While millions of people around the world eagerly awaited the release of Apples’s new iPhone 7, dozens of attendants at the Fireside Gathering – a no-phone, no-reception event held at a summer camp two hours west of Ottawa – had to make due with a “revolutionary NoPhone Air, a simple phone package with nothing but air inside.
“We are very proud to introduce the least-advanced NoPhone ever,” inventors Chris Sheldon and Van Gould told Fireside Gathering attendees on September 10th. “We took away the headphone jack. And then we took away everything else. It may look like nothing is in this packaging. But that’s what’s so beautiful about it.”
Sheldon and Gould are part of a growing smartphone-resistant counterculture, and claim they came up with the idea for the NoPhone after seeing everyone at a rooftop bar in New York with their eyes glued to their smartphones. “The NoPhone was created to combat the rapid decline of real life social engagement that has stemmed from chronic smartphone use. It’s sleek, plastic design serves as an idle hand’s security blanket and is devised to alleviate the constant need humans have to hold a mobile device without preventing users from fully experiencing their immediate surroundings,” they wrote on the NoPhone official site.
