I take one look at our smartphone/social media addicted society and the damage that does and think of the parallels of forcing opium on a population in the 19th century

Not that the rural third world don’t already have phones. Whether they are engineering to be as addictive as crack like in the west I’m not sure.

Oh, they are already as addictive as crack because Zuckerberg has successfully pushed his social media onto them. And it's very hard to compete with Zuck. The network effect is a very wide moat.