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The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper

The Wired Rainforest. Aired 8-9p ET

Aired May 04, 2025 - 20:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[20:00:00]

DEAN: Thank you so much. An all-new episode of "THE WHOLE STORY WITH ANDERSON COOPER" air next only on CNN.

Thanks so much for joining me this evening. I'm Jessica Dean. We're going to see you right back here next weekend. Have a great night.

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome to THE WHOLE STORY. I'm Anderson Cooper.

Since the launch of its first satellite in 2019, Elon Musk's Starlink has been providing internet access to more than 125 countries and territories all over the world. Even in the Amazon rainforest, indigenous groups who've lived largely isolated from the modern world are now getting online with portable satellite dishes. That connectivity brings remarkable benefits, but it's also upending many communities' way of life.

CNN's Nick Paton Walsh and his team traveled into one of the most isolated regions of the Amazon, with local activists connecting villages online for the first time. Over the next hour, he'll show you how quickly this rush of unlimited information is changing their world and what it tells us about the internet's impact in all of our lives.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

NICK PATON WALSH, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The thing that has changed our world forever is now seeping across this vast, vital expanse that has kept us all alive for as long.

The internet is coming to, here, the Amazon, the forest that gives the world breath. And to the indigenous communities that have for centuries called this splendid isolation their only home. And the slow wind up river provides a rare vanishing glimpse of a world before the internet of a people who have never been online. In this remote corner, the protected indigenous world of Brazil meets the volatile borderlands of Peru. They can literally see the avarice of the future across the water.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): Here is the Javari Valley indigenous land. On the right side, indigenous land. On the left side is the land of the Nawa, the land of the Whites, as we call them. PATON WALSH: Our journey is with this man, Gago, and a group of

activists called navaja who work to protect the indigenous way of life and are here to introduce space based internet, Elon Musk's Starlink satellite dishes to this piece of perfect nowhere as their world and climate changes fast. The waters are lower than anyone alive has seen them.

Well, you can see how high the water used to be up there on the riverbank and how low it is now, and we're traveling this slowly because basically they're worried about the bottom of the boat hitting the rocks on the river bed unthought of frankly. In previous years it might damage the island, caused the boat to sink. Now this is impacting life all around the area. This kind of slow speed of cautious travel impacts how fast you get your sick to hospital, how you get your goods to the market, really altering the pace of life here.

Yet here where we moor, as dusk nears, it is almost like we step through an airlock in time and space to reach across the lake to the village where Gago is originally from.

We're about to go to a world that most people alive have never really experienced, but someone like me is old enough to remember, and that's a world without the internet and the extraordinary toll and change it's brought to our lives. But even that here is about to change.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): During summertime, the water gets very, very hot.

PATON WALSH: Oh, yes? Wow.

(Voice-over): Yet still, as it always has, it holds life.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): Listen up. It's fish.

[20:05:07]

PATON WALSH: Well, this is the last moments of daylight here. Where we're headed, we can't even tell at this distance if there's anybody living there.

(Voice-over): Yet one family comes home to their ordinary world, and its dusk chorus. Tomorrow is in a hurry. But the distance here hangs beautifully still. It's a silence you can feel stretches to the stars and back. Each day brings something new but none before like today.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): I'm going to make some tea. Here we have the medicine that cures malaria.

PATON WALSH: This is what hectic looks like here. Change comes on another boat. A revolution in a tiny box.

(INAUDIBLE) put villagers online to help them access medical aid and report illegal logging or mining. They're led by Orlando.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): Small but heavy, right? PATON WALSH: This will take them about an hour, but throw the village

forwards two decades.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): We can see that they don't have any sort of communication.

PATON WALSH: So far they have a diesel generator and like a dog here and now, you're giving them internet from space.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): For sure. They will now have to adapt to this new reality. I believe it's going to be a drastic change. We're witnesses this first moment. Damn. I'm sweating too much.

