It's such a learned helplessness statement "oh no, I can't possibly not open the reddit app 30 times a day. Save me from myself."
Like, I get it, it's not easy but it's also a pretty basic part of being an adult. Like brushing your teeth, eating healthily or doing exercise (which is to say: if you think "I have problems with those too" then the problem really isn't your smartphone).
Everyone knows smoking crack is bad for you. A lot of people want to quit but are unable to no matter how much “self discipline” they have. And app developers have teams of people dedicated to making sure you stay on these apps longer and longer.
Now imagine your dealer is in your pocket 24/7.
Again: learned helplessness. You've picked a comparison to ensure that you have maximally separated any notion of your own culpability. Drug addicts who get clean start by recognizing that they made the choice to start, and need to be mindful of the choice to quit, outside the physical addictions which drive it.
The answer for them isn't "I need the crack dealers to all go away first".
You wouldn’t tell a depressed person to just stop being depressed either and that they lack the discipline to be happy.
Externalizing the locus of your problems is itself a pathology: "I receive too many notifications from social media apps" in a normal person leads to "so I just silenced them all" or "that's why I don't install social media apps, who needs that?".
The first thing anyone does in this topic though is externalize the problem: it's not a problem with them, it's a problem with the broadest possible generalization of a thing. They're not incapable of having a smartphone, everyone is.
People fail therapy and rehab all the time because of that expectation mismatch: you don't go in and "they fix you", you go in and put in the work to fix yourself, with some assistance.
The US army officially considers cyberspace to be a dimension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Dimension_Operations
If a factory is polluting the air, the water, if you can't sleep because it makes loud noises at night, you don't tell people they should get air masks, or water filters, or take melatonin, or to just move somewhere else.
If you live in an area that a corporation is about to deforest, you don't just tell individuals to just plant a tree.
If you live in an area where traffic lights don't work, the streets are full of pot holes, you don't tell people to just drive better and get a jeep, or to just walk places.
The internet is a shared space, and you have to consider who you're siding with and why. You initially said this "triggers your learn self discipline" response. Did you stop and ponder why you have that trigger and why you feel so strongly about shifting the onus from powerful corporations towards individuals?
Thus proving my original point: the immediate reaction is to try and externalize the problem, despite the fact that it is entirely being driven by your own choices.
You've carefully constructed your example once again to make yourself the idle victim: powerless against those evil corporations who are just forcing those alluring social media sites on to you. As though you exert no control or dominion over your smartphone or it's applications, or how you use them.
Given that you ignored pretty much all of my points and instead doubled down on your bootstraps mentality I'm just gonna say your empathy is very atrophied.
Perhaps the language of idolatry as used in the Bible (reflecting thousands of years in the Jewish and Christian traditions) may be more helpful. What many see as addictions may in fact be an underlying spiritual condition of serving something as an idol, or a God-substitute. The only way to break that is repentance, turning from the idolatry to the living God. But this gives hope, because as people we are able to do exactly that.
We are more that a bag of matter and energy. We can exercise responsibility over our actions.
The doctrine if sin and the language if idolatry actually can give hope, as the possibility of repentance and belief is always there.
billions of dollars invested into behavior manipulation algorithms using billions of terabytes of data gathered through constant surveillance
vs
just don't use it lol
If you were to design a visual drug, as a concept, you wouldn't get very far from the current state of affairs.
The preponderance of substance abuse addicts in recovery that "swap the witch for the bitch" and adopt behavioural addictions also support the genetic basis for addictability (my word).
I am a behavioural addict in recovery (4442 days today) and when I consider my siblings, parents, their siblings and their children (my first cousins), there's a >50% incidence of addiction to either smoking (>2 packs/day), alcohol, sex, food, gambling, or drug use. Half of that cohort have more than one addiction and among those almost all share a substance addiction with a behavioural addiction.
I appreciate that this is just one family and is statistically irrelevant. However because I've been around people dealing with their addictions for so long and spoken to so many, this is not an uncommon familial pattern among addicts.
I'd also add that in my clan there are many instances where one sibling is an addict and another isn't. This is not learned behaviour (though the introduction to addictive pathways/behaviours etc is often as a result of environmental and psycho-social factors).