If one wanted to know what the effects of the use of smartphones might be on a population that had never used the Internet as a communication and new social life, Elon Musk did the perfect experiment, demonstrating that the negative effects that we are analyzing on young people can be produced within 12 months in a population that was completely outside of our system.
Elon Musk has decided to bring internet connection to the remote village of the Marubo, an isolated tribe living along the banks of the Ituì River that remained immune to civilization until the arrival of the Net.
As “The New York Times” explains, the Marubo number two thousand and have always lived in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, far from civilization. As of September 2023, their lives have completely changed thanks to the arrival of the Internet in their village
It did this through Starlink, the service of Space X, its space company. It launched 6,000 low-orbit satellites and connected remote areas in every corner of the Earth: from the Sahara, to the Mongolian grasslands, to the atolls of the Pacific. A leap into modernity. An opportunity for populations anchored in their eternal past.
After nine months, two New York Times reporters went to the Amazon to see how this technological revolution had been received and the effects it had produced on a pristine tribe. The experiment was positive, but destabilizing. “When the net arrived,” Tsainama Marubo, 73, one of the village elders, explained to the two reporters, “everyone was happy. There was novelty and a lot of curiosity. A world unknown to us was opening up from these screens. The Internet offered many obvious advantages. Like chats with distant loved ones and the ability to call for help in an emergency. But things have gotten worse now.” Tsainama looks around and with a wave of his hand points to the village bathed in unreal silence. “There,” he sojourns, “they are all there, focused on their phones. They have become lazy. They don’t talk, they don’t work, they don’t move. They are as if dumbfounded. They scroll through pictures, they read with the translator, they browse hours and hours immersed in a coma that frightens.”