PATON WALSH (voice-over): A billionaire's Pandora is now out of the box across the rainforest. Starlink, the high speed global satellite internet provider run by Elon Musk and commercially bought for supply here. It's changed warfare in Ukraine, sped up wi-fi on board airplanes and let Iranians evade oppressive censors. But to the kids here, when it arrives, it is just a big cardboard box.

And it is staggeringly fast how they are suddenly connected to 7,000 satellites orbiting above, and the tumultuous power of unlimited information. For the moment of on their world will never spin the same again. And the online head rush begins. You'd need to be nearly a hundred years old to really know the phone-free isolation lost in this very moment.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): Starlink internet is working.

PATON WALSH: Not that you would immediately notice a revolution. There is a shyness, but also hints they know what they're getting.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): Uninstalling these little games so you don't mess around.

PATON WALSH: The internet something that was until this moment here a rumor, gossip. But what did little Ryan know of it? A Chinese TikTok like app spreading furiously across Brazil called Kwai.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): Hey, Kwai. Silly app. It only plays silly videos. Talk to me no more. I'm now busy with WhatsApp. It's already happening. Starlink is booming. Nobody wants to talk anymore. Let me send you a message so we can talk there. Send me messages, please.

PATON WALSH: The skies are fierce that night. Nature reveling in its power, bringing a loud and dark reminder of distance and size in the forest.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): Guys, I'm going to watch Kwai. PATON WALSH: And how online everywhere, everything and everyone else

in the modern world is. The monkeys speak first with the new light. But soon, word of mouth

about the dish has spread among this, the Kanamari indigenous community.

[20:10:04]

I mean, the internet coming to our lives slowly over decades giving us kind of time to gradually adjust. But here, the full force of that technology, which has transformed every single part of lives in the West and around the world, you're probably watching this now online, that technology is landing here today in one go, suddenly transforming pretty much everything around us here and giving them access to everything available online.

(Voice-over): Even here, there are rules and passwords. And with that power.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): Then you can give the password. In fact, the user should be from that route there. The password from this one, you can't give to anyone. This one here, only you should use, OK? You are the one responsible for the internet. We're only providing the mobile and the computer.

PATON WALSH: They've gone from the equivalent of horseback to an accelerating Tesla in 20 hours. And even in that small window, there's been trouble with who gets access and the passwords.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): If no one controls the password, soon everyone's connected. I've already changed the password for it. Talk to the community to be chief, and then OK.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): Here you put her name. Her name plus Kanamari.

PATON WALSH: It is unsettling to see a community as tight and connected as this reach for another online community.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): Lots of messages coming in already, see? From Facebook, you see?

PATON WALSH: Even the phones they have come with Kwai already on them. This world of swipes and CGI edited people crossed with monkeys, softcore lingerie and giraffe acrobatics springs out of the screens.

And there is some pretty bizarre stuff here. A.I. generated. Well, you can see it's the only, the only game in town already. Just a couple of hours after installation.

(Voice-over): Sixty million Brazilians spend on average 80 minutes a day on Kwai, the company claims. They recently released to the public an A.I. generator for two-minute videos. Generations of hunters here, where piranha is breakfast now preyed upon by algorithms.

Not a professional piranha eater. But apparently it tastes a little tougher. (Voice-over): The rains have a ferocity when they begin around us this

year after a record drought. It's hard to ignore the climate emergency, which the Amazons lungs are meant to help fix, taking its toll in this hypnotizing marvel of a place.

Yes, these are dolphins just popping up alongside us.

We've upstream a slow dance on a knife's edge between the world's last untouched peoples and the full force of modernity, with its raging hunger to make it all money.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[20:16:09]

PATON WALSH: We are headed to Sao Luis, a larger village where they've had Starlink for over a year, to see what, if anything, it has changed. But first here too we seem to pass through another airlock into a tribal cloister with a greeting that seems to conjure generations of longing to be left alone.

Do they mean anything? The markings on the face.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): This is an act of affection for the people that come from outside. The painting is to thank you for coming. They usually do this when outsiders come.

PATON WALSH (voice-over): We arrived, too, in the middle of a festival and a birth, the fullest celebration of life. People seem to just merge with nature here seamlessly one.

