Not hooked up to much. North Korea Intranet. Computer room at the Nampo Chollima Steelworks. Photo by Joseph A Ferris III.
The State Department was unhappy that New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, former UN ambassador, and Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google (former CEO of Google), as well as former State Department official Jared Cohen, now with Google Ideas, went off to North Korea to do their own "citizens' diplomacy" (as it used to be called in the 1980s before the Internet; now it's called "digital diplomacy" -- same thing, only with an ego amplified more via the Internet).
The State Department was fretting because these sorts of free-lance affairs tend to do an end-run around their carefully-constructed diplomacy (mainly of the non-Internet kind), but that's all the more reason why Richardson -- and especially Schmidt -- wanted to go.
LENDING LEGITIMACY TO THE ILLEGITIMATE
While the State Department's Victoria Nuland said merely the timing was "ill-advised"; a former Clinton administration negotiatior elaborated:
The reason for State's objection is that North Korea and its allies in China will use the visit to convey "an image of openness and receptivity to the outside," said Evans Revere, the State Department's deputy chief negotiator with North Korea during the Clinton administration.
The visit helps the regime "convey a sense of legitimacy and international recognition and acceptance to its own people" at the very moment that the State Department is preparing to respond with sanctions in the U.N. Security Council, Revere said.
But Richardson and Schmidt think they can do better. And they think they know better. That's what often motivates "citizens' diplomacy" -- the idea that non-state actors somehow have more capacity to reach "people to people" on some human level that will disarm nuclear weapons, etc. -- and the idea that states are "self-interested" (even those liberal elected ones, evidently) or bureaucratic or driven by oil interests or whatever...
THE GOSPEL OF CONNECTIVITY
Google is driven by business interests, too, of course, as well, but the ad revenue from 24 million clickers in North Korea isn't that significant. No, what's more important for Sergey Brin -- and Schmidt and others like them in Google and other Big IT -- is that they have power and influence, and that they successfully promote their Gospel of Connectivity.
I first ran across the Theory of the Saving Power of Connectivity from Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg in a statement of his world view in 2008 that got overlooked because of the drama of Sarah Lacy's other confrontation of him -- Zuckerberg unabashedly claimed that if young men inclined toward mayhem or revolution or terrorism could just get on Facebook and make friends, the world would be changed -- they'd be weaned away from their violence.
But it isn't just connecting people; it's connecting them *in this one big thing called Facebook to do unified political action*. Said Zuckerberg, in 2008:
We need to build an organization that has enough political clout to really affect legislation. Like the NRA, as powerful, you can't get in their way.
Jared Cohen believes much the same, and has devoted his life lately to trying to find out why people join gangs or terrorist groups and how the Saving Power of Connectivity can prevent them from Going Wrong.
Come to Jesus!
And that's exactly what Silicon Valley -- Facebook and Twitter and Google with its often-derided but increasingly ubiquitous G+ -- set about building -- using social media where they first gathered everybody together and got them expressing, then scraped their data, drilled down, and then fed them scripted stories by demographics and issue to ensure the Obama win.
WHO GETS TO CONNECT?According to this theory, if you just connect people, magical things will happen and authoritarian regimes will be undermined and people will learn new ideas and help topple tyrants. You know, like that Egyptian Google engineer Wael Ghonim did -- and how's that working out?!
I'm all for connecting, but the problem is who gets to connect -- and to what. The Turkmens have gotten adept at saying they have "the Internet" when in fact it is more an "Intranet" using Chinese engineering to filter out the web as much of the world knows it.
It's not just that there's no magic -- that's the sort of thing Evgeny Morozov is always morosely telling us -- but then guiding us toward a more bureacratic light in the Global Glavlit, where the smart people like him and his Twitter followees will Run Things.
It's that the resulting collectivized entity created by the connectivizing salvation hasn't demonstratively advanced human rights and democracy.
DICTATOR'S DILEMMA OR DUPES' DELUSION?
North Korea is facing an extreme version of the dictator’s dilemma. On the one hand, its leaders are attracted to the knowledge, economic growth, and global connectivity that are facilitated by the Internet. At the same time, they know that the Internet would threaten their grip on power. Most regimes facing this quandary have chosen to embrace technology, even with the corresponding loss of control. North Korea is likely to do the same. The difference is that it might not survive the consequences.
I guess she hasn't heard of the mosquito net theory, as explained by Scott Thomas Bruce. Under this theory, the NK regime can let in technology, but filter out ideas that tend to undermine its power.
