Former Google and Facebook marketing exec Eric Antonow, trapped in a coffee shop with his family and his twitchy compulsion to touch a screen, blurted out a line: “Opioid addicts have methadone. iPhone addicts need… Methaphones.” Two teenage chuckles later, a bit became a mission.As reported by Wired, the Methaphone is exactly what it sounds like: a fake phone. It’s clear acrylic, roughly phone-shaped, smooth, glassy, and with no electricity coursing through it. It doesn’t buzz or light up. It doesn’t send notifications. You can’t check your replies on it. You can’t check your email on it. You can’t play Fortnite on it. It’s a clear slab of plastic that simply exists, and nothing more — and that’s the point. It simulates the tactile sensation of having a phone on you without actually being a phone at all.Antonow has a history of making “mindless toys,” as he calls them; products that are a little clever, a little useless. We used to call them novelties back when Spencer’s Gifts was a regular stop on every mall kid’s fifth, sixth, and seventh loops around the mall on an uneventful Friday night with friends. For $22, you can buy a three-pack of vinyl LPs of recorded silence, each conveniently 20 minutes long, about the recommended time for one transcendental meditation session. You can just sit in silence for free, or you can spend $22 for a three-pack of silence. That kind of thing. Knowingly useless but cute in a way that feels like a midpoint between silly Spencer’s Gifts novelty and conceptual art.Antonow used ChatGPT to visualize the thing and crowdfunded the first batch for $25 apiece. They sold out instantly. Then TikTok caught wind. A video of someone mock-scrolling the translucent slab in a San Francisco boba line hit 53 million views.The Methaphone is in no way a doctor-recommended way of curbing phone use. Speaking with Wired, addiction researcher Anna Lembke compared it to a nicotine-free vape. It shares a lot of the physical, tactile motions of smoking, and even some of the visual cues, but it doesn’t provide the same chemical hit. That slot machine of micro-dopamine rushes you get with every scroll is missing, replaced with maybe a view of your own feet, or the dog or human child you’re ignoring as you look at your phone.Antonow has been selling The Methaphone on his website for 25 bucks a pop, and even recently started selling sticker packs that look like icons for fictional apps with names like Walk, See Friends, and Day Dream that act as reminders of the better things you could be doing with your time than looking at your phone.In a world of noise that’s all vying for our attention, it’s kind of nice that there is a product out there that actively wants us to ignore it while providing the tactile sensations that we’ve all so quickly grown attached to.The post The Methaphone Might Be the Key to Breaking Your Phone Addiction appeared first on VICE.