Newbie or Not Newbie

I eased into this addiction. A transistor radio. A TV with a few channels picked up via rabbit ears. Cable TV. A remote control. Compuserve. AOL. The web browser. Yahoo Directory. Google Search. The iPhone. Streaming media. Siri. Alexa. ChatGPT. But imagine getting it all at once. Imagine you were part of a remote tribe with no screens, no internet access, no smartphones, virtually no contact with the outside world … and then one day, you just got it all. No warmup. No time to build up a tolerance. That’s just what the Marubo tribe experienced when someone mounted a Starlink antenna on the top of a tree stump in a village called Manakieaway in the Brazilian Amazon. As you can imagine, it was a lot. And as you know full well, there were good parts and bad parts. Jack Nicas and Victor Moriyama hiked 50 miles into the the Amazon to find out how the newbies were adapting to being online. NYT (Gift Article): The Internet’s Final Frontier: Remote Amazon Tribes. “After only nine months with Starlink, the Marubo are already grappling with the same challenges that have racked American households for years: teenagers glued to phones; group chats full of gossip; addictive social networks; online strangers; violent video games; scams; misinformation; and minors watching p-rnography.” (Just wait until Amazon delivers to the Amazon.)