This belief in the alchemic power of information is big in Google and its NAF fangirlz:
Examples like these illustrate how even the most basic access to information could be devastating to the North Korean regime. North Korea is built on a myth: that it is a great country to live in, that nothing is lacking, and that the outside world should be viewed with fear and distrust. When people discover that their homeland is built on lies, they lose faith in the regime.
You would think -- except it just doesn't work that way. I wish more people would study the experience and psychology of the Soviets -- before, during and after the break-up of the Soviet Union. People exposed to the truth of the "West is best" can suffer a crisis. They can become more belligerently nationalistic and defensive; they can see the reality of the free world as one where no one will take care of them -- and they're right about that in one sense. A key reason why North Korea doesn't change is because South Korea doesn't want to have to pay to integrate it if/when it collapses -- it's just too costly (more than West Germany had to pay to integrate East Germany).
And there's nothing to say that the regime would topple merely if some more people got on the Internet: see Russia, see Putin.
GANGNAM STYLE OR GANGLAND STYLE?
The former North Korean prisoner Shin Dong-Hyuk who escaped from the camps and eventually made it to South Korea explained it rather plainly to a young fellow who also gushed hopefully that maybe Gangnam style could bring...universal peace or something. Even if you piped this song to everyone, they wouldn't get the references, he explained. Hell, even Americans don't get the references. Did you know that hip-thrusting character in the video known in the US on Youtube as the Elevator Guy -- who seems like a total goofus walk-on -- is actually very famous and important in South Korea?
The North Koreans will likely ignore Schmidt's call -- or figure out how to manipulate it to their ends, by having just enough "dialogue" or "engagement" to keep Google officials coming back along with NAF fellows -- and hopefully not getting kidnapped like Kenneth Bae, the guy whose case they were raising (and whom they didn't even get to see).
There's a message that never, ever seems to get delivered to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un -- out loud, with the world's attention on it, as with this Google trip -- that the reason the world doesn't want you to have nuclear weapons, isn't because they're imperialist or mean or unfair or, um, not respecting your manhood.
It's because you don't seem as if you can be trusted with them when you jail and torture dissenters, ordinary people in the wrong place at the wrong time, and of course keep the whole population under lock and key, including starving them in favour of feeding the army.
WHY DON'T THEY RAISE THE LABOUR CAMPS?
What would have been more important, in my view, would be for Richardson and Schmidt to call for the brutal and torturous labour camps to be closed. It's not merely about connecting to the Internet; it's about first having people be free even to speak in real life and find their own way to lasting freedom.
The focus is always on trying to find some carrot or stick that will get the North Koreans not to develop further and launch nuclear missiles.But the reason their nuclear capacity is even at issue is because of their nature, and that's what has to change first. Until it changes, nothing else will change. It might seem to be the hardest part to tackle -- the nature of the regime -- but in fact it's the only thing that matters, as the rest are totemic symbols, albeit deadly ones.
Does finding some other avenue like the attractiveness of Internet technology work to crack the nut? No, because it only adds to the aggrandizement. As the Wall Street Journal quoted Kim as saying, he sees it as a tool for making himself/his country a "giant":
The industrial revolution in the new century is, in essence, a scientific and technological revolution, and breaking through the cutting edge is a shortcut to the building of an economic giant.
And as expected, the mere call for connectivity -- for "progress -- is morphed by an over-eager press into a call "for Internet freedom" -- when in fact Schmidt never uttered the word "freedom".
Nobody raises the labour camps -- least of all Eric Schmidt, least of all on a Google good-will mission disguised as a "humanitarian" trip -- because that would get the hosts mad.
So what? They're already mad. They already torture people. They already kidnap foreigners. They already launch missiles. It's time to say that what's wrong with them is their oppression of their own people -- the heart of the matter.
This will not be fixed by a very thin cosmetic layer of nomenklatura getting Internet access -- any more than Gorbachev's very managed glasnost in 1986 (and the NK version of this will be far less) led to nuclear arms reduction. That didn't happen until in fact Gorbachev was gone, the conservatives whom he in fact supported failed in their coup, and Yeltsin came to power and freed the media and the economy.
INTERNET CONNECTION AS A PLACEBO FOR REAL HUMAN RIGHTS
There's a very troubling aspect to such "humanitarian missions" that junk hard human rights issues -- like the labour camps -- in favour of the placebo of "Internet connectivity". It's as if that milder more "vegetarian goal" can be pursued without ruffling the host's feathers and by appealing to their vanity in wanting to become technologically modern -- and later the harder human rights issues can be "eased in". Jared Cohen did this with the delegation of US technologists to Russia three years ago, when he steered the American do-gooders from Big IT in Silicon Valley to the safer topics of "children" and "corruption" which were already pre-approved by Kremlin manipulators.