Well, the reason for all the bustling and activity around this building here is that a healthy baby girl has just been born. And tonight, during a pretty big celebration they'll have here, they're going to choose the little girl's name.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): Oh, our relative has been born. Our friend.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through text translation): Everyone is happy.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): That's why everyone is here. To get to know the baby. See how it's doing. See if it's a boy or a girl. It's a woman, one of ours. Today we're going to sing. We're going to put her name in the song. Very good song.

PATON WALSH (voice-over): This is part of the festival of Quehanna, which comes with the late summer's full moon and boasts unity between men and women, and the task of feeding the village.

They chant to ask the spirits to bring good fortune to the fishermen.

The men come back laden with fish. And later they will dance, and the men will use song to show their prowess.

The world is changing. Even as it tries to stand still. UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): Don't mess with the

parrot or it will bite your finger. The Whites are stingy. What goes inside this hole?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): This pin.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): What's this for?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): To hold the shotgun's firing pin.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): This one I have here. It's old and no longer shoots.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): That one no longer shoots?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): It can hit a monkey all the way up there.

PATON WALSH: Do you think that their way of life is changing?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Sure. Sure. It's changing. With the technology and the cities coming.

[20:20:03]

It's getting closer to the village. But one of the problems that I see, it's the kids needs to go to the city to study. So this is a big problem.

PATON WALSH: They just leave for good.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes. So when they are too young they still in the village. But when they are like 17, they go to the city. Sometimes they never back. Yes. Everything is changing too fast now. So.

PATON WALSH (voice-over): Dusk and the lights are from beneath the other than the stars above.

What's your favorite app? WhatsApp? Face?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Facebook.

PATON WALSH: And your Kwai? Kwai guy. You show me your Kwai? Whoa. Does everybody have a phone? It looks like everybody has a phone.

So you come here to send each other messages? Or do you go back to your houses?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): We come here to use the internet.

PATON WALSH: Have you tried the ice bucket challenge? UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through text translation): I am embarrassed

because of the Whites. Let's leave them here. Come on. Let's go.

PATON WALSH (voice-over): It does not, even now a year in, have a sinister feel. The stuff of online life is mostly silly, superficial, even social here, as people gather around and share one or two devices. They're dealing with something urban billions can't understand yet. Exactly what is mostly benign, but all pervasive and consuming. Blue light of distraction does to our brains and our lives.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): Is this his or her picture? It's the photo of the one I was talking about.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through text translation): I have sent the Careca's photo. But look, send me your photo, Christina.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through text translation): I do your photo here. There's a photo someone sent me on my phone.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): Go there. Play with me.

PATON WALSH: But the oldest song soon calls them back to earth. They gather in the large round hut, as has always been the way.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): We use our headdresses.

PATON WALSH: Orlando and Gago explain the choice of where to put the dish belongs only to the village.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): And now it is time for you to decide and see what is best. We know that sometimes the internet can bring some problems. But you tell us where to install it or not. So tomorrow we can then install it, sounds good?

PATON WALSH: The first voice, the teacher, said it must be used outside the village to help them catch illegal fishermen who poach on the protected land in a nearby lake.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): If there are invaders here, invading our lakes, our land, our territory, we'll take pictures and send them to Univaja.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): We will have the old Starlink there by the lake so if an intruder passes by, a fisherman, we can ask, where's that guy?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through text translation): We'll form task forces to organize the village.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): Are the task forces approved?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through text translation): Approved.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): Two task forces then.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): Are the task forces approved?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): Yes.

PATON WALSH: What they decide about the dish is simple enough, to have it in the village itself. The decision is simple and unanimous, and soon the ancient rites take center stage again.

Here the men dance and sing to the women who must learn the song and sing it back. In this ritual known as kajana, the men's faces are hidden, and they are dressed as the souls of the dead. But tonight's ritual is less about those who have left, but those who will come. The future. The men's song must be learned by the women and taught onwards to ensure bountiful hunts and fish.

