When willpower alone fails, some of us reach for the soldering iron. Liam Kloppers took a rather more direct approach to his Bluetooth shock collar doomscrolling problem, reverse-engineering a smartphone-controlled dog collar and wiring it into his own software stack to deliver a sharp reminder every time his phone usage crossed a line he himself had defined.
Reverse-Engineering the Collar’s Bluetooth Protocol
The project hinged on finding a dog shock collar controllable via a smartphone application, one whose Bluetooth protocol could be reverse-engineered and hooked into custom code. Liam managed exactly that, building a quick-and-dirty Python control programme that talks to a web server running on his laptop. The final piece was MacroDroid, the Android automation tool, which he configured to call that web server whenever his personal criterion for doomscrolling was met. The collar itself was strapped around his leg, well away from anything vital, and the stage was set.
The logic is pure classical conditioning: behaviour you want to discourage, meet an immediate, unpleasant consequence. It is the same feedback loop Ivan Pavlov demonstrated over a century ago, applied here not to a dog’s dinner bell but to a human’s doom-laden feed of short-form content. Liam had tried other approaches before arriving at this one, but found he was unwilling to go cold turkey entirely, since he still saw genuine utility in social media. Hence the collar rather than the account deletion.
The Bluetooth Shock Collar Doomscrolling Test Did Not Go Quite as Planned
It turns out there is a meaningful physiological gap between a Labrador and a software developer. Even at a low setting, the shock was sufficient to send Liam’s phone skidding across the room and left him distinctly reluctant to pick it up again. Dogs, it must be said, wear these things routinely without apparent distress. Humans, less so.
The collar came off and has stayed off. In its place, Liam is now considering an audible alarm trigger, a rather gentler deterrent that swaps voltage for noise. It is a more forgiving implementation of the same underlying idea: an automated, external consequence attached to a behaviour the user wants to change, without relying on the willpower that was already failing him.
There is something genuinely interesting in the engineering here, even setting aside the self-inflicted discomfort. The ability to sniff a proprietary Bluetooth protocol from a consumer pet product, wrap a Python script around it, expose that as a local web endpoint, and then drive the whole thing from an Android automation rule is a tidy little systems integration project. The individual components are all off-the-shelf; the ingenuity is in how they are combined.
It also speaks to a broader frustration. Doomscrolling is genuinely difficult to interrupt, partly because the applications driving it are themselves engineered to resist interruption. Screen-time warnings, app timers, grayscale modes, the platforms tolerate these nudges because they barely work. Liam’s approach essentially bypassed the software layer entirely and made the cost of scrolling physical rather than abstract. That it worked, perhaps too well, is its own kind of proof of concept.
For anyone tempted to follow the same path but unwilling to accept the voltage, there are less sparky options. Commodore has produced a social-media-free phone aimed at exactly the kind of user who wants the hardware to enforce what their willpower cannot. No reverse-engineering required, and considerably fewer scorch marks.
