Dan Kurtz, the game developer and improv actor who created Binky, tells me that the idea for the app arose partly from his own feelings after reading through the current updates on Facebook or Twitter while waiting for a train. “I don’t even want that level of cognitive engagement with anything,” he explains, “but I feel like I ought to be looking at my phone, like it’s my default state of being.” Kurtz wondered what it would look like to boil down those services into their purest, most content-free form. This is what people really want from their smartphones. Not content in the sense of quips, photos, and videos, but content as the repetitive action of touching and tapping a glass rectangle with purpose and seeing it nod in response.

Binky also offers a new take on the smartphone’s effects, McLuhan-style. Some of the toy-dog aspects of mobile computing remain, along with the compulsive ones, too. But the novelty of touching the smartphone has long since ended, and the angst of its compulsive use is universally acknowledged. Those habits are here to stay, like it or not.

Standard smartphone fare inspires users to create content whose publication accrues value for the tech titans that operate walled-garden services. Those businesses transform that aggregated attention into revenue and stock value in turn. Meanwhile, the pleasure and benefit of those services dwindles by the day, as conflict and exhaustion suffocate delight and utility.

Binky offers a way to see and tolerate that new normalcy. What if the problem with smartphones isn’t the compulsion to keep up with the new ideas they deliver, but believing that the meaning of those ideas matters in the first place? Binky offers all the pleasure of tapping, scrolling, liking, and commenting without any of the burden of meaning.

The app frames its intervention with humor and mockery. Its name is a trademark for baby pacifiers, an image that also adorns the app’s icon. Calling it “Binky” implies a global infancy among apps, but also a legitimate comfort thanks to Binky’s succor. And Kurtz initially conceived of the app in a Comedy Hack Day mini-hackathon held by Cultivated Wit, a firm that produces, well, content—videos and events and software and the like. Forged from games and comedy, Binky might look like an ironic joke to some.

“Is a baby pacifier just a parody?” Kurtz retorts when I press him on the matter. It’s a good point; something that replaces another isn’t always a joke. He reminds me of my own ironic app, which, to my delight, he cites as an inspiration: a game called Cow Clicker that boiled down Facebook games to their purest form like Binky does social apps. In both cases, irony offers an in-road for some but burns out fast. Deliberate use always wins.

On that front, Kurtz makes his faith in the app’s earnest utility clear. “Look, all we want from our apps is to see new stuff scroll up from the bottom of the screen,” the Binky website reads. “It doesn’t matter what the stuff is.” That’s no gag; it’s an incisive elucidation of why people want to handle their smartphones so often. By sparing the mental and emotional effort of taking in content and spitting back approval and commentary, Binky makes it possible to experience the smartphone as such, as a pure medium for its behavior rather than a delivery channel for social-media content.