In the book Singularity Sky , Charles Stross has envisioned an entire planet that has outlawed all forms of advanced technology being brought kicking and screaming into the present day with an influx of technology. Literally communicators and cornucopia machines raining from the sky by a race that wants entertainment and stories in return.
Great book, but I’ve been thinking lately, could we accomplish something like this in North Korea? Airdrops of cell phones, satellite wireless connectivity, hell, even radios.
Technology has advanced enough that they would be easily concealed, and open up a window to the world that the average citizen is not seeing, outside smuggled DVDs and South Korean soap operas.
Has this been attempted? I seem to remember radios being dropped into East Berlin, along with food and other necessities during the Berlin Airlift.
To an extent, it already happens, at least on the northern border. North Koreans smuggle in DVD players and watch South Korean soaps. As for radio broadcasts and leaflet drops, they also occur but anybody caught with leaflets is arrested.
Why would it make any fundamental difference? Contraband is contraband and, ultimately, dead is dead. And it’s not like the people there don’t already know their lives are cruddy and there are signs people know the official government line isn’t totally on the level. Worse, it’s not like they’ve got the most reliable electrical infrastructure or sources of food. It’s hard to forment philosophical change in a people on a few minutes of TV a day when they’re starving, drug-addicted (a huge portion of the population is hooked on meth - partly due to a lack of basic medical supplies like palliatives), and miserable.
So why should they totally accept (or even think about) the world they see on the TV? They could always accept the simple answer: everybody else’s lives in the world are also cruddy (though perhaps to a lesser extent) and the stuff they see on the TV is largely propaganda.
I guess that is my point. With access to cell phones they could tell for sure that what they were seeing and hearing isn’t just propaganda, it’s how the rest of the world lives.
Who would they call, though? How would they even know how to reach someone else who spoke Korean and lived outside of NK? And, again, even if they got through to somebody they could understand, how would they be sure that the person on the other end of the line wasn’t some South Korean propaganda operator?
50 years of NK brainwashing has really left North Koreans suspicious of anyone peddling anything other than the party line. I honestly believe the only way to get NK to change is to get the leader, whoever it is, to change–and even then it’s going to be a slow and dangerous process, probably one that would result in the execution of all of the hardliners in the party and the army, thousands of them at least. Throwing down a few cell phones or unlocked TV sets is not going to start a revolution by brainwashed peasants who have no weapons and no support, arrayed against an army totally committed to the Kim cause.
I somehow have a feeling that airdropping phones and radios to the North Korean people would be interpreted as an act of war by the North Korean government. And while we could probably clean their clocks, I don’t think the South Koreans would be too thrilled about the prospect of a war.
Hell, you’d be better off air dropping in food than electronics, since their power grid is so creaky and unreliable. I think if you air dropped in McDonald’s meals somehow I think it would be more amazing to the average North Korean than cell phones and satellite news, especially when they realized that even the poorest American has access to such things (and generally eats there WAY too much for their own good). Think about the disconnect between the average North Korean struggling for food, and the average South Korean who has an over abundance (and are starting to get a bit plump on average last time I was there :p)
Isn’t it amazing how stuff in books always works the way it was designed to? No failures, no unintended consequences, no technology screw-ups, no government interference, no blowback by religious groups, no lack of acceptance by the public? You do something amazing and everybody goes YEA!
The exact scale of the problem is a matter of debate, but that a meth addiction problem exists really isn’t. Apparently, in addition to use as a palliative, some use it as an appetite suppressant.
Even if they have phone numbers to call, they know the phones are safe to use because…?
Beyond the fact that there are dire consequences if they are caught, how are they to know the person on the other end isn’t a propaganda agent of the “evil, imperialist forces of the US or their puppets in the South”? Or that it isn’t a trap by their own government to catch the disloyal?
You can play this game endlessly. At some point, you have to have faith in something. Even if these people don’t buy everything their government tells them, they’ve been sufficiently inculcated from birth to buy into a good portion of it just on faith. They won’t ever totally buy the notion that the vast majority of what they know to be true is actually false.
