NoPhone is the latest brain-poundingly stupidly pointless Kickstarter idea to capture people’s attention since that potato salad, designed to cure phone addiction in the most inane manner possible…
Pitched as an aid to cure people’s unhealthy phone addictions, NoPhone is a featureless, battery-less black surrogate phone that prides itself on being ‘technology free’. So basically, it’s a doorstop.
“Phone addiction is real,” the creators of NoPhone say. “It’s ruining your dates. It’s distracting you at concerts. It’s disrupting you in movie theaters. It’s clogging up sidewalks. Now, there is a real solution.”
We don’t dispute that phone addiction is a thing but is swapping your expensive, just-bought iPhone 6 for a dumb surrogate the best way to go about curing that? In case you hadn’t noticed, all mobile phones since Year One come with this magical application that, in our experience, has proven to be the best cure for extended periods of screengazing. It’s called the off button.
If you actually find your phone more interesting than your date, it’s probably a sign that this thing isn’t going to last. If you find yourself checking your phone at a concert, well so what? Maybe the support band sucks so bad that playing Puzzle Chef or seeing how many dirty words Siri knows is a more fun alternative.
If you’ve got your phone on in the cinema then you’re not an addict, you’re an inconsiderate prick who probably pulls the legs off badgers for fun. As for morons who bimble down the street starting at their screens, well they’re basically cretins who don’t deserve kindness or sympathy. Even China doesn’t like you, segragating you away from normal people who prefer not to walk into inanimate objects or in front of buses.
The NoPhone doesn’t so much solve a problem as highlight that some people only have themselves to blame for their complete lack of self-control.
Admittedly, the makers at least appear to know that their product is a bit of a joke. Answers to the FAQs ‘does it have a camera?’, ‘does it make calls?’ and ‘does it have an operating system?’ are all simply stated: ‘no.’
Despite this, the creators also insist that it’s definitely not a joke. Who said Americans can’t do sarcasm?
We think crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo can definitely be a force for good, but they can also be a force for stupid and in some cases just plain weird.
In our honest opinion, NoPhone is somewhere between the latter two. We appreciate that we all need to unplug from the matrix from time to time, but ditching your phone for something more useless than a barbed wire dildo isn’t the best solution.
At the time of writing, $5,421 (£3,324) of the NoPhone’s $30,000 (£18,400) goal has already been amassed, so it looks like these black rubbery slabs might be coming to a store near you soon. I officially don’t want to live on this planet anymore.
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