After nine months with Starlink, the Marubo, an Indigenous Amazon tribe, faces challenges like addiction and concerns about potential loss of cultural identity
it turns out, many of the same challenges that have racked Americans for years (teens glued to phones, gossip-filled group chats ...).https://www.nytimes.com/ ... Phillip Crenshaw / @pcmugwort1 : @JonHaidt Society as a whole has to make the decisions in which they want to go. Often, technology is pushing those decisions. Many times society is no very well prepared for these changes. Society as a whole does not often understand the technology or what the changes will lead to. Peter Yeung / @ptr_yeung : So often when I go to very remote parts of the planet, there is Starlink. Fascinating report by @jacknicas on this internet powered by 6,000 satellites. In the Brazilian Amazon there are 66,000 users. It's changing ways of life; not always for the better. https://www.nytimes.com/... Greg Gauthier / @gmgauthier1967 : It's not the technology, it's the human beings that use it. Just like guns. What Haidt is advocating is going to contribute to the end of free and open global communication, because the legislation they will draft at his prompting will be loaded up with Trojan horse language, Gisele Regatão / @gregatao : A woman from Oklahoma bought 20 @Starlink antennas for a remote Indigenous tribe in Brazil. The internet was a sensation, but also detrimental. “In the village, if you don't hunt, fish and plant, you don't eat,” said leader Enoque Marubo. By @jacknicas https://www.nytimes.com/... Glenn Schmelzle / @heyglenns : @JonHaidt Interesting social experiment we're running on ourselves. Atin / @___atin___ : This article on giving starlink to marginally contacted tribes in the Amazon is hitting me right in the feels. i've always been pro-connectivity but suddenly and unexpectedly find myself wondering if this is really a good thing. Thoughts. https://www.nytimes.com/... [image] @easygoer1999 : Best figure out ways to train adults to be better stewards and better parents as Capitolism isn't going to allow the big changes to be made. Prohibition after the fact isn't going to work. School at every level now built around technology. Albert Fong / @albertfong98 : Imagine you were part of a remote tribe with no screens, no internet access, no smartphones, virtually no contact with the outside world. Then one day, you just got it all. The results are exactly what you'd expect https://www.nytimes.com/... @jacknicas #internet #starlink #culture @carlosperes_ : Very gloomy to see the last of the wild — here the seldom contacted MARUBO people of the western Brazilian #Amazon — succumbing to the allure of the Internet, which will inevitably hasten the demise of their culture & the hyper-diverse forests they protect https://www.nytimes.com/... Ved Nayak / @catcheronthesly : Nowhere to hide from the RF waves! Where will you run when there're eyes in the sky. 'Musk's Starlink has connected an isolated tribe to the outside world — and divided it from within.' The Internet's Final Frontier: Remote Amazon Tribes https://www.nytimes.com/... Maria Chong / @mariachong : Fascinating article. Lives are saved due to faster treatment after poisonous snake bites. But boys in these remote tribes are being exposed to graphic and violent pornography. Scott Wallace / @wallacescott : There might be some good in this, but the downside is huge. — The Internet's Final Frontier: Remote Amazon Tribes https://www.nytimes.com/... @ethingiscringe : @JonHaidt How much of the antipathy is not the access, but the dissolute nature of the content? Benjamin D White / @waldenkent : 'The Marubo are struggling with the internet's fundamental dilemma: It has become essential — at a cost.' Elon Musk's Starlink Connects and Divides Brazil's Marubo People - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/... Ash Paul / @pash22 : The Internet's Final Frontier: Remote Amazon Tribes. Elon Musk's Starlink has connected an isolated tribe to the outside world and divided it from within. https://www.nytimes.com/... via @jacknicas The anti-social drawbacks of smart phones without exception, are universal Michael Platt / @michaellouispl1 : After 9 months with Starlink, the once-isolated Marubo are grappling with teenagers glued to phones; group chats full of gossip; addictive social networks; online strangers; violent video games; scams; misinformation; and minors watching pornography. https://www.nytimes.com/... Jonathan Haidt / @jonhaidt : The arrival of smartphones, social media, and high speed internet can warp a culture and change childhood in less than one year, as happened to the Marubo people of the Amazon. [Or maybe they have just confused correlation with causation :) ] https://www.nytimes.com/... [image]
Context & Ripple Effects
The Marubo case extends a longstanding debate over whether social platforms create broad social harms or effects that vary by user and setting. It also gives a remote-community example of the need for social media’s societal effects to be studied as a crisis discipline.
Unlike accounts focused on smartphone-native youth, including the costs of a smartphone-based childhood, this story centers on a community receiving high-speed connectivity abruptly. That makes the trade-off unusually visible: the same connection supports urgent medical communication while exposing users to unfamiliar online risks.
First-order effects
- Marubo residents gain rapid communication and access to help, including faster coordination of treatment for poisonous snake bites.
- Within months, community members—especially younger users—face intensive phone use, group-chat conflict, scams, misinformation, strangers, violent content and pornography; leaders worry about pressure on traditional practices.
Second-order effects
- Community leaders and families must mediate access norms and digital safety locally, because a connectivity deployment transfers platform-content risks into a setting with little prior exposure to them.
- Starlink’s broader use across the Brazilian Amazon means the Marubo experience becomes a salient test of whether satellite broadband providers and local intermediaries can separate connectivity’s practical benefits from unmoderated online harms.
Third-order effects
- If rapid satellite rollouts continue into previously disconnected communities, digital inclusion will increasingly be judged on social adaptation and user protection—not coverage alone.
- The case reinforces the unresolved measurement problem in the debate over social media’s harms: aggregate claims can obscure acute effects when a community’s exposure changes quickly.
The trend: Satellite internet is turning last-mile connectivity from a slow infrastructure project into an abrupt social transition, forcing digital-safety questions into the definition of access.