Kwangmyong/광명 (literally ‘bright light’) is the North Korean ‘walled garden’ national intranet service. It uses domain names under the .kp domain that are not accessible from the global internet.
The country’s cyber warfare guidance unit, Bureau 121, has more than 6,000 hackers stationed in countries around the world.
In North Korea, every person is property and is owned by a small and mad family with hereditary power… The private life has been entirely abolished… George Orwell’s 1984 was published at about the time that Kim Il Sung set up his system, and it really is as if he got hold of an early copy of the novel and used it as a blueprint. (“Hmmm … good book. Let’s see if we can make it work.”) -Christopher Hitchens, 'Worse Than 1984'
One wonders what certain North Koreans would do with works of born-digital literature… One imagines the propaganda machine at work, fulfilling, perfecting, extending Orwell's dystopic vision… One suspects the individuality of the artist would be erased and replaced by the small and mad family with hereditary power…
Here, multiple born-digital works have been plagiarised, modified, corrupted, infected, injected with words of the Supreme Leader/Marshal of the Republic, Kim Jong-un/김정은. A Kim Jong-un robot has also been 3D-printed, assembled, and programmed to read these works out aloud. One can imagine these robots deployed in houses throughout the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, forever invading privacy, nattering away propaganda…
These works also contain vocabulary and phrases from works critical of the North Korean regime. These words are swallowed up by the propaganda. Yet occasionally, if one looks carefully, the criticism can be noted. This, one imagines, is how a curious, intelligent yet powerless Democratic People's Republic of Korean citizen might (struggle to) engage with local culture.