Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/06/remote-brazilian-tribe-gets-internet-porn-addiction.html
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Just introduce League Of Legends to that community. That should easily take care of their horny problem.
“New, Fun Stuff Introduced to Remote Area of Brazil, Provoking Typical Reaction from Local Conservatives and Old People.”
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Wait, are you saying that there is pornography on the Internet?
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They’re not wrong, and contact with modernity will definitely destroy a lot of what makes this group of people unique and distinct.
But for this one:
The Marubo pass down their history and culture orally, and he worries that knowledge will be lost.
The knowledge is one thing that definitely doesn’t need to be lost. Not anymore, not like even a few decades ago. Just give the elders an easy way to record the things they say and store the recordings in the cloud, then encourage them to do so whenever they feel like sharing wisdom or telling a story. Even if the youngsters ignore it, it won’t need to be lost.
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Oral history is different from written or even videotaped records. “The medium is the message”.
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They can create a wiki! I mean, basically every video game and TV show has one detailing their lore, why not one for their culture? And after all, the very word “wiki” is from an indigenous culture (it’s a Hawaiian word meaning “quick”).
NYT is behind a personal data paywall, of course.
I found a couple of other sources, yesterday that give a bit more detail from the NYT article. (Both are at the more sensationalist end of the press spectrum, but it is more detail, at least.)
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I’m not saying written records are a substitute or that the solution is some videotaped interviews or anything like that. I’m saying that, once you have starlink, you have the ability to record literally everything you say and do in life, if that’s what you want to do.
It’s true that we don’t have the ability to easily do so from every angle and viewpoint, and we don’t have the ability to record and transmit touch and taste and smell, and we can’t record all the nuances of everyone’s actions and reactions. So yes, what I said is wrong in that sense. I still think the long-standing assumptions about how much of a culture necessarily gets lost when it contacts modernity more is outdated, and we can do vastly better using the now-cheap tools many of us carry around all the time.
We should not ignore how stuff gets commodified and twisted in the process of coming into contact with modernity, though. And I think @dwall0 is right about the medium being the message. It’s really not the same thing passing something down orally (and keep in mind, that there has been plenty of things that made it to today, passed in that way - think of how we know that the stories of Aboriginal peoples today, because they did just that for thousands and years prior to western modes of transmission). Just the act of recording something vs having it handed down from person to person is… objectifying, let’s say?
It’s not bad that it’s being recorded for the rest of humanity, but it certainly strips something fundamental away, and I don’t think we should just dismiss that out of hand. 
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Not all forms of knowledge are things that can be easily recorded, digitized and catalogued.
If you really want your descendants to have an intuitive understanding of the local environment or be able to effectively get food, shelter and other critical resources from their jungle home then YouTube and Wikipedia are poor substitutes for hands-on learning and generational experience.
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Oh, I agree with that. It’s definitely objectifying, and a whole lot that’s valuable is definitely lost.
Unfortunately I think that ship has sailed, for better and worse, and trying to keep people away from modernity to preserve the uniqueness and value is patronizing and damaging in ways that are worse than trying to help them minimize the downsides.
I also don’t think we have to look anywhere near as far away as the aboriginals to get examples. All the cultural knowledge past generations of immigrants in America lost trying to assimilate. All the cultural knowledge that was lost mid-century as official source pushed modern foods and appliances and processes at the expense of traditional ways of doing things. Some of it survived in fragments, and recent generations have tried to revive and rediscover some of it once we realized some of the old ways really were better, but it would have turned out a heck of a lot better if my great grandparents and grandparents had had smart phones in their pockets, and made videos of themselves making cheese by hand or tending their gardens or fixing furniture or telling stories from their lives and pasts. We pretend those losses are different in kind and not just in degree, because they came from within the nominally-same country that caused the modernity, but it’s not like any individual subculture had much choice in the matter.
If you really want your descendants to have an intuitive understanding of the local environment or be able to effectively get food, shelter and other critical resources from their jungle home
Do they want that? More importantly, do the descendants want that? I don’t think that’s up to us to decide or to judge, and it isn’t up to the older generations either.
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Either way it is cultural knowledge that will be lost forever, so I don’t think people are wrong to mourn the loss of said knowledge.
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True. Good point. Mourning a loss is never wrong. I immediately jumped to minimizing the loss, and skipped over that.
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… I can’t tell if this is sarcasm 
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I mean, not like the internet ever caused problems in the developed world! They should be grateful! /s
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