Versen Lab · Apparatus VL-001
THE WALL
touch the void: a gazemaxxing technology / for Windows
Within the wall
Into the void
Witness truth
Infinitely deep
Endlessly flat
It is.
Matter
/
Perspective
§ 01 — What it is
Attention is your key through the Wall
You block a site. You open it anyway. Nothing loads.
To get through you don't type a password, and you don't wait out a timer, while scrolling your mails in another tab. You sit in front of your camera and you look at a blank screen, and the app checks whether you are actually there. Hold it long enough and the site opens, for as long as you decided. Then it closes itself.
That's the whole thing. Banal right?
What it does though, is leave you alone with what you were about to do, and what you were running from, for a moment, before you decide to do it.
§ 02 — Why this and not the others
Every other blocker pretends to charge you time. But time without attention isn't felt is it?
We know the internet got worse. Most of us know about the casino design, the infinite scroll, all of it. So we try blockers. They rarely work, and there is a fatigue that comes from trying.
Mine failed the same way every time. Not because I broke them (even though I did quite a few times), I simply waited them out. You start the delay, then you go pick up your phone. Any friction you can evade by looking somewhere else is not friction. You just delegated dealing with it to yet another tool. And who is to blame? That is what we expect from technology, friction reduction.
the delay only works if you have to be there for it. For a moment of silence to take shape.
So this blocker charges attention instead, and it checks. You cannot pay it with your phone in your other hand, or with another tab open in sideview. Around the forty second mark, staring at nothing, messing around pulling faces at yourself, the question shows up on its own:
why am I doing this, really?
Half the time I close it and go do something else. Not because the app stopped me, it was about to let me in. Because I had long enough to notice I didn't want it.
I can feel the empty, but precious time that the distractions I indulge in are about to spirit away in a vanishing trick.
That is the product. Not the blocking. The noticing.
My hope is that I, we, won't need a blocker, that we outgrow it.
It never really is about “the website”. If it isn't the internet it is something else we would jump on to avoid the silence. Convenience has been quietly eroding our capacity to bear its absence, and worse than that, to wish for anything beyond what it serves us. It robs us of our imagination for alternatives, for the experiences that simply cannot be made convenient.
A voidwall is one way to take some of that back. A space between the impulse and the hand.
| Every other blocker | The Wall | |
|---|---|---|
| The toll | Time, or a password, or a click-through | Held presence, verified by camera |
| Can you pay it while scrolling your phone? | Yes. That's the hole. | No. It only counts if you're there. |
| What it does to the impulse | Postpones it | Puts you face to face with it |
| Cost | $40–60, often per year | $29, once |
§ 03 — The apparatus
What you actually get
- Per-site tolls. youtube.com might cost you 120 seconds of stillness and buy 5 minutes. reddit.com might cost 20 and buy 15. You set both, per site.
- Schedules. Blocked 9–6 on weekdays, open after. Overnight windows wrap midnight correctly.
- Hard lock. Arm it and you cannot remove a site, ease a timer, or switch the lock off by clicking. The only exit is staring it down for the disarm duration you chose while you were calm. Quitting the app doesn't help — the block lives below the browser and survives a restart.
- Meditation mode. A genuinely locked, timed sit: kiosk fullscreen, no alt-tab, no minimize. Optional kasina disc to rest your gaze on. The timer is wall-clock — there's no failing it, drifting just reddens the edges.
- The screen as your lamp. In a dark room a webcam can't find your face, so the app turns its own background into a soft light when it needs to see you, and back to black when it doesn't.
- A Chrome companion (optional) that closes the one gap in this kind of blocking: a tab you already had open. It also replaces the browser's error page with a proper block screen that has the stare button on it.
- No account, no cloud, no telemetry. Face detection runs on your machine. No video is recorded or sent anywhere. There is no server to send it to.
§ 04 — Subject profile
Who this is for
You have installed a blocker before. Probably a few. You also uninstalled them, or found the hole, or waited them out. So you already know the problem was never the website.
You suspect that what you are avoiding is two minutes alone with yourself, and you are willing to test that.
It is not for you if you want something frictionless, if you are on a Mac (yet!), or if a local app using your camera on your own machine is a line you don't cross. All fine positions. This just isn't the tool.
§ 05 — Acquisition
Take it home
$29
once · yours · no subscription
Buy The Wall
Instant download. Windows 10/11.
The phone version is coming — buy now and you get it free when it lands.
If it doesn't do what this page says, email me and I'll refund you. No form.
§ 06 — Containment notes
What's rough about it
This is something I needed and built it, three weeks ago. This is version one and the worst it's ever gonna be. I'd rather you knew all of this before you paid than after:
- Windows 10/11 only. No Mac, no Linux. It works by editing the Windows hosts file.
- You need a webcam. Obviously. Any built-in laptop camera is fine.
- It asks for admin every launch. The hosts file requires it. Nothing else does.
- Windows will warn you when you install it. The app isn't code-signed — a certificate costs more per year than this product makes so far. You'll click “More info → Run anyway”. If that's disqualifying, don't buy it.
- It blocks websites, not desktop apps. And no wildcard subdomains yet.
- The phone version doesn't exist yet. It's where this belongs — phones are where the scrolling actually happens, and they all have a front camera. It's next. Buyers get it free.
§ 07 — Standing by
Not ready? I'll tell you once.
If you're curious but waiting for this to grow up — the phone version, a Mac build — leave your address and I'll let you know when it lands. One email, that one notification. I'll never send you anything else.
Opens Gumroad to confirm. Unsubscribe in one click, any time.
§ 08 — Provenance
Where it came from
The Wall is the first apparatus out of Versen Lab. The whole field log — what I wanted to figure out, what I made, what it did and did not change — is published in the open. The honest version, typos and all. read log 001 →
As waves are not the sea, yet no ocean is without waves, this stays everchanging.
What was or what will, is an echo of a place imagined, a frozen chrysalide.
Ripples of this moment, past and future, extends endlessly.
Yet, it is centerless.
Centerless