MEDIA’S DISTORTING IMAGES: From 1995 Fiji To The Brazilian Amazon 2024

The More Things Change In Media, The More It Destroys The Same Things

In a mere nine months, the addition of the internet to the daily lives of the remote Amazonian Marubo tribe has completely revolutionized a society that had largely remained unchanged for thousands of years.

[A portion of this Substack originally appeared in the Feb.1, 2000, edition of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Following several journalism awards, it was reprinted in the 2003 textbook Writing Talk: Sentences & Paragraphs with Readings.]

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I was jarred this week by a familiar-sounding story out of Brazil, headlined in The New York Post as “Remote Amazon tribe finally connects to internet — only to wind up hooked on porn and social media.”

Yup, yup. Everybody’s favorite richest-man-in-the-world-or-at-least-that’s-what-they-tell-us who is also the #1 military contractor on the planet (I’m sure that’s just a coincidence!) and curious human anagram Elon Musk/Lone Skum did a Starlink solid (or so it seemed) for the reclusive west-Brazilian tribe known as the Marubo, nine months ago. 

Populated by roughly 2,000 natives, deep in the rainforest along the Ituí River in the Amazon Basin, near Brazil’s border with Peru, the Marubo tribe had been largely cut off from civilization until Oklahoma mom-of-11(!), Harvard grad, “international space consultant” and entrepreneur Allyson Reneau donated twenty Starlink-connected antennas to the Marubos.

In the original story published in The New York Times that the Post slipstreamed behind, Ms. Reneau and one Marubo tribal leader claimed the technology has “saved lives.” A lot more of the tribe’s elders, however, think the digital infusion is of the devil, a huge mistake, and is already destroying their society with little chance of turning back, even as it has escalated poisonous divisiveness among village leaders.

According to several Marubo, the “always on” capacity brought by Starlink has also brought “laziness…In the village, if you don’t hunt, fish and plant, you don’t eat. Now some young people just want to spend the whole afternoon on their phones,” one tribe elder noted.

Additionally, the Marubo are a sexually restrained and conservative people, for whom kissing in public is considered extreme. Yet now, according to the Times, the Marubo young men are web surfing internet porn like a pimply high schooler on a Red Bull-and-Vasoline weekend bender while his parents are away. Behaviors are changing. Becoming more course. Disrespectful. Uncivilized.

Tribal elder Alfredo Marubo (everybody in the tribe’s got the last name Marubo) laments that many of the previously respectful and gentlemanly Marubo men have taken to sharing pornography videos and other outré visual material with each other, leading to “aggressive sexual behaviors” and upending societal standards.

The rise of the internet and social media has been accompanied by a rise in sexual violence among America’s youth. There is literally no debate to be had about this fact. Good luck, Marubo people.

Other Marubos complain that the tribe’s newbie state to the digital world has made them easy prey for internet scams, and their innocent children quick pickings for strangers with online candy. While several people vaguely assured the Times that there were plans to provide internet training, “No Marubo interviewed said they had yet received it.” Shocker.

“When it arrived, everyone was happy,” said another elder. “But now, things have gotten worse.” After a pause, she added: “But please don’t take our internet away.”

Grrrrrrreat. 

Couple other things about the Marubo: I noticed all the coverage of Starlink in the Amazon touted how the Marubo’s internet connection was established in September, 2023. I saw that over and over again: September 2023, September, 2023. September generally, but never the actual day it happened. Never the specific day in September for some reason.

As usual, the lack of that particularity was conspicuous by its absence, which suggested to me that the day the remote tech-free native people went online and joined the porniverse would’ve been September 11th.

Ms. Reneau’s Facebook post on September 11, 2023, seems to support my hypothesis. These technocrats are nothing if not predictable!

Another thing the predictable technocrats do is virtue-signal their benevolence to get their name in the controlled corrupt collectivist corporate criminal clown media. Like how Harvard grad and NASA acolyte Allyson Reneau ran to be interviewed on CNN and Fox in 2021 for “rescuing” an all-girls robotics team from Afghanistan during the Taliban takeover…until lawyers for the robotics team told Ms. Reneau to STFU and stop taking credit for a rescue she had almost nothing to do with.

Photos from wealthy white savior of primitive tribespeople Allyson Reneau’s Facebook page. First, left, when she thought she was posing with her NASA and Harvard and Nike vanity gear for a puff piece in The New York Times, and earlier this week when the Times piece finally hit.

I’ll give the last word in Brazil, before moving to Fiji, to tribe elder Sebastião Marubo, who said his people’s digital fate had been foretold decades earlier by one of the tribe’s greatest and most highly respected Shaman. “He had visions of a hand-held device that could connect the entire world. It would be for the good of the people, but in the end it wouldn’t be. In the end, there would be war.” Shocker.

All of this sounded depressingly familiar, scratching at the skin of something I wrote nearly a quarter century ago about the South Pacific island nation Fiji. It won me a couple journalism awards and got a bunch of attention at the time, including interviews with Sam Donaldson on his radio show and a few other places, but of course nobody paid heed because humanity almost never does until it’s time to clean up the mess. Usually it’s a bloody mess, and includes a lot of dead people.

