You might not guess that a 900-kid middle school in Seattle and a 2,000-member tribe in the Amazon jungle would have much in common.
But when it comes to the greatest distraction machine ever invented, it turns out we are all together, struggling as one …
(Sorry, I was gone for a minute there, had to check my email.)
The tribe part of this story, the Marubo people of the Brazilian rainforest, just made international news as one of the last offline places on Earth to get the internet. The tribe put up four Starlink satellite antennas to join itself, for the first time, to the digital world.
What followed, though, sounds like any American household in the past decade: “teenagers glued to phones; group chats full of gossip; addictive social networks; online strangers; violent video games; scams; misinformation; and minors watching pornography,” The New York Times reported.
“Young people have gotten lazy because of the internet,” one tribal elder said.
“Everyone is so connected that sometimes they don’t even talk to their own family,” another said.
Sound familiar?
Both kids and adults were spending enough time lying about in hammocks, streaming soccer videos or scrolling Instagram, that some elders fretted about their very survival.
“In the village, if you don’t hunt, fish and plant, you don’t eat,” one said.
This echoed here when parents in the Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle, home of Hamilton International Middle School, made a surprisingly similar plea. Despite being people with cars and plumbing in a high-tech city in the planet’s richest country, their story sounded very Marubo.
“Sexually charged Snapchat messages. Violent TikTok challenges. Privacy violations in the bathrooms. Kids taking ridiculously long bathroom breaks to use social media,” the Hamilton parent-teacher group reported.
Like a lot of schools, Hamilton has a policy that phones should be turned off and stored “away for the day.” Yet kids were finding ways online anyway, often by sneaking off with their phones to the restrooms.
It was smokin’ in the boys room back in my day; now it’s TikToking in the restroom. The jarring thing about this generational analogy is that the internet finds itself in the position of tobacco.
All of this was prophesied in the best account about the compulsions of modern America, the novel “Infinite Jest” by David Foster Wallace. It’s about addiction — to pot, booze, hard drugs, sex, fame. But the ultimate obsession is “the entertainment,” a video so compelling that its viewers lose interest in anything other than viewing it, over and over. Until they eventually lose all agency and die.
He wrote this in 1996, long before people were carrying dopamine-release rectangles around right in their …
(Excuse me, I was off doomscrolling X for a minute, back now.)
The best part about the Amazon tribe story, and the Seattle middle school story, is what they both did next.
The internet is so jacked into the world bloodstream, and, it must be said, carries so many pluses and life-improving conveniences, that it’d be defeating to shut it off completely. But both realized it was degrading their lives. So they pushed back.
In the Marubo village, they decreed that the satellite transmitters could only be turned on for two hours in the mornings, a few hours in the evenings and all day Sunday.
At Hamilton, the school announced this past week it’s hiring a company called Yondr that leases a lockable pouch system for smartphones. When the kids arrive at school, they’ll lock their phones into pouches that can only be unlocked at special stations. Presto — no more mainlining inane videos or posting embarrassing photos of frenemies on the toilet.
Also, everyone hopes, there’ll be more focus on school.
Don’t worry kids, there’s still plenty of trouble you can get into in a school bathroom. But you’ll have to use your imaginations — which is the point.
“There was this promise that more technology was going to open limitless possibilities, it was going to take us here, do this do that, everything would be more connected all the time,” said Graham Dugoni, CEO of Yondr, at a recent conference on digital overload.
“I don’t believe that,” he said. “My belief is we need to carve out spaces in modern society for things like learning, and participation in the creative acts and art.”
Or, talking to one another. Or, just remembering to eat…
(Sorry, I flitted off to check the Mariners score. And my notifications. And my email again.)
Yondr also sells systems to shut out the internet at music performances, theaters, bars and weddings. It advises venues to set up “designated phone-use areas,” so there’s still a place to log on if you really need it. The parallels to smoking are striking.
I tried and failed at curtailing phone use at home with my kids. I employed a central docking station, and a phone usage monitoring app. I went all Marubo tribe and shut off the Wi-Fi for two-hour blocks. Nothing worked — mostly because I chafed at the restrictions. Once my kids observed, correctly, that I was phone-jonesing more than they were, it turned into a free-for-all.
Story of parenting. The bigger story though is how society has built a machine so pervasive and intoxicating that we’re now in a war of wills against our own creation. Kudos to the Marubo, and to Hamilton Middle School, for recognizing that the struggle is real.
It’s remarkable how far gone we already are. Consider that Yondr now sells, for home use, a “signal-blocking lockable box” lined with “faraday fabric.” It’s so you can quarantine your phone away from you, where notifications can’t buzz and “apps can’t listen.” You need a key to free your dopamine-release rectangle. It’s kind of like a gun safe for phones.
It’s another analogy that raises the question of which is more dangerous.
The lockable “home tray” is $249, and could make a fine Father’s Day gift. Turn off the internet for a few hours, for Dad. Now suitable for newspaper columnists all the way to Indigenous tribesmen.
Keep an eye on Dad, though, wherever you are. He may get the jitters.
Discussion about this post