The metal is a phone (which is not a phone) to help you stop using the phone

At the beginning of this year, Eric Antonow was in a cafeteria with his family when he felt the family need and recaps to reach his phone. He stroked his pockets for relief: the fresh and thin slab was still there. He joked with his family who, like a drug addict for a success, one day he would need a medical level solution to detoxify himself from his phone. Oppiacean drug addicts had methadone. The drug addicts for iPhone would need … methaphones.

“It was a joke, but I had two laughs from my two teenagers, who is gold,” says Antonow. “I was like,” I will engage in the bit. “”

Antonow, a former Google and Facebook marketing manager, has committed to bits through the decade, doing what he calls “senseless toys. “His online shop offers projects like a”listening switch“To indicate when you are paying attention and vinyl for silent meditationwith 20 minutes of silence recorded on each side (not requested record reader).

So, a few days after his last joke, he had enrolled chatgpt to deride an image of a telephone -shaped gadget, without all the content: a translucent rectangle that could be looked at or for everything. From that original generative sketch a more made design emerged: a 6 -inch light acrylic slab with rounded corners, such as the iPhone and green edges that resembled the glass. Antonow placed an order for samples and started a Indiegogo countryside For the metal: “Leave the phone without cravings or retreats”.

The smartphone dilemma is that we all want to use our phones less, but few of us actually do it. Apple and Google offered some life conservatories in 2018, in the form of self -regulation tools such as the time limits on the screen, but most of these came out of the window during the pandemic years in which the screens became a window in the outside world. Now, a person who hopes to recover his attention is trapped between two unattractive choices: the downgrade to a minimalist “stupid phone” or surrender to the dripping of the dopamine of infinite content. However, the phone wins.

In response, a cottage industry emerged to offer detachment tools. There are apps with symbolic names, such as Freedom AND Focusthat block that distracts the content. Startup like Brick AND Unpluq Offer “keys” NFC physicists to block and unlock addiction apps. (The co -founder of Unpluq, Jorn Rigter, says that people use the device equally to block social apps, as Instagram, and the working apps, as Slack, who have become equally sticky.) There is YondrA storage case to avoid the use of the phone in the classroom and concert halls. And there is a growing range of “Dumb Phones”, some at premium and postmodern prices.

Unlike those solutions, the metal does not do much. It is more a declaration: Ceci n’est pas a phone. But in a culture of technological excess, the project has resounded widely, such as Ozempic in an epidemic of screen obesity.

In May, when the first lot of metaphons arrived, Antonow sent them to a dozen friends to get their reactions. A recipient was Catherine Goetze, who quickly published a video on the metaphon to his 400,000 followers on Tiktok. In the videoGoetze is lined up in a Boba store in San Francisco, curved just like everyone else, but instead of scrolling the phone, it is scrolling … a light acrylic slab. The commentators were unleashed with speculation. Was it a Nokia prototype? A Black mirror trailer? Within five days, the video had over 53 million views.

After Goetze’s video, Antonow says that the metaphon “is massively exhausted”. (Initially he had ordered a series of 100 units, sold as a limited version, for $ 25.) While it is planning to supply, it says that the future of the metaphon concerns less than individual purchases than large -scale experiments, let’s say a restaurant that offers a metal in the menu so that people can have dinner without distractions. The phones are more than simple portals for other people, they are portable for another dimension. “So even counterbalances must be more important than the simple, ‘Oh, I must remember not to use my phone at the table’,” he says.