[20:25:03]

This is the living in the vague hum of the moon, celebrating life.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[20:30:47]

PATON WALSH: We get a rare glimpse at how ingenious the old ways can be, too. Fishing here remains a family enterprise. One indigenous community showing us how they've always taken what they need. No more. There is no scale or rush to market here. But as they head deeper into the canopy, there is a little ancient wizardry.

The roots of these specific trees contain a chemical that they soak into the stream. Watch what happens next. The fish just float to the surface. The roots' chemical removes oxygen from the water, suffocating the fish. It is the indigenous natural equivalent of fishing with a hand grenade. And it is wildly effective.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): Look at the big fish there.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): Let me throw it.

PATON WALSH: And to undo it is also simple and natural. Urine, peeing into the stream reverses the spell and leaves the fish able to breathe again. So they can come back and repeat without lasting damage, as they have done for centuries.

The same skies hang over the new dawn here, though, and its new problems. There's been a deluge of new anxieties, new information, troubles they never knew they needed to have.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): My perceptions is that the indigenous already have the world defined. Their vision of the world is already complete. They know where the world came from. When you die, where you're going to. They already have a whole culture defined based on this. So new took arrive, without much explanation of what already exists naturally in their lives.

PATON WALSH: So connected it is easy to forget where exactly they are. A single nurse is based here, and today she switches out after a three-month shift by helicopter because the rivers are so low. Her replacement, Angela da Silva Melo, has been coming here for 11 years.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through text translation): Marli is in pain. She was carrying a big bag, then she fell.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through text translation): Is she Marli? Or is that her?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through text translation): This one.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through text translation): Speak up friend. Speak. Where does it hurt?

PATON WALSH: Starlink has transformed Angela's work. She can now get real time diagnosis from a doctor in a video call, even advice on handling a baby's birth complications. She even has patients self- diagnosing online now.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through text translation): And some of them even tell me when they come here, Nurse, I want this medication because it heals faster. And how do you know, I ask. He says because I researched it. You see? And this is when we see this evolution.

PATON WALSH: But she has seen a change among the people fast here since the internet arrived.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through text translation): They used to play football all the time. Today they play, but before it was way more. If you look at them today, they are all like this. Too much time that they spend on the internet. What I see the most is TikTok.

[20:35:33]

PATON WALSH: It is night when the village really joins the new online world. Increasingly one where they are together alone.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't want peace. I want problems always.

PATON WALSH: Kids use their parents' cell phones and oddly adults explain how to use them. A new rite of passage so distant from being taught fishing.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): Scroll the video like this.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): The craziest is to watch these videos that the internet shows.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): It pops up some videos with some fake news. Some lies, that type of thing. We mostly use WhatsApp to talk with relatives, for communication, for emergencies, those things.

PATON WALSH: Adults, even after a year here, aware of the damage these machines can do to them, but especially to children. They've learned to turn it off.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): People here turn on the internet at 7:00 a.m. and turn it off at 9:00 a.m. Then it opens again at 3:00 p.m. and turns off at 8:00 here. I go home to sleep. We used to play football, bathe in the river, change clothes, and went to do things from our culture. Hai Mai, you know, take ayahuasca.

We're still doing it. I don't use my cell phone all the time. I play too. I don't use my cell phone all the time. I play too.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): Back in Flores, where the Matses people are, their teacher doesn't let them use phones because it's bad for them. He says it's bad for the children. You can only use it if you are an adult, according to him.

PATON WALSH: There is a fierce sensitivity about pornography here. Yes, something not abnormal online, sure. But since a "New York Times" article suggested it was a world rife among another community, people fear its mention, however common it may be in cities.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): It's forbidden for children to get mobiles to watch porn, these things, it's not allowed. They can't. The teacher forbids them to use it like this. He teaches them how to use the phone.

PATON WALSH: Perhaps they are correct in understanding the enormous power of the richest American, Elon Musk, here. The disruptive ripples of porn, fake news panic already here, and remarkably, already an awareness, too, that the off button has a use, of a need to disconnect and to protect children. Ideas far advanced on the West. Only after a year here. Its introduction so rapid and extreme perhaps, they are the boiling frog, and the West is slowly simmering.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[20:43:36]

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): Radio check?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): Hearing.

