I mean smartphone apps are literal brain plugins designed to minimize choice in favor of passivity, where the passivity serves no other "value system" besides profit. Disciplined adults can maybe resist control; kids are super malleable and we leave them to faceless algorithms that tune themselves to the basest versions of our nature (a "base" we've probably spent our entire existence attempting to rise above).

The internet (maybe best framed as instantaneous "world connectivity") might not be inherently bad, but "consumer tech" leans towards exploiting / re-centering our "nature" + breaking down taboos in exchange for the "new market" that always emerges as a result. “Make something people want” (even if there may have been good reason for that want to go un-served).

I imagine this playing out on the level of individual adaptations / boundaries – from building personal discipline (hard) to just having enough of a life to be offline more than online – rather than any macro improvement. New tech (eg. Urbit) might do it, but I think it requires both utopian and revolutionary (tear-the-whole-thing-down) thinking, both of which are vastly more likely to (catastrophically) fail than succeed.

All that pessimism aside though: anyone can still choose to personally resist that pull instead of accepting it as inevitable, as challenging as it might be for some. And maybe you're perfectly fine (maybe even better than you'd have been otherwise) in that regime anyway, who knows?