It’s not bait. I don’t think the OP that I responded to was speaking about the mechanics of introducing these populations to the Internet (they’re welcome to correct me) but that they shouldn’t be introduced to such things or that the introduction would be tantamount to exploitation of some sort.

I read it more as that a remote highlands PNG villager is not "innoculated" against the concept of, and is not aware of the methodologies that will be used by odd foreigners who have a well thought out plan to convert people to their specific ideology.

Like, if you're out shopping and some person starts up a weirdly friendly conversation with you that leads to a MLM sales pitch, you already know that's a thing which exists and why you're almost certainly not interested in participating even before the pitch arrives.

I see- your interpretation may be the correct one.

As someone who knows exactly nothing about PNG, I got curious and had an AI retrieve some numbers:

IFPRI's 2023 survey of ~2,700 rural PNG households (~900 in highland strata) found 57–70% of highland homes thatched; across those same strata, 8–12% were on-grid, 41–68% had solar, and 5–14% had no electricity. This nonrepresentative sample excluded communities more than two hours from motorable road or river access and "areas with known security risks".

The same study found adult literacy of 40–54% (27% for seasonal-highlands women), assessed using Tok Pisin (not English) sentences—directly for household heads and by household-head proxy for other members—and secondary/vocational completion of 4–8% [1].

Phones: the 2016–18 DHS put mobile-phone ownership at 34% of people aged 15–49 nationally [2]; a 2018 rural (lowlands, not highlands) IFPRI survey found just over half of households had no phone-owning member, and only about a quarter of the poorest quintile owned a phone [3]. Cellular connections—distinct from unique owners—subsequently rose from ~2.7M in 2019 [3] to 5.03M in early 2025 [4]; there were 2.57M internet users (24.1% of the population) in early 2025 [4].

[1] https://cgspace.cgiar.org/items/05f7b268-cfd9-4b35-aba6-71c8... (Tables 2.4, 2.7, 2.8)

[2] https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/impactevaluations/improved-ta...

[3] https://cgspace.cgiar.org/items/fd5ac6eb-5268-4db7-ac96-bf01...

[4] https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2025-papua-new-guin...

It is immoral to treat another human being as too stupid to be exposed to others and worthy of your protection because you view them as primitive.

It's also immoral to expose isolated populations to all manner of the modern world's vices, optimized to be maximally addictive and maximally extractive, for which they have zero defense or even knowledge of their dangers.

That's a decision for them to make. If they don't want it by all means don't force it. But to say you shouldn't talk to them is unfathomably cruel.

Missionaries aren't there to inform the locals but to persuade them. They are intellectually dishonest.

But they're not equipped to decide whether they want it or not. It's like offering drugs to children saying they can choose if they want it. Children simply aren't equipped to make that decision, neither are people in these populations. I don't think we should keep them isolated, but contact should be limited initially. The technology we introduce them should be limited, enough to increase their quality of life and eliminate disease and so on without being utterly disruptive. Over time more technology and information can be introduced.

No population should be kept living a life we would consider extreme poverty out of some noble ideal. But we also shouldn't completely disrupt their way of life out of a different noble ideal. Wealth as we understand it isn't the only thing of value. Human connection, meaning anchored in community and deep roots, a sense of belonging and so on, are what really matter. Introducing modernity to such populations will sweep all of that away in one motion. These people would be left adrift in an alien world devoid of personal meaning, their only solace whatever addiction appeals to them most.

> But they're not equipped to decide whether they want it or not.

Why can't you say that about, idk, folks on welfare in the United States? How are they in a position to decide whether buying pop on food stamps is what they want or not? Maybe a woman doesn't really have the tools she needs to decide whether she wants to keep a pregnancy until she's had some counseling and time to cool off?

Obviously I'm not comparing these situations directly, and frankly I'm not sure you're wrong, but the point of view you are expressing here leads us to all of those scenarios and I think we should reconcile that.

I agree the application of the logic doesn't end with isolated populations. The relevant difference is that those brought up in the modern world have/had the potential to engage with knowledge of addiction and other vices, and decide for themselves how to steer their lives in an informed way. We draw a somewhat arbitrary line for being responsible for oneself as the best way to structure society given the tradeoffs. There's just no sense in which these isolated populations as a whole can be sufficiently informed about the modern world to suitably navigate its complexities to lead to their prospering in it.

But on the other hand you are assuming the modern world is bad and so therefore exposure to it is a dangerous and negative thing. I'm here to tell you that having access to medicine and playing sports and whatever is pretty great too. It's not all bad. I think you're taking a little bit of this Star Trek version of "leave them alone to develop on their own" but if the shoe were reversed and there was an alien species out there that could come down and talk to us and share knowledge and potentially harmful things as well, I'd like to make that choice for myself.

It's certainly a complicated subject, but I'd just challenge you to think of the positive version as well, not just the negative (addiction/vices/&c). It seems you have a default negative view of the world, some of us have a default positive view of the world. Modern life is pretty awesome!

My concern isn't mainly about addiction and vices, its more about a loss of meaning and being adrift in an alien world. The addiction/vices are just what one falls into when your life becomes devoid of meaning. I think the mental health crisis that most of the western world seems to be engulfed by, despite living in an age of endless wonders, goes to show that there is something deeply wrong with our modern way of living. My caution is against introducing this "sickness" (for lack of a better term) into populations even less able to defend and preserve personal meaning against an onslaught of technology and ideas that would evaporate their personal sources of meaning in an instant. That is no gift to anyone.

I just think you are super focused on the negatives. My life is great, I don't have a mental health crisis, most of my friends are doing well and having kids and enjoying their lives, and more.

There might be something deeply wrong with the modern world (which by the way includes other countries ranging from, idk, Iran, to Vietnam, to Korea) but there are a lot of things deeply right about it: opportunity, human rights, women's rights, independence, opportunities to build rocket ships or sail the world. That seems like one hell of a gift that I wouldn't want to deny anyone. If anything, providing opportunities and giving human minds the chance to flourish and be creative seems less of a sickness and more of a cure.

The danger when making decisions on behalf of other people is in imagining yourself in their position, rather than imagining them in their position. So you have a happy fulfilled life, you have the kinds of human relationships that provide deep meaning to you, you have the right kind of curiosity and wonder to be fulfilled by witnessing burgeoning technological progress, etc etc. Yes, being deprived of all that would be very bad for you.

Now imagine someone psychologically very average whose source of meaning is in the familiar environment where they have an acceptable amount of status, broad community support and much social engagement. They have a peculiar culture and social practices which gives them deep personal meaning. Now imagine all of that is swept away; no social status, no familiar environment, cultural practices gone, extended family scattered to the wind. What value does the wonders of the modern world have to someone who has lost everything they value?

Consumerism, technological marvels, and endless entertainment are the modern world's answers to the waning sources of personal meaning in modern life. Turns out that it's all a very poor replacement.