Is Starlink turning Amazon villagers into porn addicts ?

The Marubo people, a village of 2,000 souls, live deep in the Amazon jungle on the banks of the Itui River. It takes an 80km hike on foot to find them.

They've lived the same life for millennia: hunting, fishing, warring and procreating, all within the confines of their culture. They are the friends of rain spiders, both in a stew and as pets, and the psychoactive plant ayahuasca, which caused what was probably the most distant of trips they'd collectively taken — until now.

These people are not to be confused with tribes living deeper in the jungle, yet to encounter any other examples of the human persuasion. Those tribes have been kept away from us for their own good — because obvs (use your imagination!). But the Marubo have had intermittent contact with humans like us. I mean, the jungle is awash with loggers and beef, soya and almond farmers stripping natural life at a rate of knots since the 20th century.

Despite that minor inconvenience, these people continued, by choice, to live lives untrammelled by the outside world. That was all until Elon Musk manifested there. His thinking was: "Why should they live without the single most important thing that defines contemporary existence: the internet?"

And so this great humanitarian, the spreader of the love, the man who intends to ensure humanity makes it by exiling us to a horrific wasteland of an inhospitable planet entirely devoid of the building blocks to support actual human life, gave these Amazon people access to Starlink. 

Starlink, if you're unaware of it, is the satellite system connecting the world without the need for pesky underwater cables. As we know, those cables are vulnerable to desert tribes equipped with rocket launchers and Starlink. The Houthis, it appears, also have an agenda.

So ja, Elon's Starlink has made him powerful beyond his riches. With this system he can control the world in unprecedented ways — also 60% of all things floating around the planet. Never mind rocket launchers, those are for tribes still clutching to their ancient cultural tropes; every time Elon gets a bee in his bonnet he can shut down entire countries, like Ukraine, early in the war with the country governed by that other megalomaniac with his finger on the button: Vlad Putin.  

In an act of magnanimity, Elon gave the Marubo access to the internet and the ability to flood their frontal lobes with all the attendant joys of it, just like the rest of us. I don’t want to get into prelapsarian grandstanding here, but this is a case of Pandora’s box and the apple in the Garden of Eden all wrapped up into one mega-download of data.

Plus, to add spice to a parable of a story, it was a woman who financed the whole thing. Has it not always been thus?

Allyson Renee, a woman with a budget for the apple, mother of 11 biological children and with a latter-day saviour complex (she visits South Africa a lot), donated 20 Starlink antennas to the Marubo, who asked for them via Brazilian activists wanting to empower the tribes of the jungle.

To be fair, the internet helps with things like long-distance education, medical interventions and Wikipedia — but be careful what you ask for!

In just eight months, practically overnight, the Marubo went from a cohesive, self-sustaining group of people who'd managed to live quietly in the jungle in their own dominion to a bunch of porn-addicted, TikTok-addled swipers, falling for scam after scam and unable to rouse themselves to do the  basic hunter-gathering tasks that had kept them alive for God knows how long. 

The New York Times visited and confirmed that these days, they're prone to hours of scrolling and violent sexual outbursts which they've seen on Pornhub. The elders are freaking out because the village teenagers are particularly hooked. Not to worry, though, because at least they can get hold of the outside world. So it must be good, right?  

It's obvious that everyone in the world should have connectivity. Right? I'm not some Luddite, questioning progress. I don’t have a desire to keep the tribespeople of the Amazon or the Mongolian steppes in their prelapsarian state. God no! They should fall right into the attention economy like the rest of us.

Everyone has the right to be up to date on the latest TikTok dances, and fisting. I mean, why not drop the satellite dishes and smart phones in little packages throughout the forest and the steppes and speed the process up so that all those tribes that haven't yet met contemporary Homo erectus get the chance to see him do his thing on Pornhub as soon as possible?

Penetrate the jungles and the deserts, I say. Why the hell not? It's patronising in the extreme to suggest that some people should be kept in the iron age in the benighted notion of protectionism as if they lived in a zoo, while the rest of us get to jack off in a constant barrage of product placement. Or as attention activist D Graham Burnett calls it, "the fracking of our minds", which, depending who you ask, is a $500m, $7bn or $3-trillion industry.

"To get the money value of our attention out of us, they're continuously pumping into our faces high-pressure, high-value detergent in the form of social media and nonstop content that holds us on our devices. That pumping brings to the surface the spume, the foam of our attention, which can be aggregated and sold off to the highest bidder," — even in the depths of the deepest forests of the world.

Now that, my friends, is progress.