Late last fall, in the gleaming white lobby of Madison Square Garden, uniformed attendants were posted at security stations to make thousands of smartphones stupid. Chris Rock was playing his 10th show in a 12-city international tour, and at every stop, each guest was required to pass through the entryway, confirm that his or her phone was on vibrate or silent, and then hand it over to a security guard who snapped it into a locking gray neoprene pouch—rendering it totally inaccessible. The besuited man ahead of me in line, clearly coming straight from the office, had two cell phones, each of which required its own little bag. The kid behind me groaned that he wouldn’t be able to Snapchat his night. The friend whom I’d come to meet was nowhere to be found, and after slipping my phone into the pouch, I couldn’t text her to ask where she was. Finally, I spotted her near the escalator. “That was weirdly scary,” she said, laughing.

The show would start in 45 minutes. There were still seats to find, bathroom visits to be made, bottles of water to buy. And throughout the lobby, hands everywhere were fidgeting. It was as though all 5,500 of us had been reduced, by the sudden and simple deactivation of our phones, into a roomful of jonesing fiends.

February 2018. Subscribe to WIRED. Sean Freeman

We applied lip balm needlessly, ripped up tissues, cracked our knuckles. The truly desperate could get relief in a cordoned-off “phone zone” just outside the auditorium, where an employee would unlock your phone so long as you stayed within the bathroom-sized pen. “I gotta tell my wife there’s no service here,” a man told his friend, before ducking in. A woman laughed as she walked by. “It’s like a smoking area! Look at all those addicts.” Meanwhile, those who resisted the temptation to gain back access to their phones, not five minutes after relinquishing it, complained that they didn’t know the time.

Yondr, a San Francisco company with 17 employees and no VC backing, was responsible for the cell phone restriction. Its small fabric pouches, which close with a proprietary lock that can be opened only with a Yondr-­supplied gadget, have been used at concerts featuring Alicia Keys, Childish Gambino, and Guns N’ Roses, and at shows by comedians like Rock, Dave Chappelle, and Ali Wong who don’t want their material leaked on YouTube or their audiences distracted by Instagram. They’re used in hospitals and rehab centers to enforce compliance with health privacy laws, in call centers to protect sensitive customer information, in churches to focus attention on the Almighty, and in courtrooms to curb witness intimidation. They’re used in more than 600 public schools across the country to force children, finally, to look at the board and not their screens. The ingeniously unsophisticated scrap of fabric has only one job: to eliminate smartphone use in places where the people in charge don’t want it. Which is great when it means creative artists can express themselves freely or the rest of us can see a doctor without worrying we’re being recorded. But when it means stifling expression in places where smartphones are increasingly our best chance to document abuses, chronicle crimes, and tell the world what we see, it takes on a different, darker dimension. “The smartphone is many things,” says Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst for the ACLU. “A means of privacy invasion”—something we need to be protected from—“but also an instrument of free speech.”

I met Graham Dugoni, Yondr’s founder, over drinks one evening in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He was in New York for two days, meeting with vendors, clients, and business partners about how and why they should use Yondr. “Everyone gets it super intuitively,” he says. “Our attachment to our phones isn’t all that intellectual. It’s much more a body thing, so it was always clear to me that whatever solution there is to this problem had to be itself physical and tangible.”