In June of 2023, the Marubo, a remote Amazon tribe of around 2,000 people, were supplied with Starlink antennae to connect to the internet.
This connection was immediately damaging to the community: “It changed the routine so much that it was detrimental. In the village, if you don’t hunt, fish and plant, you don’t eat.” Instead, teenagers were spending their time on social media networks, watching soccer videos and chatting on Instagram. Young men, meanwhile, immediately gravitated toward pornography, a fact Enoque finds particularly disturbing. Some leaders said they had already observed more aggressive sexual behavior from young men.
As a result, internet use has been limited. The antennae are switched on only two hours in the morning, five hours in the evening, and all day on Sundays. This confirms what we already know: the internet can ruin a society in a matter of months.
“Everyone is so connected that sometimes they don’t even talk to their own family,” laments Alfredo Marubo, leader of one association of Marubo villages.
“Young people have gotten lazy because of the internet,” complains Tsainama Marubo, a 73-year-old tribal elder. Instead of learning the orally transmitted traditions of Marubo culture, the youth are only interested in “learning the ways of the white people.”
The New York Post reported: “Remote Amazon tribe finally connects to internet–only to wind up hooked on porn, social media!”
From its very inception, the internet was a creation of the military-industrial complex and the alphabet soup agencies that was always intended as a tool for tracking, surveilling and controlling any would-be opposition to the Silicon Valley overlords.
By their own admission, the pioneers of social media deliberately engineered their algorithms to exploit vulnerabilities in human psychology and make their platforms as addictive as humanly possible. These same social media mavens concede that social media is “ripping apart society.” By and large, all the Big Tech CEOs raise their children tech-free or greatly restrict their children’s screen time.
We know, as one of the earliest viral internet videos has it, “The Internet is For Porn,” and that pornography is a neurological weapon rewiring the brains of an entire generation of men in ways neurologically indistinguishable from severe drug addiction. Porn has actually been used as a weapon of demoralization, as when the Israelis seized three Palestinian television stations and began “broadcasting pornographic movies and programs in Hebrew.” (And is it any wonder that Elon Musk has just tweaked Twitter’s rules to formally allow adult content on the platform?)
The average American now spends 11 hours per day listening to, watching, reading or generally interacting with media. In some fundamental sense, humans are already some amalgamation of human and electronic media, some species of homo medias that no longer remembers what it is to live an authentic human experience in the natural world.
The internet is increasingly a vile and divisive place that is tearing society apart at the seams.
Perhaps it’s appropriate to give the last word today to the Marubo.
Decades ago, the most respected Marubo shaman had visions of a hand-held device that could connect with the entire world. “It would be for the good of the people,” he said. “But in the end, it wouldn’t be.” “In the end,” he added, “there would be war.”
His son sat on the log across from him, listening. “I think the internet will bring us much more benefit than harm,” Enoque said, “at least for now.”
Regardless, he added, going back was no longer an option. “The leaders have been clear,” he said. “We can’t live without the internet.”
https:/corbettreport.com/remote-amazon-tribe-gets-internet
