The Strong Case for the Brick App-Blocker
2025 was the year when we all began to realize that maybe we’d let ourselves get carried away with this whole internet thing. This makes sense. Though the seeds of what would eventually become the internet first took root in 1969, the World Wide Web began gaining popularity during the ’90s, resulting in the peak internet of the early 2010s, when Twitter was for joking during award shows and our Instagram feeds were full of oddly filtered images of sunsets, or people’s latest meals.
Now, we’re closing in on two decades of being unable to escape The Algorithm, and words like “doom-scrolling” and “slop” have entered our lexicon in ways that we cannot take back. For many, the urge to “get off the internet,” as Le Tigre so memorably sang in 2001 (!!!)—if only we’d listened then—began to feel rather urgent.
When I set a time limit of 30 minutes for Instagram on my phone, it was too simple to tap “Ignore Time Limit” and continue scrolling if I felt like I was in the middle of something important (I never actually was). Much like those people dealing with the consequences of their own stupidity on the late-night infomercials of yore, I thought to myself, There’s got to be a better way!
I am not sure where I first came across Brick, but I know that I believed in its powers right away, clicking on the link from whatever article I was reading and swiftly purchasing it. The Brick is a small, square device that allows you to block your phone from whatever apps or websites you choose. The trick is that, unlike the easily dismissed alerts on your phone, you need to be physically standing next to the Brick in order to access that content again. I banned myself from Instagram, yes, but also TheRealReal—both websites where I was known to spend the day scrolling away (I had given up Twitter a long time ago, and did not feel the need to re-download TikTok after the short-lived “end of TikTok in the US” saga last December).
The difference was immediate. I left the Brick at my bedside table and started experiencing my weekends social media-free. When friends would share Stories and posts with me, I would just say, “I can’t see it! I’m Bricked!” which either resulted in screenshots or an “Oh, it wasn’t that important anyway.” (The other reaction was giggles, as I discovered that “being bricked” means something completely different… which naturally only made me want to say it more.)