PATON WALSH: To see what is at stake, you have to get above it.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): On the runway, starting take-off, one, two, from Hotel Tango Lima.

PATON WALSH: To this is a tiny helicopter flown for us by the same crew who take Brazilian federal agents on raids against illegal miners.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): Good morning. Taking off from Tabatinga. Destination Delta Charlie Golf. Five on board, off.

PATON WALSH: It feels like an insect shaking over the vast canopy. An endless green cover for the breakneck exploitation of this vital expanse. All this down below supposed to be a river but the drought is so

severe now we're just looking at riverbed exposed. It's startling to see from up here just how dry the Amazon is at the end of this summer.

(Voice-over): It feels so big you wonder how anything could touch it. But the clearings are slowly linking up and each one brings with it faster opportunities to take more wood, grow more crops and stop here from generating the air we all breathe.

Federal investigators have given us the coordinates of several areas where they suspect illegal mining is taking place in indigenous areas.

[20:45:00]

We're flying about 17 minutes before we see the first distinct blue roof and dredging tail of a mining boat. It is a centuries old trade, men in the wild, dredging for gold. But it is illegal and sometimes linked to drug cartels who want a part of an estimated $48 billion business.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): Look, people running.

PATON WALSH: A lone figure races across the beach towards the safety of the tree line, carrying a bag, perhaps a stash of gold. Our helicopter is also used by federal police on raids, and so they may think we are about to land and attempt an arrest. One boat turns as if to flee, but the water is too low to enable a swift getaway.

An actor can earn the millions and causes such damage to the forest here.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): There must be dredging around here. Look how dirty and contaminated the river is.

PATON WALSH (voice-over): This is why it's a problem. The unnatural dead and still brown of a mined riverbed. Mining chemicals like the mercury used to get the gold can kill all life and mining sediment turns the water brown. There is no more central part of a forest ecosystem than a healthy river giving life to everything from tree to jaguar. And here, for miles, life has been extinguished. The trail of damage also leads to the culprits.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): There's a construction here, look.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A house.

PATON WALSH: Here is where a Brazilian government raid a few months ago to try and shut this down. And you can see the damage that's been done here. And there are minimal signs of life.

(Voice-over): Miners made this deathly swamp their home.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): Look at the guy running there.

PATON WALSH: There they are. There they are running into the forest.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): He took a bag.

PATON WALSH: Running back and forth. Literally within weeks, weeks after the government raids here they're back.

(Voice-over) On the roof of the supply boat, part of the information arms race here, a Starlink dish, so they can tell their bosses what they've mined and be warned when the authorities come.

See the organized operation here. A fuel boat designed to move around, giving out fuel to the other boats.

(Voice-over): This is a spot of some intense activity. Mining dredges even sunk.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): There's another one here. Look there. Abandoned.

PATON WALSH: Our pilots think the miners are right here who are often armed and have shot a helicopters before, have fled. So they take the rare decision to land.

Where may be deserted and burned now but it was massive, causing significant damage here. This precious water that feeds everything around it frankly now barren.

(Voice-over): We just keep flying into the miners. So undeterred and open is their illegal world.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): The others just moved and hid. Now with Starlink they have total communication between them.

PATON WALSH: Here the internet is also a catalyst. But to speed up damage and help avoid the police. The enormity of the task police face.

He's running.

(Voice-over): How can you sweep down and pick up a miner in the hope they're still caught in possession of gold, so hovering over them is sometimes their only move. Futile as it feels right here.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[20:53:41]

PATON WALSH: There is another force here more violent than online algorithms and abuse. Also, dragging these tiny, calm worlds faster towards modern chaos and greed. On one side of the river here are the indigenous and on the other side is Peru, where coca cultivation is mostly legal and where the cartels are the main power.

