Metaphone is a phone (which is not a phone) to help you stop using your phone.

Earl this year, Eric Antonow was in a cafeteria with his family when he felt the family and nervous urgency of reaching his phone. He patted his relief pockets: the fresh and thin plate was still there. He joked before his family that, like an addict to a blow to a blow, one day he would need a medical grade solution to detoxify his phone. Opioid addicts had metadona. IPhone addicts would need … targetTelephones.

“It was a joke, but I received two laughs from my two teenagers, which is gold,” says Antonow. “I thought, ‘I’m going to commit to part'”.

Antonow, a former marketing executive on Google and Facebook, has been compromising with bits for half a decade, doing what he calls “meaningless toys. “Your online store presents projects like a”listening switch“To indicate when one is paying attention and a Vinyl for silent meditationWith 20 minutes of silence recorded on each side (a disk player is not required).

Then, a few days after his last joke, he had enlisted Chatgpt to make fun of an image of a telephone -shaped device, without all the contents: a translucent rectangle that one could look or through. From that original generative sketch a more made design arose: a 6 -inch transparent acrylic slab with rounded corners, such as the iPhone and the green edges that looked like glass. Antonow made a request for samples and began a Indience campaign For metaphone: “Leave your phone without cravings or withdrawal.”

The first metaphones were sold for $ 25 through a crowdfunding campaign.

Courtesy of Eric Antonow

The smart phone dilemma is that we all want to use our phones less, but few of us really do it. Apple and Google offered some life conservatives in 2018, in the form of self -regulation tools such as screen time limits, but most of that went out the window during the pandemic years when the screens became a window to the outside world. Now, a person who hopes to claim their attention is trapped between two unattractive options: degradation to a minimalist “silly phone”, or surrender to the drip of dopamine of infinity content. Either way, the phone wins.

In response, an artisanal industry has emerged to offer detachment tools. There are applications with symbolic names, such as Freedom and Focusthat block that distracted the content. Startups like Brick and A stranger Offer “key” NFC to block and unlock addictive applications. (The co -founder of UNPLUQ, Rigter, says that people use the device equally to block social applications, such as Instagram, and work applications, such as Slack, that have become equally sticky). There is YondA closed bag to avoid the use of telephones in the courts and concert halls. And there is a growing line of “silly phones”, some at premium and postmodern prices.

You can buy stickers that look like application icons.

Courtesy of Eric Antonow

Unlike those solutions, metaphone is not long ago. It is more a statement: This is not a phone. But in a culture of technological excess, the project has resonated widely, such as Ozempic in an epidemic of screen obesity.

In May, when the first lot of metaphones arrived, Antonow sent them to a dozen friends to obtain their reactions. A receiver was Catherine Goetze, who quickly published a video about metaphone for her 400,000 followers on Tiktok. In it videoGoetze is queuing in a San Francisco Boba store, hunched as everyone else, but instead of moving on their phone, it moves … a transparent acrylic slab. The commentators went crazy with speculation. Was it a Nokia prototype? TO Black mirror trailer? In five days, the video had more than 53 million visits.

After Goetze’s video, Antonow says that metaphon “sold out massively.” (Initially he had ordered a series of 100 units, sold as A limited launch, for $ 25.) While planning to refuse, he says that the future of metaphone is less about individual purchases than larger scale experiments, for example, a restaurant that offers a metaphone in the menu so that people can dinner without distractions. The phones are more than just portals for other people, they are portals for another dimension. “Therefore, the counterweight must also be more important than alone, ‘Oh, I need to remember not using my phone at the table,” he says.