Kim the geek creates digital Achilles' heel
By Andrei Lankov
SEOUL - Recent visitors to Pyongyang are surprised by many things. They expect
to go to the capital of an underdeveloped Stalinist nation, run by a crazy and
brutal dictatorship. But the picture they see before them is remarkably
different.
No doubt, signs of ideological craziness and political repression abound:
people are visibly afraid to talk to foreigners, the Internet is banned
unconditionally, and posters glorifying the leader and his wisdom are
ubiquitous. However, there are sights and sounds that do not fit easily into
the pre-existing image of a starving, destitute and hopelessly backward
country.
One is the remarkable abundance of cellphones. Mobile communication has taken
the North by storm. Mobiles were first
introduced in the early 2000s, but the service was soon discontinued (only the
top brass were allowed to use cellphones after 2004).
Things changed almost overnight when Egyptian telecom company Orascom secured a
deal with the North in early 2008 and began to operate the network later the
same year. Only three years have passed since the first subscribers joined the
network. Today some 700,000 North Koreans own cellphones.
Another peculiarity is the steady proliferation of individually owned
computers. The North Korean government does not merely tolerate individual
ownership of what is essentially an information processing and decimating
machine - in fact, it goes one step further and actually encourages the spread
of computers.
Some political precautions are taken. There is a government agency known as
Bureau 27 (the North Korean bureaucracy seems to love mysterious sounding
numerical names for institutions), whose mission is to register all
privately-owned computers and conduct random checks to ensure that owners do
not store anything improper on their hard disks.
South Korean soap operas are seen as especially subversive. Needless to say,
there is no Internet access in North Korea whatsoever. Still, computers are
increasingly common in households.
Frankly, this is quite strange. Both history and common sense suggest that a
spread of information processing/dissemination technology is dangerous for any
authoritarian regime. This is particularly dangerous for the Kim family regime
in the North, whose legitimacy depends on its claimed ability to deliver the
economic growth and prosperity to the populace.
Since this is an exact area where North Korea has failed most spectacularly,
regime survival largely depends on its ability to keep the population ignorant
of the daily lives and standards of living of people in neighboring countries,
especially South Korea.
There is little doubt decision-makers in Pyongyang understand that both
privately-owned computers and cellphones constitute a serious threat. The
abortive attempt to ban cellphones in 2004 and the sheer existence of Bureau 27
indicates that North Korean decision-makers are aware they are playing with
fire. Yet, they still continue this dangerous game.
Had Kim Jong-il and his henchmen been perfectly rational and cold-minded
dictators, they would probably outlaw all dangerous communication technologies.
This is not as bizarre as it sounds: after all, Kim Jong-il's father Kim
Il-sung once banned tunable radio sets (according to a time-honored tradition,
possession of a tunable radio set is still a crime in North Korea). But they
have not adopted this easy solution, and a brief look at the history of
Stalinist regimes and communist regimes in general provides a plausible
explanation as to why.
Nearly all Stalinist regimes share a feature which for want of a better term
can be described as "technological fetishism". Stalinist potentates believed
that the obvious economic problems that their regimes faced must be cured by
some a technological panacea.
The leaders saw that the promised Leninist utopia was seriously slow in
arriving, but could not admit that something was terribly wrong with the system
itself. Therefore, the Stalinist potentates began to pin their hopes on some
spectacular technological invention. More often than not, they found themselves
trusting a rag-tag band of pseudo-scientific charlatans.
In some cases, though, they were interested in genuinely promising
technologies. These technologies, however, were not powerful enough to meet the
rulers' vastly inflated expectations and solve the manifold problems of the
notoriously inefficient Stalinist economic model.
Joseph Stalin himself can be seen as a perfect example of a technological
fetishist. His most notorious mistake was his infatuation with a "new kind of
biology" that was pedaled by Trofim Lysenko, a life-long enemy of modern
genetics. He was Lamarckian and hence believed that plants could, under the
right conditions, be manipulated through changes in environment.
Lysenko used Stalin's trust to destroy the Soviet genetics program, promising
that his new methods would dramatically increase harvests. The damage was
great.
