As the speeches progressed, eyes turned to screens. A young man scrolled through Instagram. A man texted his girlfriend. Men gathered around a cellphone to watch a live stream of a soccer game as the group’s first female leader spoke.

It would be a common scene anywhere, but it happened in a remote indigenous village, in one of the most isolated regions on Earth.

The Marubo people have long lived in communal huts scattered across hundreds of kilometers of the Ituí River deep in the Amazon rainforest. They speak their own language, take ayahuasca to communicate with forest spirits, and capture spider monkeys for soup or as pets.

They are isolated and have maintained this way of life for hundreds of years – some villages take a week to reach. But since last September, the Marubo people have had high-speed internet, thanks to Elon Musk.

The 2,000-person tribe is one of hundreds across Brazil that have suddenly begun using Starlink, a satellite internet service provided by Musk’s private space company SpaceX. Since arriving in Brazil in 2022, Starlink has swept through the world’s largest rainforest, bringing the internet to one of the last offline areas on Earth.

The New York Times traveled deep into the Amazon to the village of Marubo, trying to understand what happens when a small, closed civilization suddenly opens up to the world.

“When it came, everyone was happy,” said Tinama Maloubo, 73, sitting on the mud floor of her village’s mallorca, a 15-meter-high hut where her family sleeps, cooks and eats. The internet has brought obvious benefits, such as video chatting with distant relatives and calling for help in emergencies. “But now, it’s gotten worse,” she said.

The Marubos are grappling with the internet’s fundamental dilemma: It has become indispensable — but it comes at a price.

Just nine months into their partnership with Starlink, the Marubos are already grappling with the same challenges that have plagued American families for years: teenagers addicted to their phones; group chats filled with gossip; addictive social networks; strangers online; violent video games; scams; misinformation; and underage pornography.

Modern society has been grappling with these issues for decades as the internet continues to grow. In the Marubo and other indigenous tribes, people have resisted modernization for generations, and now they are confronting both the potential and the dangers of the internet, and what it means for their identity and culture.

One Marubo chief, Enoch Marubo, 40, (all the Marubo use the same last name) said he immediately saw Starlink’s potential. Years after leaving the jungle, he said he believed the internet could bring new autonomy to his people. With it, they can communicate better, understand themselves and tell their own stories.

Last year, he and a Brazilian activist recorded a 50-second video seeking potential donors to help them get Starlink connectivity. In the video, he was wearing a traditional marubo headdress and sitting in Mallorca. A child wearing an animal tooth necklace sat next to him.

They sent the video out, and a few days later, they received a response from a woman in Oklahoma.

The Hawari Valley Indigenous Territory is one of the most isolated places on Earth, a dense rainforest the size of Portugal with no roads but a maze of waterways. The Hawari Valley is home to 26 tribes, the densest concentration of tribes in the world, 19 of which are completely cut off from the outside world.

The Marubo people, too, had been isolated, wandering the jungle for centuries until rubber tappers arrived in the late 19th century. With them came decades of violence and disease, but also new customs and technologies. The Marubo began to wear clothes. Some learned Portuguese. They traded bows and arrows for shotguns to hunt wild boars and machetes for chainsaws to clear cassava fields.

One family in particular is driving the change. In the 1960s, Sebastião Marubo was one of the first Marubos to live outside the jungle. When he returned, he brought another new technology: the boat engine. It could cut trips that took weeks into days.

His son Enoch became the next generation leader, eager to lead the tribe into the future. Enoch moved between the jungle and the city and once worked as a graphic designer for Coca-Cola. So when the Marubo leaders were interested in accessing the Internet, they went to him to ask.

When Musk came to Brazil, Enoch had his answer. In 2022, the owner of SpaceX and then-President of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro announced the arrival of Starlink in front of a screen that read “Connecting the Amazon.”

Enoch and Flora Dutra, a Brazilian activist who works with indigenous tribes, wrote to more than 100 members of Congress asking for access to Starlink, but received no response.

Early last year, Dutra saw an American woman speaking at a space conference. Dutra checked her Facebook page and saw her taking photos outside SpaceX headquarters. “I knew she was the one,” she said.

Alison Renaud, who describes herself on her LinkedIn page as a space consultant, keynote speaker, author, pilot, equestrian, humanitarian, CEO, director and mother of 11 children, says she makes most of her income from coaching gymnastics and renting out homes near Norman, Oklahoma.

Lenore said she doesn’t help people for the fame. “Otherwise, I would tell you all the projects I’ve done around the world,” she said in an interview. “It’s for the look on the face, for the hope in the eyes. These are the trophies.”

She said she got the idea last year after receiving a video from a stranger asking for help in building internet connectivity for a remote Amazon tribe.

She has never been to Brazil but thinks the return on investment would be high. Enoch wants 20 Starlink antennas to change the lives of his tribe, which would cost about $15,000.

Lenore said she bought the antennas with her own money and donations from her children. She then booked a flight to help deliver the antennas.

The Internet equipment was carried in by men, some barefoot, some in flip-flops, who trekked for several kilometers through the jungle, each carrying two antennas.

She was followed by Enoch, Dutra, Lenore and a photographer who documented her journey.

The arrival of the internet was an immediate sensation. “It changed our daily lives so much that it had a detrimental effect,” Enoch admitted. “In the village, if you didn’t hunt, fish or grow vegetables, you didn’t have food to eat.”

The tribal leaders realized that restrictions were needed. They decided that the Internet would only be available for two hours in the morning, five hours in the evening, and all day on Sunday.

Alfredo Marubo, the leader of a federation of Marubo villages, has become his tribe’s most outspoken critic of the internet. The Marubo people pass on their history and culture orally, and he worries that this knowledge is being lost. “Everyone is online, and sometimes they don’t even talk to their families,” he said.

He was most disturbed by the pornographic content, saying young people were sharing explicit videos in group chats, a startling change in a culture that frowns on kissing in public.

In April, Lenore returned to the jungle. At Enoch’s request, she bought four more antennas. Two were sent to the Kolubo, a tribe of fewer than 150 people that first made contact with the outside world in 1996 and still has some members in complete isolation.

Sitting on a log, eating dried beef and boiled cassava on the Mallorcan dirt floor, Lenore said she realized the Internet was “a double-edged sword.” So, she said, when she posted on Facebook about bringing the Internet to Marubo, she always emphasized that it was at the request of a local chief.

“I don’t want people to think I’m bringing this stuff in to impose on them,” she said, adding that she hopes they can “protect the purity of this incredible culture, because once it’s gone, it’s gone.”

After the meal, Enoch’s father, Sebastian, said that something had been prophesied about the tribe’s journey to the internet.

Decades ago, one of the most revered Marubo shamans envisioned a handheld device that could connect the entire world. “It would benefit the people,” he said. “But in the end, it wasn’t.”

In any case, he added, there is no way back.

“The chiefs have made it very clear,” he said. “We can’t live without the internet.”