What all this means is that we get a "Google knows better" notion of how to sequence the order of human rights -- first the economic/social rights of Internet connectivity, then the civil and political rights of free speech and release of political prisoners from labour camps. I think not only that won't work; it's a betrayal of the people who suffer in the camps.
There's also the disturbing totalitarianism in the technocommunism of the cult of connectivity -- there's really only one big thing, then, to keep us connected, especially across all platforms and devices now, via G+...
Google knows what's best, and what's best for Google is what's best for the country, and that means first connectivity, and then everything else...
As we've seen with a similar country scoring very low on the media freedom indices -- Turkmenistan -- the Chinese engineers come in, the filters go on, and the Internet usage increases -- but without Youtube, where dissidents have satires of the great Turkmenbashi, including out-takes from official TV showing him to be a petty and vain tyrant.
In Russia, certainly far more along the path of "transition to democracy" than North Korea, which is a Soviet pupil excelling ferociously, sure, there are lots of opposition people on Facebook and Twitter and more connected sorts speaking their mind than ever before. All you have to do is look in the hostile comments to any dissident piece in the Russian official or alternative press or see the numbers of state TV by contrast with Internet users to understand why democracy in Russia isn't going so well: be careful what you wish for when you connect up the "aggressively obedient majority" as the historian Yuri Afanasyev so aptly called the Russian mob that opposes liberalism.
In ten years of Interneting around Belarus or Russia or Ukraine or Uzbekistan, we'd have to concede that we have more citizen journalists and bloggers in jail than ever before, and more super-suave wired regime tools to crush dissent with withering invectives on every forum -- sometimes for pay, sometimes by bot.
I'm not for counseling despair or caution and accommodation, however, like Sarah Kendzior and Katy Pearce. We do have to fight the regimes and their tools -- but not just on the Internet -- and more effectively online than ever before.
THE REAL CONNECTIONS
Far more important than connecting up a few regime tools right now to Youtube while the masses are kept away even from lolcats is keeping the real-life connections among the exiles and the homeland. That's the living bridge that does exist now between the closed North Korea and open South Korea and that's what should be enhanced.
There are now more than 25,000 "defectors," i.e. people who have fled North Korea for South Korea -- they aren't called "refugees" because they are automatically given citizenship -- unless they get trapped in China, which doesn't always let them through. There are even people desperate enough to leave North Korea due to lack of work and food - and then return to try to support their families -- particularly rural women, who are watched less then men because they're second-class citizens in that society. Everything should be done so that there are more of these people -- and there *are* more due to a combination of some slippage of control by the regime; increasing news about the realities of the outside world; and increasing corruption that enables border guards to be bribed.
Is there a "one laptop per defector" program? Is everything possible being done to help these people express themselves and be broadcast by various means both to North Korea and the world to tell their stories?
Each person who flees has family and friends behind who trust them. If they can communicate with each other -- whether by cell phones, which are also tightly controlled, or indirectly through radio and Internet broadcasting -- they can sustain the kind of living bridge that tends to work more efficiently and durably to undermine authoritarianism than empowering a lot of nomenklatura elites and expecting they are going to change gradually into liberals instead of just keeping themselves in power. Indeed, empowering the Oprichnina and hooking them up to faux "counterparts" in the West only delays progress.
Eric Schmidt, understandably, is more interested in making a New Class -- that's the kind of New Class that creates engineers who can work for Google but more broadly be part of the "savvy, connected" uber class that helps rule things Google's way.
ONLY CONNECT...OR ELSE?
I, for one, do not welcome our new overlords -- I guess it's no surprise to me at how eagerly Schmidt went running to Pyongyang given how swiftly his G+ minions send out ban warnings to people who criticize Sergei Brin's notion of a party-less future and how touchy his transparency team is about criticism of their actual lack of transparency.
Has it ever happened in the history of humankind that technologists threatened people with actual wholesale economic loss if they didn't use modern technology -- and use it their way? Says Schmidt:
As the world becomes increasingly connected, their [North Korea's] decision to be virtually isolated is very much going to affect their physical world, their economic growth and so forth
The government has to do something. They have to make it possible for people to use the Internet. It's their choice now, and time, in my view, for them to start or they will remain behind.
Choice? Sounds like coercion, even if for "a good cause" -- ending North Korea "backwardness" and oppression (as a secondary matter, for Schmidt, evidently).
A creepy implication, no? Connect or fall behind. Connect or die!
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