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On a recent weekday, I sent an Instagram message to a friend of mine, an art adviser in New York named Stephen Truax, to gossip about an exhibition. Instead of messaging me back in the app, he texted me to say that he’d blocked Instagram on his smartphone during daytime working hours. Impressed, I asked him how he was accomplishing such a feat. Truax said he was using Opal, an app that makes your smartphone a little more like a so-called dumbphone, without requiring you to trade in your device altogether. He said that several of his friends swore by the app, and so he had begun using it, too. Opal is not new—its current iteration launched in 2022—but I took this word of mouth as evidence, outside of the app-hype cycle, that it might actually work. I downloaded it without any particular optimism; I considered my phone addiction to be an incurable case.
Being on the internet too much is an essential part of my job, and a requirement of writing this column. But I’m aware that there’s still such a thing as diminishing returns; a doctor doesn’t have to personally chain-smoke, for example, to know that cigarettes are bad for your health. When I began using Opal, a few weeks ago, the barrage of online stimulation had become even more cacophonous than usual. It was not just social-media updates; it was video podcasts, live-streaming commentators, and celebrities on press campaigns competing to be perceived through the digital noise. The temptation to tune into everything at once was too strong. I could leave my phone in another room, or switch to a flip phone, or try “launcher” apps, such as Dumb Phone, that convert one’s smartphone display into a minimalist set of text-only buttons. But those solutions all rely on self-discipline, which is something I’ve proved to be short on. Opal, I found, provides something like gentle parenting for your smartphone habits: you set up a daily schedule of which apps to block when, and then the app guides you into sticking with it using a combination of mild friction, encouragement, and guilt. As the app suggested, I set up a recurring “Work Time” block from 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. and selected every social app I ever use: Bluesky, Instagram, TikTok, X, and even Threads. At the designated time in the morning, those apps go gray on my home screen and remain that way all day.
I was surprised to find this new routine relatively painless, in part because of the app’s flexibility. Every time I’m frustrated that I can’t look at Instagram on my phone, I just think, Surely I, a human adult, can wait a few more hours to see my friends’ dog photos—5 P.M. isn’t that far away. Crucially, Opal also allows users to suspend the block for short periods of time without feeling like failures; when the designated break time elapses, the blockage automatically resumes. (I would say that I’ve only used the breaks for necessary work purposes, but that would be a lie.) Kenneth Schlenker, the French American founder and C.E.O. of the company, told me that cultivating a sense of user agency is important. “If you create a commitment that’s too high, you run the risk of having people abandon it,” Schlenker said. The inspiration for Opal came from Schlenker’s time working at Google, around 2008. There, he saw how software was beginning to be designed to “hack your attention,” he said, with new interfaces and alert systems optimized to get users hooked. During the following decade, he watched app addiction spread from tech insiders to everyone else, including his relatives, young and old. He founded Opal in 2020 in order to add what he called “productive friction” to online user experience. “The entire tech industry is about removing friction, and we do the opposite,” he said. (The app’s name comes from the idea that our attention is precious; users who reach their screen-time goals are issued sparkling digital gemstones.)
Adding friction means making it harder to access addictive apps. When certain platforms are blocked on Opal, they’re inaccessible in web browsers as well; taking a break from the scheduled block requires entering passcodes and waiting out a built-in delay, during which the app prompts you to do breathing exercises. The writer Molly Young has recommended sequestering your smartphone in a plastic box, with a timer-lock, for enforced productivity; the app is much more convenient. One thing that appeals to me about Opal is how it leverages technology against technology: whereas TikTok and Spotify optimize their interfaces to encourage maximum consumption of content, Opal uses crowdsourced real-time data and A/B testing to maximize how long those apps get blocked. This may seem ridiculous—the idea that the only way to defeat the dark arts of user-experience design is through more dark arts—but to Schlenker it’s just a question of best practice. “I think most people overestimate their free will and underestimate the power of habit-forming products,” he said. In other words, we could use some help resisting the predations of designers attempting to get us to scroll our feeds yet again.
There’s a clear demand for what we might call anti-tech tech. Opal has several million monthly active users, and recently signed its first institutional agreement, to provide the prep school Harvard-Westlake, in Los Angeles, with a customized app-blocking dashboard. Students will be asked to install it on their phones, in compliance with new regulations restricting smartphones in schools. (The school will be able to see how much time students have spent blocking apps, like a digital-hygiene attendance report.) The company now has enough data from users to calculate where in the world screen addiction is the worst. “New York City is one of the highest screen-time cities in the world,” Schlenker said. “New Yorkers spend forty minutes more per day on their phones than Parisians.” (The recent New York average, at least among Opal’s users, is close to five and a half hours.) According to behavioral science, though, shame is not a strong motivator for spurring personal change. Positive reinforcement is better. Thus, I can look in my Opal app and see that my daily screen time is down by more than thirty-five per cent since I started using it; I just unlocked the “diligent gem” to mark a hundred hours unwasted. I take solace in the fact that my mind feels clearer after a full workday without scrolling social media, but an added bonus is that once the block ends I can mainline all the good posts that I missed. As Truax told me, “The flood of content that happens after dinner is wild.” The addiction is not cured, perhaps, but at least it’s finally managed. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
