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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27060 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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From NYT (archive): Elon Musk’s Starlink has connected an isolated tribe to the outside world — and divided it from within.

As the speeches dragged on, eyes drifted to screens. Teenagers scrolled Instagram. One man texted his girlfriend. And men crowded around a phone streaming a soccer match while the group's first female leader spoke. Just about anywhere, a scene like this would be mundane. But this was happening in a remote Indigenous village in one of the most isolated stretches of the planet.

"When it arrived, everyone was happy," said Tsainama Marubo, 73, sitting on the dirt floor of her village's maloca, a 50-foot-tall hut where the Marubo sleep, cook and eat together. The internet brought clear benefits, like video chats with faraway loved ones and calls for help in emergencies. "But now, things have gotten worse," she said. She was kneading jenipapo berries to make a black body paint and wearing ropes of jewelry made from snail shells. Lately, the youth had become less interested in making such dyes and jewelry, she said. "Young people have gotten lazy because of the internet," she said. "They're learning the ways of the white people."

After only nine months with Starlink, the Marubo are already grappling with the same challenges that have racked American households for years: teenagers glued to phones; group chats full of gossip; addictive social networks; online strangers; violent video games; scams; misinformation; and minors watching pornography.

During the meetings, teenagers swiped through Kwai, a Chinese-owned social network. Young boys watched videos of the Brazilian soccer star Neymar Jr. And two 15-year-old girls said they chatted with strangers on Instagram. One said she now dreamed of traveling the world, while the other wants to be a dentist in São Paulo.

A case study in what happens when you take a “natural” society and introduce the internet. This relates in some interesting ways to an overview of Hunter-Gatherers and Play that I posted a few weeks ago in the FFT:

Given the indulgence that hunter-gatherer adults exhibit toward children, it is no surprise that the children spend most of their time playing. Play, almost by definition, is what children want to do. The adults have no qualms about this, because they believe that it is through play that children learn what they must to become effective adults. In a survey of ten hunter-gatherer researchers, who had lived in 7 different hunter-gatherer cultures, all of the researchers said that children were free to play essentially from dawn to dusk every day (see Gray, 2009). In a published report on how Ju/’hoan children spent their time, Patricia Draper (1976, pp 205-206) concluded: "[Ju/’hoan] children are late in being held responsible for subsistence tasks. Girls are around 14 years old before they begin regular food gathering and water- and wood-collecting. This is in spite of the fact that they may be married before this age. Boys are 16 years old or over before they begin serious hunting. … Children do amazingly little work." In a study of peoples with mixed hunter-gatherer and agricultural subsistence, in Botswana, John Bock and Sarah Johnson (2004) found that the more a family was involved in hunting and gathering, and the less they were involved in agriculture, the more time children had to play.

Hunter-gatherer children are never isolated from adult activities. They observe directly all that occurs in camp––the preparations to move; the building of huts; the making and mending of tools and other artifacts; the food preparation and cooking; the nursing and care of infants; the precautions taken against predators and diseases; the gossip, discussions, arguments, and politics; the songs, dances, festivities, and stories. They sometimes accompany adults on food gathering trips, and by age 10 or so boys sometimes accompany men on hunting trips. In the course of their daily lives, they see, hear, and have the opportunity to explore everything that is relevant to becoming a successful adult in their culture, and they incorporate all of this into their play. They play at the activities that they observe in the adults around them, and as they grow older, their play turns gradually into the real thing. There is no sharp division between playful participation and real participation in the valued activities of the band.

The above-mentioned survey of researchers elicited many examples of valued adult activities that were mimicked regularly by children in play. Digging up tubers, fishing, smoking porcupines out of holes, cooking, caring for infants, climbing trees, building vine ladders, building huts, using knives and other tools, making tools, carrying heavy loads, building rafts, making fires, defending against attacks from predators, imitating animals (a means of identifying animals and learning their habits), making music, dancing, storytelling, and arguing were all mentioned by one or more respondents. The specific lists varied from culture to culture, in accordance with differences in the skills that were exemplified by adults in each culture. All of the respondents said that boys in the culture they studied engaged in a great deal of playful hunting. The two respondents who studied the Agta—a culture in which women as well as men regularly hunt—noted that girls as well as boys, in that culture, engaged in much playful hunting.

Apparently, when children are free to do what they want, they spend much of their time playing at the very activities that they see, from direct experience, are most crucial for success in their culture. Their conscious motive is fun, not education. It is exciting for children, everywhere, to pretend that they are powerful, competent adults, doing beautifully and skillfully what they see the adults around them doing. From an evolutionary perspective, it is no coincidence that children are constructed in such a way.

Equally important to learning how to hunt and gather, for hunter-gather children, is learning how to interact with others assertively yet peacefully. In their play, children practice arguing. Turnbull has described how older Mbuti children (age 9 and up) playfully rehash and try to improve upon the arguments that they have heard among adults.

In a “primitive” or natural society, childrens’ play is an effortless rendition of adult activity. Over their crucial years of cognitive development, children slowly become adults through stress-free exploration and imitation. The playfulness guides them toward skill acquisition, not unlike a fun video game. In the absence of superstimuli, there is no better way to “play”, so boredom promotes the learning behavior effortlessly. This has the inherent benefit of acting as “shaping” (in a psychological sense) because the skill that is learned is never beyond one’s capacity, is imitated through one’s father, and with the older children who act as mentors (“the Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise”).

Their original arrangement was paradisal. Just from a psychological standpoint. It is the optimal way for a child to learn. When StarLink was introduced, the paradisal order was disrupted — innocent children have consumed Apple in the prelapsarian garden, so to speak. There is no turning back; they will likely look at their loincloths and feel shame at their nakedness. But I do wonder then, what about us developed people? Are we doomed to fall further and further from grace, our children forever destined to the cognitive hazards of superstimuli? Is there no way out, no rope we can grab to lift us back to grace?

"Young people have gotten lazy because of the internet," she said. "They're learning the ways of the white people."

Genuinely hilarious commentary, although I would personally bet quite a bit that they are not, in fact, learning the ways of the white people.

Say more?

Cynically, I expect that the young people in the tribe are learning about TikTok trends and performative nonsense from Western culture, but getting absolutely none of the cultural and personal habits that are the "ways of the white people" that have generated the wealth and success of the Western world. That she believes that learning the ways of the white people leads to laziness suggests that she also doesn't actually know anything about those white cultural habits and is going entirely off of what she sees on the internet and sees the kids developing. In reality, white culture looks a lot like that Smithsonian poster (that was apparently intended to be a critique) - rugged individualism, family structure, future orientation, rigid time schedules with time viewed as a commodity, and hard work as the key to success. I doubt the tribe is learning those values, which is perhaps an indictment of internet culture, but has nothing to do with the ways of the white people.

rugged individualism, family structure, future orientation, rigid time schedules with time viewed as a commodity, and hard work as the key to success

You think white culture is the only culture that has these values?

The Smithsonian's African-American Museum created the brochure. I don't think any of those traits are individually specific to white people, but collectively I think they're a good way of describing the culture of Amerikaners in contrast to other groups that have inhabited the continent.

I can't name any others that has all those features, can you? Certainly not the combination with "rugged individualism"

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