Chairman Mao Zedong, being a Chinese revolutionary romanticist, hatched even
wilder schemes. Among other things, he believed that steel production could be
dramatically increased by the construction of household furnaces (even primary
schools were ordered to build their own steel-making facilities back in the
late 1950s).
Mao was also supportive of some Chinese agronomists who said that yields could
be dramatically improved if ploughing was done much deeper (in practice this
meant that farmers were ordered to use shovels to dig deep trenches and then
just cover them with earth). Another insane idea was "close cropping". Seeds
were sown with exceptional density on the politically correct assumption that
seeds of the same class would not compete between themselves.
Kim Il-sung is likely more rational than such mentors in Moscow and Beijing,
but he clearly shares the same belief in technological wonders. Among other
things, he pushed for the development of terrace fields. It was assumed that
terrace fields would allow the cultivation of hitherto unproductive slopes in
North Korea. But these fields turned out to be very vulnerable to floods.
Actually, the use of terrace fields made the floods of 1995-1956 far more
severe in their destruction of crops.
The logic behind technological fetishism is not that difficult to understand.
The root cause of economic stagnation experienced by Stalinist regimes is the
intrinsic inefficiency of the Stalinist economic model. But the potentates of
such regimes as well as their henchmen could not admit such things - at least,
openly.
For Stalinist leaders, the social system was perfect, or at least had to be
presented as such. Therefore the only conceivable reason for obvious economic
difficulties had to be technological issues. Being hard-core modernizers,
Stalinists shared the modern belief in the power of technology as a force that
could change people's lives.
Had they been real Marxists, they would probably have paid more attention to
the social issues, but most of them ceased to be Marxists when they took power.
The current North Korean leadership is not free from technological fetishism.
In all probability, Kim Jong-il and his inner circle know only too well that
the economic situation of their country is disastrous. But they seemingly hope
to find some technological silver bullet which will deliver them from their
current woes. Social and economic reform is taboo, therefore a wonder
technology remains their only hope.
Being aware of trends in the modern world, the North Korean elite probably
believes that this "wonder technology" must be somehow connected to
telecommunications and computers. After all, information technology is what
every authority across the globe describes as the future of civilization.
Hence, North Korean leaders cannot bring themselves to ban computers and even
mobile phones. For them, it would be tantamount to giving up the dream of an
eventual technological breakthrough.
An interesting confirmation of the trend is the current fad for CNC (Computer
Numerical Control) technologies - computer automation at factories. The CNC
craze is often associated with Kim Jong-eun, the most likely heir to the North
Korean throne. Indeed there is good reason to believe that this is the case,
but it doesn't really matter whether this fad is sponsored by Kim Jong-eun or
someone else. Rather, what is important is that this naive belief in the power
of intelligent machinery that will miraculously transform the North. (See
Happiness rolls over us like a wave, Asia Times Online, Feb 26, 2010)
Incidentally, when the present author was a Soviet teenager, back in the 1970s,
he frequently read similar stories in the then-Soviet media. The Soviet
leadership of the Leonid Brezhnev-era also invested some hope in the miraculous
power of CNC technology. CNC is actually quite a sound idea and works very well
if used in the right social and economic conditions.
However, such conditions were absent in the Soviet Union of the 1970s and are
also seemingly completely absent from North Korea of today.
So, Pyongyang's expectation for CNC, mobiles and computers are unfounded. These
technologies, or for that matter any other technology, are unlikely to have any
serious impact on the future of North Korea as long as the country's social and
political system remains unchanged. However, North Korea's leadership cannot
see or accept this.
The flawed judgment might have its benefits, as naive hopes lure North Korea's
hereditary dictators into promoting forces which in the long run could
potentially threaten the survival of their regime. And this is, in the end,
would be good news for both outsiders and common North Koreans.
Andrei Lankov is an associate professor at Kookmin University in Seoul,
and adjunct research fellow at the Research School of Pacific and Asian
Studies, Australian National University. He graduated from Leningrad State
University with a PhD in Far Eastern history and China, with emphasis on Korea.
He has published books and articles on Korea and North Asia.
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