So what happens along that border near China?
Apparently there is some trading going on, and the people are less hungry than other parts of the country. Surely the North Koreans who watch DVD’s of South Korea also ask a few questions, such as “is it true that people really live that way?” And if they have a stack of, say, 5 DVD’s containing silly TV shows, surely it’s possible to sell/smuggle a few additional DVD discs within the same stack…and those DVD’s could contain actual news about the rest of the world. That might provide enough info to spark some genuine curiosity among a few thousand people, who would then talk (in whispers)about what they have seen, to a few thousand more, who might then be willing to smuggle radios and listen to broadcasts from across the border.
It’s not going to cause a revolution, but it could be a small crack in the wall.
There’ve been cracks for ages. You wouldn’t have people sneaking out of the country if not.
The problem is that the notion that this would lead to a “singularity” to precipitate change is unrealistic.
“Of course TV will present the best possible picture. It can’t be the case that soap operas show what life is actually like in South Korea - we know from our government that they’re also poor.”
As noted, the people there don’t totally buy into the government line. But there are few nations where that isn’t true. Most Americans would be unsurprised to learn that what they’ve been told about most things is not totally true. But we generally accept that most announcements out of Washington are generally true and that we’ve got a fair handle on the situation. Why wouldn’t most North Koreans believe the same of their government - that while they don’t get the whole truth that they get the general gist of the real situation?
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. And it would be a two-fer…they would get food AND they would get the toys as well (I assume Happy Meals still come with toys anyway :p)
The vital difference in the op post is the dropping of cornucopia machines as well as communicators . If those existed and we could drop them then sure we could bring about change in any society.
Since we don’t have cornucopia machines the best we can do us massive food drops together with DVDs and other literature . Sure we could probably crumble nk if we did that but first we would have to establish total air superiority and also take the hit that nk would probably shell Seoul and kill a few hundred thousand or more before we could take out all the artillery they have.
Attempts to send balloons into north korea with radios attached are frowned upon by the SK government. They tend to intervene to put a stop to it. Doing it from China is even less likely. So you are going to have a problem with that.
There is a big smuggling operation between NK and China. The NKans are still using VCDs I think, supposedly those are only 10-20 cents each. The biggest media people in NK want is SK soap operas. Some people find this offensive (people would prefer the NK citizens want info about politics or the world) but soap operas could really open up some good introspection in SK. Everyone in a soap opera is well fed, the country is wealthy, people aren’t terrified of the government, etc.
Fundamentally I don’t know if it matters much. Even if 90% of the NK citizens realize they’ve been had and get enraged at the government as long as the military, police, secret police and prison camps still work it will mean nothing. Real reform will come when the hundreds of high level leaders in the political and military system realize their lives will be better under reform.
Its not even remotely comparable, but in the US hordes of the public are upset that our government has been captured by the financial industry. But is anything done about it just because the public is mad? Nope. By and large ‘the public’ have very little power unless there is a spark (like what happened in the middle east in Tunisia, or in the former soviet states) that causes all that public rage to spill over into civil war.
Actually, it may end up being the Chinese tourists (tourism being one of the few ways Kim & Co. can get hard currency) who start the “wow, we really DO suck” realization.
In stories of obnoxious Chinese tourists (they were throwing wrapped candy to the small kids like they were throwing bread at ducks (and the kids acted like the ducks), it was mentioned that the NK mindset was “we’re poor, but at least we’re better off than the Chinese”.
Once it becomes widely known how well off the Chinese have become, and how they got there, the water park and ski resort might not impress the locals anymore.
If it turns out that dead uncle was killed because he was working with China to repeat the Chinese period of 1980-1990 in NK, and Kim opposed it… well, he is already suspect for killing an elder - Confucian teaching is that you honor your elders, not publicly execute them on flimsy charges.
