I can't live without the Internet. 

I could say that is because I make my living off of it, and that would be accurate enough. Except I have been an internet addict since a few months after I conned my employer to help me install a SLIP connection to their server, back when Netscape was still in Beta. 

Luckily I never had to use AOL as I worked at an institution that got me straight onto the real internet, and to be honest there were very few webpages to visit. Mostly I perused newsgroups, back when they were THE THING. 

My mother created one of the first academic web pages for the Physics and Astronomy Department she worked in, and designed and maintained a website for Native American artists. She accumulated quite a collection of Native American art in recompense. 

So, I am no Luddite when it comes to all things Internet. But with that said, this hardly surprised me:

“It’s a real shame that we don’t have a control group to see just how bad the Internet is for us.”

Actually, there’s this remote tribe that

“I SAID ITS A REAL SHAME” https://t.co/o7wvldHEF0

— Aelfred The Great (@aelfred_D) June 4, 2024

Is anybody surprised?

A remote tribe in Brazil has become bitterly divided nine months after gaining access to satellite internet via Elon Musk’s Starlink service. 

The 2,000-member Marubo tribe, who live along the Ituí River deep in the Amazon rainforest, were connected to the World Wide Web last September after 20 antennas were donated to them by American entrepreneur Allyson Reneau.

Starlink, which works by connecting the antennas to 6,000 low-orbiting satellites, delivers super-fast internet to far-flung corners of the planet and has been billed as a game-changer by Musk. 

But the internet is already posing problems for the Marubo, with many youngsters in the tribe now hooked on social media and pornography, much to the alarm of elders. 

“When it arrived, everyone was happy,” Tsainama Marubo, 73, told The New York Times. “But now, things have gotten worse.”

No doubt this is all somehow Elon Musk's fault. 

I often trash the New York Times and with good reason. But they also produce some really great reporting, and this story fascinated me. 

As the speeches dragged on, eyes drifted to screens. Teenagers scrolled Instagram. One man texted his girlfriend. And men crowded around a phone streaming a soccer match while the group’s first female leader spoke.

Just about anywhere, a scene like this would be mundane. But this was happening in a remote Indigenous village in one of the most isolated stretches of the planet.

The Marubo people have long lived in communal huts scattered hundreds of miles along the Ituí River deep in the Amazon rainforest. They speak their own language, take ayahuasca to connect with forest spirits and trap spider monkeys to make soup or keep as pets.

They have preserved this way of life for hundreds of years through isolation — some villages can take a week to reach. But since September, the Marubo have had high-speed internet thanks to Elon Musk.

There is nothing idyllic about the Marubo people's life, at least not to me. You couldn't pay me enough to live in the middle of a jungle or eat spider monkeys. 

But I am pretty sure that getting everybody addicted to porn and turning kids into social media addicts is quite the lifestyle upgrade that they needed. 

“When it arrived, everyone was happy,” said Tsainama Marubo, 73, sitting on the dirt floor of her village’s maloca, a 50-foot-tall hut where the Marubo sleep, cook and eat together. The internet brought clear benefits, like video chats with faraway loved ones and calls for help in emergencies. “But now, things have gotten worse,” she said.

She was kneading jenipapo berries to make a black body paint and wearing ropes of jewelry made from snail shells. Lately, the youth had become less interested in making such dyes and jewelry, she said. “Young people have gotten lazy because of the internet,” she said. “They’re learning the ways of the white people.”

Then she paused and added, “But please don’t take our internet away.”

I understand that! I guess all people are the same under the skin. 

Starlink's arrival in the Amazon has been neither all bad nor all good, just like the internet itself. In many ways life has gotten better for all the reasons you expect. Mobility of people and of information--both of which we term communications--are probably the most important to empower people. Starlink doesn't improve mobility, but it sure changes the other lines of communication. 

Kâipa Marubo, a father of three, said he was happy that the internet was helping educate his children. But he also was concerned about the first-person-shooter video games his two sons play. “I’m worried that they’re suddenly going to want to mimic them,” he said. He tried to delete the games, but believed his sons had other hidden apps.

Alfredo Marubo, leader of a Marubo association of villages, has emerged as the tribe’s most vocal critic of the internet. The Marubo pass down their history and culture orally, and he worries that knowledge will be lost. “Everyone is so connected that sometimes they don’t even talk to their own family,” he said.

He is most unsettled by the pornography. He said young men were sharing explicit videos in group chats, a stunning development for a culture that frowns on kissing in public. “We’re worried young people are going to want to try it,” he said of the graphic sex depicted in the videos. He said some leaders had told him they had already observed more aggressive sexual behavior from young men.

Of course, it is easy to romanticize the innocence of what we once called "noble savages." It is likely that for the most part one set of vices is being exchanged for another. 

Yet there is plenty of evidence that, at least for kids (and I think likely adults), social media and things like pornography are devastating to mental health. Whenever I go to confession, the priest has a stack of pamphlets on pornography addiction--it is so pervasive that they hand them out to the men as a matter of course, as far as I can tell. 

You can't stop the earth and get off, so society will adapt. But it is sad to see the worst aspects of progress corrupting an island of relative innocence in these matters. 

On the other hand, I can't wait to read the stories about how Amazon is delivering in The Amazon.