This is a self contradiction. You always have the choice to turn off or tune out the distractions and focus your attention on more important things (which is the essence of free will). That people don't feel like doing that is a psychological problem not a problem with capitalism or profit seeking.
Of course the answer to a DOS is to not accept the incoming requests. It's tricky to distinguish between the malicious requests and the legitimate ones, and doing so doesn't cost nothing. One way to break the defense of a DOS is to DOS the system that does the sorting.
Further, The "requests", in this case bids for our attention, exist on a spectrum from "legit" to "malicious"-- or more precisely "information I will endorse having gotten in long-term retrospect" to "information I will have wished I had no gotten in long term retrospect." So we're already fucked, because you can't even make that determination in a meaningful sense.
When do you eventually settle on a filter that is an approximation of the above, you'll find that it's trivial to DOS that filter too since we're made of meat and exist in a low trust environment.
You can live in the woods or whatever, but since you're posting on HN, I assume you haven't chosen that. And you can look at the other posts in this threads for examples of just how intrusive and unavoidable the bid for attention actually are.
And all this is only the first layer of complexity: the difficulty/impossibility of individually choosing to "free will" your way of this issue. The next layer is that we're not even talking about individuals. We're talking about Capitalism, by which I mean we're talking about systemic issues.
That's a whole different can of worms, but the headline is: in response to global, systemic issues if you find yourself saying a variation of "it's simple! humans just need to be different/better," then you're doing it wrong. You're missing most of the relevant dimensions, so you will not solve the problem, nor is your voice likely to be particularly helpful in the discussion about potential solutions.
When it comes to drug law, precedent would show that they are far more culpable than the user/addict.
To some degree, any time anyone says they "can't" do something like this, they are saying they don't want it bad enough. I have done a lot of rearranging of my life to get things to work in a satisfactory fashion. This includes but is not limited to changing my relationship to how I use my phone. I used to be a big phone person. I now do most stuff online. After a long time of doing very little with my phone, I am slowly doing more with it these days.
But there is also this: If your family, friends and work all are basically making you crazy, they would probably do so even if phones did not exist. So, this might be an indicator of deeper problems.
Or it might be an indicator that you aren't being driven as crazy as other people, so it just isn't really that important to you.
If you want to guess the outcome of a coin toss, no strings attached, you're completely free to choose heads or tails.
But a lot of bright minds are working very hard to convince you to pick up that phone and not the book. You're being told to pick tails by a man with a gun, offered a reward if you do and pain if you don't.
Perhaps this man is quieter for you, or maybe you have never let him in. But he is very real for a lot of people.
No, you are not. A man brandishing a gun and telling you do do something is threatening to kill you. Nobody at instafacetweet is going to kill you for ignoring their products or limiting your usage.
What we're dealing with isn't an armed strongman, but a clown. The clown really wants your attention and has a lot of tricks up his sleeve to get it, but regardless of the difficulty, ignoring him is not dangerous.
It's true, you could do it but would it be a life?