Chaining Your iPhone to the Wall: An Anti-Screen Remedy?

If you have a chain, a good drill-driver, and the will to get rid from a longstanding screen addiction, this newsletter edition is your tailor-made antidote.

Today, I want to tell you about the most intriguing detox method I’ve come across in between two mindless Instagram scrolls:

Chaining your phone to the wall and using only a single full charge for an entire week.

The idea comes from New York tech and culture writer Tiffany Ng, who writes for Vox, Wired, and Vogue, and also publishes her own newsletter, Cyber Celibate, where she explores her nostalgia for a vintage Internet era when Paint still reigned on our desktops.

Ng often takes on analog challenges, from communicating by carrier pigeon to printing out her entire Instagram feed. Over our video call, she shared with me the “intrusive thought” behind her urge to chain her phone to the wall.

“It was a thought that kept coming back to me, like: ‘I wish I could just throw my phone away. I wish I could chain it to the wall.’ Then I thought: ‘Wait. What if that was actually possible?’”

Like with her other challenges, she chronicled her experience in her newsletter and on Instagram, where her video caught many people’s attention.

“I’m really glad the video took off, but I wasn’t expecting it to resonate with so many people,” she admits, as someone who regularly makes it her mission to cleverly dodge technology, even if that means faxing her friends.

So I had to understand what drives these frequent quests. Maybe she knows the secret that will finally (!!) make us lift our eyes from our screens toward the bright blue sky.