Internet addicts, There’s an app that can force you offline

Okay, so you’re at work, and you’re trying to do your work, but then you hear the sweet siren song of Facebook calling. What’s that? The ping of an email? That would be me more fun than working, right?

The Internet is a dangerous place. Who is to keep us from Pinning, checking out dudes on Tinder, buying things on Amazon, taking surveys on Buzzfeed or playing fantasy basketball while we’re trying to work, study, have dinner with friends or play with our kids? Apparently, we have no self control, which is why we need an app called SelfControl.

“SelfControl is like the simplest program in the world,” said its creator, 22-year-old Charlie Stigler. “Pretty much, you create a list of the websites that you want blocked. You’d probably put Facebook on there, YouTube, Tumbler, whatever. And then you choose an amount of time you don’t want to access it for.

“You say, okay, I don’t want to access it for the next six hours while I’m studying. And then, for those six hours, anytime you try and load that website, it just won’t work. It doesn’t matter if you restart your computer, if you try and uninstall the app, any of that. It’s very, very hard to get around.”

Stigler developed the free, open source Mac app six years ago when he was 16 years old. He met an artist online who paid him to develop a simple program that would block him from checking emails so he could get work done. It was so successful, they decided to share it with the world.

“I think of it as a volunteer project. Whenever I hear someone say, ‘Oh wow, this got me my PhD, this made my work tolerable,’ it’s really awesome. So I think of it as my contribution to the world. It’s my volunteer work, it’s my way that I’m giving back.”

Around the same time Stigler was developing SelfControl, Fred Stutzman was developing Freedom, an app that blocks the user from the entire Internet. Since then he’s created Anti-Social, an app that allows users to choose what sites they want to block.

“Keeping you away from the distractions that suck away your time that you’d rather be working or getting things done,” Stutzman said.

But here’s the thing, these apps are only for your desktop, your laptop, maybe an Android phone. But until very, very recently, no one could figure out how to do this on an iPhone.

“We just launched a new service that is the only service that will work on an iPhone or an iPad. It was a lot of work to build,” Stutzman said. “The reason why there aren’t other people out there with these products is it’s just incredibly difficult to do on an iPhone, but we figured out a way to do that. That new service is also called Freedom. We did just launch, so please be gentle.”

The iPhone app is free, but Stutzman charges $45 a year for his other software since, unlike Stigler, this is what he does for a living. But both apps are super popular. Freedom has had more than a million downloads and SelfControl has had over four million.

“It’s really just kind of been a surprise,” Stigler said. “I did not expect at all that it would be a thing that anyone else would use, let alone millions of people.”

It’s a prime example of our love/hate relationship with social media and the Internet in general. A lot of us are addicted and now we need more technology to set us free.