Nigel Washburn, writing at Overland Trail Guides:
I'm sitting at a campsite in the Eastern Sierras—one of those spots where the stars are so thick they look Photoshopped and the silence is so profound it almost hurts. It's golden hour. The kind of light that makes even my beat-up camp chair look like it belongs in an REI catalog.
And across from me, bathed in that perfect amber glow, is a dude with a Starlink dish mounted to his $80k overland rig, frantically refreshing his email while his kid watches YouTube Kids on an iPad.
This is where we are now. We've officially brought the one thing we're supposedly escaping with us into the wilderness.
Look, I get this take. But I'm here to say that it isn't always so black and white. I can tell you that sometimes—oftentimes, even—it's the fact that I can stay connected that's letting me get out. I've done several mid-week trips that I could not have done without the ability to stay connected to my responsibilities.
I get the desire to disconnect and share moments with each other. Let's just not forget that disconnecting isn't possible for everyone all the time, and maybe hold back a bit on the judgment over how much your fellow traveler spent on his rig or how much he's using Starlink.
How Starlink Killed the Campfire (And Why We're All Complicit)
We drove into the wilderness to escape our screens, then paid one of the world's richest billionaires to bring them with us. This satirical look at overlanding's satellite internet obsession explores how Starlink and similar services are killing boredom, destroying campfire culture, and turning backcountry trips into just another place to doomscroll. Spoiler: we told ourselves it was for the kids, but we're the ones who can't disconnect.