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Photo: Winnie Yang
I don’t remember exactly when it happened. Probably around 2012, when I downloaded Instagram to my iPhone and posted my first heavily filtered image. In the years that followed, the iPhone, which had, in the beginning, been revolutionary — I could listen to music! I could navigate without a map! I could learn obscure animal facts on the go! — stopped being a tool and started to feel more like an addiction.
I never consented to the smartphone’s dominance in my life. Sometime in the past decade, I began to feel less like a person and more like a lab rat trained to receive pellets. Except the pellets were things I hadn’t even known I wanted. I began to feel an impulse to photograph a meal or view instead of simply experiencing it. An impulse to check my email for no reason. To put on a podcast instead of thinking my own thoughts. To see what someone I’d known in college and not spoken to since had eaten for breakfast. For most of the time I’ve owned my phone, I’ve struggled against it — toggling it to airplane mode, banishing it to other rooms — all in an effort to rehabilitate my distracted, broken brain.
But then I discovered the Brick. It is a small gray NFC-enabled square, NFC-enabled so it can communicate with your phone (like with Apple Pay), and magnetized so you can keep it somewhere handy. It was launched in fall 2023 by two recent college graduates who found themselves waging similar battles against their phones. At first the price of the Brick seemed steep, even a little silly. Why would I pay so much for what was essentially self-control? But the Brick has been worth every penny.
The Brick works like this: You select what apps you’d like to block. Tapping your phone against the physical Brick magnet then “bricks” your phone and prevents you from accessing those blocked apps. Another tap unbricks them. My Brick never leaves its location in my office, where it lives on the steel index-card file where I keep my notes. Having to be physically near the physical Brick in order to unbrick your phone weaponizes human laziness for our own benefit, making it far more effective than app-only blockers or the iPhone’s Screen Time feature. (In an emergency, you can utilize one of five “emergency unbricks” to unbrick the phone without the magnet present.) Satisfyingly, the Brick tells you the precise amount of time that you have been bricked. And you can set the Brick to different modes, selecting different apps to block depending on your activity. (I have Brick modes for hiking, for writing, and for going out.)
Our phones have been designed to addict us. The Brick restores a sense of agency. I found it impossible to simply use Google Maps without also wanting to open Instagram, or my email, or my app that tells me which phase the moon is in. Something about the phone beckons me to pick it up in idle moments and run my finger across its screen — for no reason at all.
My phone prompts me constantly with what to buy, what to pay attention to, who to compare myself to, what I might make for dinner. I don’t want an algorithm to tell me how to spend my human life. I want to find out what I care about for myself. I want not to be a lab rat. The Brick has returned my phone to being a tool. I use it, instead of it using me.
Paradoxically, my Brick has helped me need the Brick less. The Brick was my nicotine patch, tapering me off Instagram and leading me to quit it entirely. These days, I use the Brick to block email, which I’ve found I don’t actually need on my person. I’ll brick my phone and forget about it. My Brick tells me I’ve been bricked now for 372 hours and 23 minutes.
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