In late 2023, two computer science graduates in Germantown, Wisconsin, started selling a gray square about the size of a teabag. Called the Brick, it was 3D-printed in a basement. Tap your phone against it, and the apps you’ve chosen become blocked until you tap it again. The product works because of where you leave it. Stick the Brick to your fridge, and opening Instagram now involves standing up, walking to the kitchen, and holding your phone against the device—by which point you’ve usually remembered that you didn’t actually want to.
TJ Driver and Zach Nasgowitz built a $59 accessory whose entire purpose is to make a $1,000 smartphone do less. Within months of launching, they’d sold around 2,000 units, each one printed at home. By this January, Business Insider was describing “Bricking” your phone as the new Dry January, and The Wall Street Journal had reported a spike in digital detox resolutions. The New York Times, meanwhile, predicted on the last day of 2025 that stripped-down phones would become a status symbol.
Driver, the co-founder, described the mechanism plainly: the extra moment of effort gives users a chance to decide whether they really want to open an app or whether they’d rather stay present. That framing would have been heresy in any Silicon Valley product review for the past 20 years. Removing moments of decision is precisely what the industry was built to do.
A product that removes capability should be a curiosity. It’s becoming a category. Bloom, built by two college students in 2024, sells a $39 stainless-steel card that does the same job at the budget end. At the other sits Norma, a European entrant that machines the idea into a weighted disc of solid stainless steel for around $70, with no battery and no subscription, marketed in the vocabulary of a luxury object rather than a gadget. When a product type is barely three years old and already has a premium tier, something more than a fad is underway.
Decades spent sanding everything down
For decades, consumer technology competed on a single axis: shrinking the distance between wanting something and having it. Amazon patented one-click ordering in 1999. Uber removed the phone call for a taxi. Spotify removed the song purchase. Apple Pay removed the wallet from the pockets of the masses. Netflix removed the decision to keep watching. The current wave of AI assistants removes the effort of writing the email at all. Convenience was the product, and every redesign, onboarding flow, and A/B test pushed in the same direction. Which makes the counter-movement hard to dismiss.
The Light Phone III, a deliberately limited handset with no browser and no social feeds, sells for $699, a price co-founder Kaiwei Tang defends as a small investment to get hours of your attention back. Punkt, the Swiss maker of minimalist phones, shifts around 50,000 units a year at up to $299. ReMarkable, the Norwegian company whose e-paper tablet cannot show you a notification, reached revenue of over $300 million by 2022.
Each is a new product built around deliberate limitation, and the limitation is what customers are paying for. Some buy it as self-control, a barrier wedged between impulse and action. Some buy it as focus, fewer options in exchange for more attention. And some buy it as proof of commitment. Superhuman understood this earlier than most. Rahul Vohra spent years rationing access to a $30-a-month email client while Gmail sat there, free. By 2019, the waitlist had swollen past 180,000 names, growth was capped at roughly 100 new users a week, and every applicant faced a mandatory 30-minute onboarding call before being granted the privilege of paying. Investors went on to value the company at $825 million, and today, after an acquisition by Grammarly, Superhuman has more than 40 million daily users (myself included). The queue functioned as the most effective marketing Superhuman ever ran because a product you have to wait for must be worth waiting for.
Behavioral economics has a name for part of this. In a 2012 paper in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely showed that people who assembled flat-pack boxes or folded origami valued their own clumsy creations as highly as experts’ work, an effect that held even for participants with no interest in DIY. They called it the Ikea effect. Labor, invested successfully, raises how much we value the result. The companies above have simply turned that finding into a pricing strategy. Effort changes behavior, and it changes valuation with it.
AI raises the price of restraint
This is where the trend stops being a quirk and becomes a strategic question. AI is collapsing the cost of producing nearly everything digital. Text, images, music, video, and code can all now be generated in seconds, which makes abundance the baseline condition of the internet. And the things abundance cannot manufacture—attention, commitment, and restraint—become the scarce goods.
It is the same instinct currently pushing software companies into shipping physical objects: When the digital version of a thing costs nothing to produce, value migrates to whatever still costs something. The constraint sellers were early to a logic that AI will now accelerate for everyone else. Every model release that makes content cheaper makes a Brick, a waitlist, or a record collection slightly more valuable by comparison.
None of this means the next decade belongs to typewriters. The winning products won’t necessarily be analog or even low-tech. Brick’s customers still own iPhones; that is the entire premise. Consumers aren’t rebelling against technology. Rather, they’re rebelling against convenience taken to its logical extreme, where every impulse is frictionless and every moment is optimized for engagement.
For decades, technology competed by giving people more: more speed, more access, more content, and more convenience. AI is accelerating that trend to its logical conclusion, making abundance effectively free. The result is that scarcity is becoming valuable again. Not artificial scarcity, but chosen scarcity. A product that limits your options. A service that asks for your time. A device that creates distance between impulse and action.
Brick, Superhuman, reMarkable, and the Light Phone look like very different products. In practice, they’re all selling versions of the same thing: a constraint. A reason to slow down. A barrier between impulse and action. Value created not by what a product enables, but by what it prevents.
For years, friction was a bug. The fastest-growing corners of consumer hardware say it’s becoming a feature. The ultimate luxury in an age of infinite abundance may not be more capability, but the deliberate power to say no.
Somewhere in Wisconsin, the proof is stuck to a fridge.
—Connor Jewiss
This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister website, Inc.com.
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