Maybe it’s through word of mouth or (ironically) through your regularly scheduled online scrolling, but chances are high that you’ve heard of Brick or seen somebody say they locked out of social media (an alternative version of the salacious “bricked”). The chronically online—no judgment here!—have been crediting the palm-sized magnetic device with helping them stay offline. But is it just a marketing ploy?
At a time of peak exhaustion with our smartphones and being inundated with study after study that shows how excessive screentimes increase our chances of experiencing insomnia, anxiety, and depression, many are looking for ways to log off. Brick, a $60 device, was created by two Gen Z entrepreneurs and touted as the answer to solve our online woes.
“Brick was born from a personal need: Our phones were getting in the way of living. We knew we weren’t alone in this. So we built a simple, physical way to take back control,” says Brick cofounders TJ Driver and Zach Nasgowitz in a joint email to Vogue. “We believe that life is better when technology serves us, not the other way around.”
It works by creating a physical separation between you and the apps on your phone. Once your Brick device (which is… aptly, a little gray square) arrives, download the app and select whatever you’d like to TK from your phone. Then, you can simply activate the block by tapping your phone to the device or set a timer to turn on the barrier. Typically, the only way to unlock the apps is by tapping the phone again to your Brick device.
“We have an attention problem; a lot of these apps are very good at taking our attention, giving us interval variable reinforcement,” says Thea Gallagher, PsyD, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at NYU Langone Health. “What’s really difficult is that a lot of us have to use our phones for communicating with our children, work, friends, and more. People are trying to say, ‘How can we separate our phone use?’ We have some data to show that this has not been great for our mental health in a completely unregulated way, so what are we doing to regulate it as well?”
Los Angeles resident Amalia Nicholson has found the Brick helpful, citing the scheduling feature (where you can set in the app when to be locked out of your apps) is effective when it’s time for her to sleep. Having bought Brick at the recommendation of friends who love the device, Nicholson set her Brick in the kitchen to prevent her from doing her usual 3 a.m. scroll—even though she has her phone nearby, she would have to get up to unlock it. “I’m truly not going to go and unlock it at three in the morning,” she says.
Content creator Haley Talyor, who bought Brick after her husband tested and raved about the product, found herself doing just that to make sure she’s not on her phone when she doesn’t want to be. “I even have Pinterest blocked,” she says. “I find that even if you have the ones that you are normally scrolling on blocked, you still crave scrolling. So you have to block everything that you can do that [with], like Safari and Chrome, because you can find anything on there to scroll on too.”
While there are many other apps designed to help limit screen time, it’s Brick’s physical barrier that users say sets it apart. Content creator Sam Klein says she tried her iPhone’s “time limit” function, but found herself dismissing it as soon as it would pop up. On top of her immediate need of focusing on an upcoming project, Klein realized she needed something stronger to create a healthier relationship with her phone—which she did once using Brick. “I immediately felt a sense of relief,” she tells Vogue. “I didn’t find myself trying to open the app much. When I did it was more just out of habit, not like there was something or someone I wanted to see, which just showed me how much I needed Brick in the first place.”
