The ills of social media are pretty well-known, and the impacts are so well-documented that Meta, YouTube, and TikTok are now facing a lawsuit for making their platforms addictive. Australia has already banned social media for teens under 16 years of age, and multiple other countries are considering similar restrictions. And let’s face it: social media can lead you into a doomscrolling spiral that is an utter waste of time and energy.
Enter Pankaj Tanwar, a developer who just created a Chrome extension that will make you scream at your computer in order to unblock social media sites. “A productivity tool that blocks social media websites and makes you say embarrassing things to unlock them,” says the extension’s description on Google’s web store. But screaming at your PC or Mac is not the whole solution.
This is pretty cool
First, you must hit the loudness threshold while screaming, “I am a loser.” Next, you must increase the tempo of your embarrassing scream to unlock the time for which a blocklisted site becomes accessible. Based on how desperately loud you are, you might unlock a few seconds or minutes worth of social media surfing time.
I tried. I failed.
The open-source tool is aimed at students, at-home workers, and basically any person with a computer who gets distracted quickly and ends up losing valuable time to mindless X or Instagram browsing. By default, the extension blocks X, Instagram, and Facebook. However, if you have other digital vices, ahem, you can simply add the URL and block those sites, too.
I desperately needed it
Once you set up the extension, which also works well in other Chromium-based browsers such as ChatGPT Atlas, you will run into a full-screen blocker every time you try to visit the distracting sites. There’s even a visualizer where you can see the loudness levels of your screen, and a timer underneath that shows you the duration for which the sites will be unlocked.
This won’t be the first project of its kind. Rhys Kentish, a software engineer at a UK-based company, developed an app called Touch Grass that will require you to go out, literally touch grass, and click a snapshot as evidence to unlock distracting apps on your phone.
As far as the “Scream to Unlock” browser extension goes, well, I desperately needed a solution like this. I visit X and Reddit for research and news gathering, but often end up wasting too much time getting distracted by random posts and rabbit holes. Thankfully, the little honor that I have left stops me from shouting at my PC and waking up my cat.