People Are Paying $59 to Make Their Phones Worse

In late 2023, two computer science graduates in Germantown, Wisconsin, started selling a gray square about the size of a teabag. Called the Brick, it was 3D-printed in a basement. Tap your phone against it, and the apps you’ve chosen become blocked until you tap it again. The product works because of where you leave it. Stick the Brick to your fridge, and opening Instagram now involves standing up, walking to the kitchen, and holding your phone against the device—by which point you’ve usually remembered that you didn’t actually want to.

TJ Driver and Zach Nasgowitz built a $59 accessory whose entire purpose is to make a $1,000 smartphone do less. Within months of launching, they’d sold around 2,000 units, each one printed at home. By this January, Business Insider was describing “Bricking” your phone as the new Dry January, and The Wall Street Journal had reported a spike in digital detox resolutions. The New York Times, meanwhile, predicted on the last day of 2025 that stripped-down phones would become a status symbol.

Driver, the co-founder, described the mechanism plainly: the extra moment of effort gives users a chance to decide whether they really want to open an app or whether they’d rather stay present. That framing would have been heresy in any Silicon Valley product review for the past 20 years. Removing moments of decision is precisely what the industry was built to do.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Fast Company.