “Leaving your phone without desires or withdrawal”.
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 curators in 2018, in the form of self -regulation tools such as screen time limits, but most came out the window during the pandemic years when 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 concentration, which block the distracting content. Startups like Brick and Unpluq 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.) There is a lockable pocket to prevent the use of the phone in audience rooms and concert halls. And there is a growing range of “stupid phones”, some at postmodern prices of superior quality.
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 video, Goetze 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 had initially ordered a series of 100 units, sold in a limited version, for $ 25.) Although he warns to replenish, he says that the future of the methaphone concerns less individual purchases than experiences on a larger scale – for example, a restaurant that offers a methaphone on the menu so that people can dine without distractions. Telephones are more than portals for other people, they are portals to 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.
