‘Information fracking’ seen as crucial to liberalizing North Korea’s people
Researchers want to ‘foment change from the bottom up’
During a week-long supervised “propaganda tour” of North Korea in 2013, Jieun Baek was caught off guard by a young lady’s curiosity about the most popular luxury brands in the U.S.
“I mentioned Chanel, Christian Dior and Burberry, and she said, ‘Everyone knows them. Tell me something I don’t know about,’ ” recalled Baek, a Belfer Centre fellow at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
“I was surprised by her cavalier response to my response. What it did tell me is that people have natural curiosity that the government cannot squash with fines, torture and executions.” That anecdotal encounter in Pyongyang also confirmed for Baek, an American-born Korean, the potential of what she dubs “information fracking” as a means to liberalize North Korea — and empower its people for democratic change in the world’s most isolated totalitarian regime.
“The regime is not impenetrable and we can foment change from the bottom up,” said Baek, author of the upcoming book North Korea’s Hidden Revolution, who was recently in Toronto for a community forum on how to hack North Korea.
“It’s similar to hydraulic fracking, the idea of penetrating something that’s seemingly impenetrable through pressure. It’s a powerful metaphor for North Korea. Their information and ideological blockades that seem to be impenetrable can be penetrated.”
While the idea of ideological warfare is not new, its execution has evolved with the technological changes from old-school propaganda leaflets to radio broadcasts, as well as information dissemination through DVDs, SD cards and most recently, USB keys.
With the collapse of the former Soviet Union — Pyongyang’s staunchest supporter — and the severe famine in the 1990s, North Koreans have grown to become more independent from the handouts of the regime. An increasingly porous border with a rising capitalist China also created more opportunity for information exchange.
Since 2008, the Seoul-based North Korea Strategy Center has smuggled more than18,600 portable computer memory sticks loaded with translated dramas, documentaries, current affairs, educational and informational content.
The information disseminated through the variety of devices has also shifted from traditional “overt political messages” to soft, nuanced contents, said Sharon Stratton, the strategy centre’s U.S. program officer, and another key speaker at the Toronto forum.
“Rather than sending something that says you have a terrible government, Communism is evil and democracy is the great, free world, we know that’s not effective. If we are sending content that enforces that, it’s counterproductive to our goals,” said Stratton, who is half-Australian and half-Korean.
“We just want to illustrate and show what it’s like in the world outside of North Korea. The hope is North Koreans will see that. It’s about opening up their eyes to what’s happening around the rest of the world so they can look more critically and objectively on what’s happening around them in North Korea.”
Both Baek and Stratton said grassroots societal and cultural changes must go side by side with changes at the political level. Part of their speaking tour is to shift the public narra- tive on North Korea from a “closed impenetrable black box” to a place of today.
“The regime is still super closed, very brutal, one of the worst human rights states in the world. However, in the past 20 years, the country has evolved to becoming much more dynamic, not at the state level but at the people level,” said Baek, who has a master’s degree from Harvard and will start her doctoral studies in public policy at the University of Oxford this fall.
“Most people who think of North Korea don’t think about the markets or the information people are taking risks to learn more about the outside world. I want to not keep North Korea in this hopeless place that’s beyond change and hope.”