North Korea is going online.Doctors can consult via live, online video conferencing, and lectures at prestigious Kim Il Sung University are streamed to faraway factories and agricultural communes.
People use online dictionaries and text each other on their smart phones. In the wallets of the privileged are "Jonsong" or "Narae" cards for e-shopping and online banking. Cash registers at major department stores are plugged into the web.
It's just not the World Wide Web ─ this is all done on a tightly sealed intranet of the sort a medium-sized company might use for its employees.
The free flow of information is anathema to authoritarian regimes, and with the possible exception of the African dictatorship of Eritrea
...is run by the People's Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), with about the amounts of democracy and justice you'd expect from a party with that name. National elections have been periodically scheduled and cancelled; none have ever been held in the country. The president, Isaias Afewerki, has been in office since independence in 1993 and will probably die there of old age...
, North Korea is still the least Internet-friendly country on Earth.
Access to the global Internet for most is unimaginable.
Hardly anyone has a personal computer or an email address that isn't shared, and the price for trying to get around the government's rules can be severe.
But for Kim
PudgeJong-un
...the overweight, pouty-looking hereditary potentate of North Korea. Pudge appears to believe in his own divinity, but has yet to produce any loaves and fishes, so his subjects remain malnourished...
, the country's first leader to come of age with the Internet, the idea of a more wired North Korea is also attractive.
It comes with the potential for great benefits to the nation from information technology and for new forms of social and political control that promise to be more effective than anything his father and grandfather could have dreamed of.