In the middle of the jungle

How the internet is corrupting Amazon natives

The internet reaches even the most remote areas such as the Amazon via Starlink terminals.(Bild: Krone KREATIV/instagram.com/jnicas, Starlink, Marcio Isensee e Sá – stock.adobe.com)

Providing people in even the most remote places in the world with Internet access - that is the goal Elon Musk has set himself with his Starlink satellite service. But what happens when people who were previously largely isolated from the outside world are suddenly hit with the full force of the World Wide Web? An indigenous people in Brazil shed some light on this.

On August 10, 1990, the Internet was officially born in Austria: the University of Vienna was the first domestic node to be connected to the global Internet with a permanent line. However, with a speed of 64 kbit/s, the "surfing pleasure" was limited, especially as there was still a lack of content. It took until the mid/end of the 1990s for the World Wide Web to gradually make its way into Austrian households.

However, many of the services that we now take for granted and use regularly only gradually went online: Google launched its search function at the end of 1997, Facebook its social network in 2004, YouTube its video portal the following year. Twitter (now X) followed in 2006, Netflix and Pornhub only started streaming in 2007 and Spotify in 2008. In short, we had many years to get used to all these things and the changes they brought with them. Not so the Marubo.