From the February 1st, 2000, Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I’d share a direct link, but despite all the fanfare at the time, it’s been deleted from the AJC website, like how so much of my writing has been removed from the interwebz:

TELEVISION & THE GIRLS OF FIJI

In the continuing cultural debate over who is to blame for all of our problems, let’s yield the floor for moment to the voice of Fiji’s young women

Fiji is a remote South Pacific Island nation. So isolated that until 1995 most islanders did not get television reception. Now, thanks to some persistent capitalists and satellite technology, Fiji gets one channel. It mixes a smorgasbord of English-language programming from the United States, England and Australia. 

Until the arrival of television, eating disorders among the young women — who live in a culture where voluptuously rounded bodies are the norm and plus is preferred — were unheard of. But now according to the Harvard Eating Disorders Center, that’s no longer the case.

According to a recent New York Times article, Harvard researchers started monitoring impressions high school girls had of their own bodies one month after satellite transmissions began beaming broadcasts into Fiji. In three years, the researchers discovered some alarming shifts in perception and behavior.

Surveying a similar number of Fiji girls in 1995 and 1998, and matching them up by age, weight and other characteristics, research found that by 1998 almost 30% of Fiji’s girls tested high-risk for eating disorders, as opposed to 13% at the beginning of the study. 15% admitted that they had induced vomiting to control weight, a nearly five-fold increase.

Nearly three-quarters of girls said they had been on a diet at least once, in a culture where three years earlier the word “diet” was used about as much as the word “snow.” 

Perhaps most tellingly, girls who watched television three or more nights per week were far more likely to describe themselves as “too fat” than those who didn’t. Perhaps even more tellingly, two of Fiji’s highest-rated programs are Melrose Place and Beverly Hills 90210.

Yes, these shows told just as big cultural lies as the tell-a-vision myths we get from Hollywood in 2024. But at least these shows, shallow and superficial and sex-drenched as they were, weren’t misanthropic and demoralizing, like most of what we’re told is “entertainment” today.

People in the entertainment business will tell you that what they do only reflects society’s behavior; it doesn’t instigate it. They will tell you that kids know that what they see is only make-believe, not something for them to imitate. They’ll say we don’t give people enough credit: People have the strength of free will to make up their own minds. 

But the facts in Fiji indicate otherwise. No TV, virtually no eating disorders. Three years of TV, lots of anxious girls who feel, in the words of one girl quoted in the Times: “I’m very heavy. Sometimes I’m depressed because I always want to lose weight.”

Clearly the programming being shown in Fiji did not reflect the culture of the country. But it did induce new behavior. So if three years of one television channel can do this to the young women of Fiji, what’s a lifetime of dozens to hundreds of channels doing to America’s children? What does seeing 40,000 murders before a kid hits high school do to a young mind?

How about a relentless onslaught of sitcoms in which the kids always have witty rejoinder for their uncool parents, instead of showing them respect? How many people on TV go to church or mosque or synagogue? What percentage cheat on their spouse?

If the entertainment industry really didn’t think it could affect your behavior, it wouldn’t be able to sell advertisements during programs, or get large corporations to pay big money to sneak their products into key scenes in movies, or pay sports stars to wear their logos on their uniforms. 

Here’s a more personal take: I remember a Christmas season when I was eight years old. I had seen a recent episode of All in the Family, where Archie Bunker was listening to a moronic story from his “dingbat” wife Edith and became so disgusted that he mimed filling a gun with bullets and shooting himself in the head to escape her blathering. 

I thought this was the funniest thing I’d ever seen. 

A few days later, during Christmas Eve dinner, my loving and wonderful mother was telling a story to friends who were visiting our home. I thought the story was kind of dull, and so to spice things up a bit, I extravagantly mimed the faux suicide, just like Archie Bunker, thinking that this was the most hilarious thing in the world and that I would be the center of attention.

People didn’t think it was funny, however. They were appalled. My mother cried, she was so shocked and hurt. It was not a happy Christmas. 

Television is that powerful. It can ruin Christmas. It can ruin our society. Right now, it’s ruining Fiji’s. 

This is literally the exact same siren’s song that we’re hearing out of Brazil right now, a quarter century later, a second verse that’s the same as the first. They say you can’t stop progress, and perhaps you can’t. But is this progress?

Maybe, just maybe, a lot of fame-hungry, too-rich white people really are a tool of the devil. I guess we’re gonna find out. Or perhaps we already have, and it’s just the native Amazon populations who are going to find out now, too. The hard way.

I didn’t really have an appropriate spot to mention the unmarried & childless Brazilian activist and poseur Flora Dutra, who worked super-hard to get some white saviors of the technocracy to wire the Amazon. When asked in the Times article about natives’ and Brazilian government’s concerns about too much culture shock too fast, Ms. Dutra contemptuously dismissed concerns with the racist and inverted comment, “This is called ethnocentrism — the white man thinking they know what’s best.” I guess the white reporter at the Times didn’t have it in him to point out the irony. O well!