So what's to be done?

Intention.

Right now, most people's relationship with technology is either transactional (I need to use this in order to accomplish this task, do my job, talk to this person) or impulsive (I got a notification, let me check tiktok) but rarely is it intentional.

We can do this at an individual level. I think that, for many of us, being on the fediverse is part of this quest for intentional computing.

For myself, I'm a Linux user because that allows me to preserve more of my own agency than Mac or windows (conversely, if also frequently demands that I exercise my own agency more than Mac or windows.)

I've disabled the vast majority of notifications on my phone. I will spend my attention where I choose to do so.

But this is a very 1960s hippie argument. This is the whole earth catalog argument. "I can fix this for myself, so that's good enough."

Nope. This is a community problem and it's going to take a community solution.

So we have a generation of kids growing up with a severe and frequently life impacting dependence on a dopamine reward cycle facilitated by technology, and getting fed to algorithms designed to maximize engagement at all costs, which generally means isolating them from their peers and pushing them towards more and more extreme content.

They would increasingly rather do literally nothing, in spite of the fact that doing nothing leaves them in a kind of discomfort that is akin to spiritual anguish, than anything that requires more than a minimal level of effort.

And we have a bunch of adults who are barely out running the same beast, who are falling victim to the same patterns. With the adults, they usually have at least some defence mechanisms against this stuff. They can usually read reasonably well. But the algorithms are more aggressive, and the gambling mechanics come with dollars attached, and it's not just that the things they're consuming are hyper-stimulating, it's specifically that these things are aggressively isolating them from their peers and alienating them from their own decision making.

I've been struggling, lately, because most of the tools and techniques that I've used to motivate kids in the past aren't working anymore.

Their TV shows are hyper-stimulating. Their video games are hyper-stimulating and have a dozen baked in slot machine mechanics. (Even the benign looking games, hot wheels racers and the like, are full of random draw lootboxes.) Everything is designed to maximize their attention and keep them coming back.

We used to describe video games as "addictive" as if that was a good thing, when it was rarely true in even extreme circumstances. Now it's just true most of the time, and obviously bad.