>large corporations whose main goal is to make you addicted to their product and extract the maximal amount of money.
I wasted thousands of hours in the 1990s reading Usenet. The part of Usenet I used (i.e., not the binary newsgroups) never made anyone any money and was never intended to make money by the people who built and administered it.
The software I used to read Usenet, namely Wayne Davison's trn, was likewise never intended to make any money: since its license had a clause prohibiting commercial use, it technically did not qualify as open-source software, but it was freely redistributable, i.e., basically given away (along with its source code).
But trn was designed for addiction. Hitting the space key always brought up a new screenful of text. Whenever I got bored with a post, the n key would skip the rest of the post and show me the first screenful of the next post. Once I'd been shown all the posts in one group, trn would automatically start showing me the next group with unread messages. In summary, the path of least resistance (namely, repeatedly hitting the space key till bored, then hitting the n key) caused a continuous "waterfall" or firehose of text to scroll by on the screen.
Moreover, it was difficult to use trn reflectively: e.g., if I found myself returning in my thoughts to a screenful of text I saw a minute ago, there was a good chance that there was no practical way for me put that earlier screenful back on the screen unless I was still reading the post in which the desired screenful occurred, in which cause I could scroll backward using the b key. (The early web, when the back button still reliably returned the user to the previous page, was a big improvement over trn in its support for reflective use.)
Point is that we should put the blame for the addictiveness of modern life on the right cause: not large corporations, not even the profit motive, but rather the technological progress that has accumulated over the centuries, which enables the creation and the delivery at an affordable price to the average person of experiences that are much more potent or pleasurable than anything available to an average person in the environment in which we evolved.
Yes, sex and eating good food with interesting people were always potent experiences for people, but in past centuries, it took a lot of effort, expense or risk to obtain those experiences in contrast to the ease, cost-efficiency and safety with which potent experiences can be arranged on the internet. And if a person carries around a smartphone, these cheap easy-to-arrange safe potent experiences are available at almost every waking moment.
For me the Usenet of the 1990s was a potent experience because I was strongly motivated by curiosity and learning. (1990s Usenet was full of conversations between very smart people.) Comedian and talk-show host Arsenio Hall joked in the 1990s that the internet was cocaine for smart people. This was true even before the US government lifted (in 1993 IIRC) the ban on using the US internet backbone for any commercial purpose.