In 2024, a news story emerged: the Indigenous Marúbo tribe of the Brazilian Amazon accessed the internet for the first time via Elon Musk’s Starlink. Within months, many issues that have long plagued modern society rapidly surfaced within the tribe—teenagers addicted to their phones, group chats filled with gossip, social media addiction, the dangers of online strangers, violent video games, scams, misinformation, minors exposed to explicit content… Absurd, yet familiar.

The internet, transmitted through Starlink, bypassed cumbersome national infrastructure and arrived in one of the last offline regions on Earth. The traditions that once thrived in the rainforest became fragile remnants squeezed by modernity. The Marúbo’s cognitive pathways synchronized with the outside world, while their embodied experience was partially damaged in uploading consciousness. Their memory storage degraded by the day, paths repeatedly rewritten—becoming indistinguishable seemed inevitable. This is not only the dilemma of the Marúbo but also the shared pain of all societies grappling with information overload, accelerating technology, and the complex crises of modernization.

In Marúbo mythology, one of their souls must undergo trials on the “Path of Mist” (Vei Vai) after death to reach Shokó, the celestial realm where the souls of their people reside. Now, they only need to switch Starlink on and off periodically to communicate with the sky—or more precisely, with the 6,000 low-orbit satellites launched by SpaceX. In this new stage of contact, the Marúbo no longer need to face death and trials; instead, they swipe and tap their screens in their daily routines (just like you and me, reading this), allowing their souls to travel through attention, converted into signals reaching the sky—or anywhere connected to the internet.

The Marúbo power Starlink uses limited electricity generated by solar panels. One can imagine that, without efficient power infrastructure, they may have never encountered a circuit breaker—an invention dating back to the late 19th century, designed to protect circuits from electrical overload (now ubiquitous). Yet, driven by a sense of threat, the Marúbo, who never fully experienced the electrification era, instinctively established a simple internet circuit-breaking mechanism at the dawn of their digital age:

      Leaders realized they needed limits. The internet would be switched on for only two hours in the morning, five hours in the evening, and all day Sunday.
— The Internet’s Final Frontier: Remote Amazon Tribes, The New York Times

We have long known—from the recurring trends of “Digital Detox Retreats” to disposable “Screen Time Management” tools—that “cutting off” the internet today is merely a rebalancing attempt, its effectiveness akin to “Edging,” a kind of sexual practice.

“Marúbo” is an external designation. The tribe has no collective name, only terms for different internal sections. Likewise, all of humanity might one day be named by extraterrestrial civilizations following their logic—perhaps as something akin to “Catúbo.” Whether for Marúbo or Catúbo, the arrival of the internet and the subsequent need for self-regulation disrupt and interrupt prior states. Countless conscious or unconscious, voluntary or forced “circuit breaks” are already scattered across the trajectories of our lives. Every disconnection—long or short—forces a recalibration of survival rhythms, with the internet marking just one coordinate in this experience.

When we look back at the moments of disconnection, whether intentional or accidental—digital withdrawal pains, abandoned appointments, sudden disruptions of daily life, relationships reconstructed in silence—these suspended memory fragments are both testimonies of wounds inflicted by modernity and portals through which individual and collective memories reconnect.

To initiate the mention of the circuit breaker means farewell.

Zhang Zhao
Feb 12, 2025