We pass a series of plantations. We cannot go there and survive, but we can speak to people who have, which is all part of the sweeping destruction brought by the outside world here. The cartels are hiring indigenous people to work on the cocaine fields.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): Indigenous people have no dimension of what it means to be recruited by drug traffickers. This is something new. We have no idea how it will develop.

PATON WALSH: Rodrigo is from the indigenous community here, and rose from selling what he calls candies crack to eight months later proving he was a good shot and becoming security on a cocoa farm nearby. We've changed his voice and name for his protection.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): We started working the plantations at 2:00 a.m. and by 5:00 a.m. we're already harvesting. They call it scraping the coca leaves. They put a plastic bag below and just scrape, scrape, scrape.

[20:55:05]

The workers use the drug, too, so they can work more. We stop for just 15 minutes to eat, and sometimes, because that drug is so strong, they don't even feel hungry.

PATON WALSH: What was the worst thing you saw in your time working with them?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): The worst thing I saw was when a worker tried to escape. They torture and kill him. They shot him twice in the forehead. The guy they killed was about 17, 18 years old.

PATON WALSH (voice-over): He says he was allowed out after he'd served his dues. The money was seductive, though. A total of $18,000 he said he just lost in partying in the nearby town. That is how the cartels here can turbocharge change.

But Starlink is another perhaps fiercer catalyst, eroding the sacred nature of the old ways. And it moves incredibly fast. We return to see what the dish has done to the village we first came to.

Well, we're just about a week after installation, and this is where we're at. Kwai? Kwai? Animatronic kitten videos. Whoa. A.I. humanoids kitten videos with this quite creepy music. Hello.

(Voice-over): The teacher Osias has seen the change.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): We want to get to know the things of the White people, things we've never seen before. That's why when they open the phone, they go straight to Kwai.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): But one night the goat fell silent and when the farmer entered the barn to see what had happened you won't believe what he saw. Follow me and comment goat for part two.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): I have seen this video before.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): Mom, who is this lady? I was outside. The photo will come.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through text translation): Oh, my foot is numb.

PATON WALSH: After a week they sit until they can't move their legs. The kids here, the pre-teens even caught. So the adults have had to make rules. Something the so-called modern world still struggles to do.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): It turns out that if we allow it, they end up using the phone all day long. And if the one in charge of the Starlink doesn't turn it off, the child will keep the phone on until the end. Then they won't; want to work, won't want to fish, to collect water for their moms, to gather firewood for their moms, because they get addicted and are unable to stop. Our concerns are with some content that sometimes portrays girls and guys dating, flirting, talking.

For the boys especially there is these little games, that we call video games. My boy is addicted to this. He doesn't want to eat if someone gives him the phone. He'll use it nonstop for up to a month. We tend to stare at his phone at all times and that gives you three problems. It can cause problems to the mind, visions and spine. That's why we need to limit its use.

PATON WALSH: They've dealt with the youth going to the city for years, but this makes that brush with urban decay constant. It follows them home here.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): If we watch too many movies, the boys can become very rude. He just wants to fight because he watched that movie, I'm going to be just like Bruce Lee.

PATON WALSH: White world rules clashing, he says, with his school and the basic timeless needs of their cycle of life.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through text translation): For example, the Whites' party. Lots going on, right? A lot of women, a lot of men, a lot of booze, fights, drugs, all come into it. And here, according to our culture, if we're going to make music, there's no such things as drinking booze. The people will sing all night, the girls and the women will join in. But when dawn breaks, the women will want their share and what is their share? Food. They want fish, meat.

So the men who danced all night with the women, they go fishing and hunting. It's also because we believe in God, man. Here we keep the holy days that God says we should keep.

PATON WALSH: The days that God says we should keep. Timeless as a thought. Sacred like the fierce spirit of these children at play in a place where what was once infinite and unquantifiable is now immediate, logged and commodified, where the medicine, internet to bring help and fight destruction carries with it another disease.

Progress, its ravages, greed and relentlessness nowhere left to disconnect or simply be. To exist in isolation.

(END VIDEOTAPE)