It doesn’t look like anything. A plastic box, just a bit heavy due to the weight of the lid. This is what we have found to be most effective for self-imposed digital detox or for getting rid of other addictions. You slip your phone in, set a time of confinement, say eight o’clock, until the next morning. After a five-second countdown, two mini-rectangles pop out of the lid and there you go, the box locked.
On the photos of suggestion of use, smartphones, game consoles, cigarette packets, bank cards and, strangely, a condom. David Krippendorf, inventor of the KSafe, first called it Kitchen Safe. When it was created in 2013, it imagined itself coming to the aid of all those who could not keep up with their diet: people would use the box, like him, to store cookies and chocolate. “A year later, I realized that people were using it to lock up their smartphone,” he tells us.
Sales of KSafe surged in 2020, following the release of The Social Dilemma (Behind our smokescreens), a documentary by Jeff Orlowski devoted to the exploitation of algorithms for addictive purposes broadcast on Netflix, which knows a lot about it. We see Tim Kendall, former director of monetization of Facebook and ex-president of Pinterest, the social network for sharing images, – therefore responsible for everything that happens to us -, explain having promised himself a thousand times that he wouldn’t take his phone to his room and be unable to.
There, appears on the screen the box in which all the members of a family slip their telephone at dinner time. Tim Kendall is now CEO of Moment, an app for monitoring time spent online, which raises questions about the sincerity of his confession. Is he really repentant or did he think that the detoxification market for smartphones is now superior to that of social networks?
Per two-hour period and at night
Today, half of these boxes are sold in the United States, and Europe is now the second market. Two weeks after acquiring it, I lock my phone in it for two hours when I need to concentrate for work, then for the night, feeling like I’m asking for a casino ban.
There’s something a little decadent about paying a third of the value of my second-hand phone to stop me using it. But, after all, in an affluent society, others pay for fasting courses, and Marie Kondo has sold millions of books to help sort out and have less business at home. Moreover, with teenagers, it is easier to say: “We’re going to put our phones in there” that : ” Give me your phone. »
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