Boston Marathon Calamity Shows Value of Social Media.
It might be no surprise that immediately after the explosions at today’s Boston Marathon, social media sites became the best way for the public to obtain on-the-scene reports. But notably, it also became the best way for classic news media to report. Even more than that, the long minutes after the news broke showed just how superior social media is for finding answers to your own personal concerns.
Here are some examples—there are many more—that arose within a few hours of the blasts:
Scientific American contributor, David Dobbs, who lives in Vermont, was re-tweeting Twitter posts from his son, @taylordobbs, who was very close to the explosion. Taylor was also posting Twitter pics and when ABC News saw them, a reporter asked Taylor, via Twitter, if ABC could use the photos in its news reports. Taylor said yes, as long as ABC properly credited him.
On the Twitter feed #bostonmarathon, people were factchecking news flashes and debunking false information almost in real time.
The Web site Reddit maintained a thread that aggregated a wide variety of information sources much faster than any media organization.
And Wikipedia started a page called Boston Marathon Explosion that contributors across the area and beyond were updating continuously.
The Boston Athletic Association had a site where fans could check the split times of every runner, which instantly became a way to see if individuals crossed the finish line—meaning, if they did not, they might have been injured by the explosions.
Perhaps most impressively, Google quickly created a Person Finder site that allowed people to post the name of a friend or family member they were desperately looking for, and which allowed people to post information about someone they had found.
On the bottom half of the page, Google added a note that read: “All data entered will be available to the public and viewable and usable by anyone.” That pretty much sums it up.
About the Author: Mark Fischetti is a senior editor at Scientific American who covers energy, environment and sustainability issues.
In an article published in the independent Egyptian daily Al-Watan on March 8, 2013, columnist Khalid Muntasir praised the Jews’ achievements in science and technology and their contribution to humanity, including to Muslims. He wrote that Jewish hi-tech magnates, especially the founders of Google and Facebook, have done much more to improve the life of humanity than the leaders of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, or Muslim scholars, who, he claims, deal with obsolete matters and trivialities.
The following are excerpts from the article:[1]
Khalid Muntasir[2]
“Long Live The Descendants Of Apes And Pigs”; Terrorists – To Hell
“When the Jewish internet and social network magnates get together, put aside their competition and unite to declare a $33-million grant for medical research on incurable diseases that prolongs human life[3] – I cannot help but cry out ‘long live the descendants of apes and pigs,’ as they were described by [Egyptian President] Dr. [Muhammad] Mursi and his [Muslim Brotherhood] movement.[4] On the other hand, those who detonate bombs in the midst of the innocent, murder tourists and eviscerate them, assassinate politicians, thinkers and intellectuals, and accuse others of being infidels can go to hell, where they can continue indulging their sick taste for violence and blood.
“The founders of Facebook and Google and the Russian billionaire [Yuri Milner] are the ones who truly love life, change it for the better, and have passion for freedom and creativity. They respect [true] scholars, as opposed to those whom we call scholars merely because they memorized 100 old books and can recite them without interpreting or even understanding them – scholars that could be replaced by a single DVD containing these books, which can be read at the stroke of a key on a keyboard costing less than $1. These emperors of the internet founded an organization that awards the world’s biggest prize without any preconditions of age, faith or gender, and with no limit on the number of times you can win. Any scientist who achieves a major breakthrough in medicine and treatment by means of genetic engineering and brain cells will receive $3 million. This prize will surely influence the advancement of medical research, accelerate change, and push universities and labs to ramp up their efforts to discover new treatments for diseases that still cause death and confound doctors.
“As I read the article on this organization, I also happened to watch a video sent to me by one of my friends, in which an important [Muslim] speaker lectured on the benefits of having a beard in treating impotence, and [explained] how the beard gives the man virility and strength. I closed the article, shut off the computer, sighed and said: It’s no use. Free us [of your discussions] on whether it is permissible to eat the flesh of demons, whether a woman can disrobe in front of a male dog, and on treatments using camel urine, fennel flower, bee stings, etc. The voice of the sheikh in the neighboring mosque rose and echoed as he cursed the Jews, the descendants of apes and pigs, [wishing] that they would scatter in every direction and that their wives become widows and their children orphans, while the worshipers rejoiced in the mighty victory…”
Who Does More Good To Humanity, Those Who Fly The Flag Of Science, Or Extremist Sheikhs?
“[As I said,] the podium at the award [ceremony] happened to feature three Jews. The first was Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who predicted that in three years, Facebook would be the most populous ‘state’ in the world, overtaking China and India. Zuckerberg is one of the richest and most influential men in the world – a genius who shocked the world at 20 years old with this amazing invention called Facebook. The second was Google cofounder of Sergey Brin, of Russian origin, who owns the internet’s largest and most famous search engine, which has not been surpassed thus far. The third was Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, who abandoned his PhD in physics to become an internet tycoon, but never forgot his love of physics despite his estimated fortune of over $1 billion – so much so that he gave prominent physicist Stephen Hawking a $3 million prize late last year [2012].
“By God! Who is more conscionable, moral, and loves life and his fellow man – is it these three Jews who contribute to science, health, happiness and the improvement of life, or [Al-Qaeda leaders] bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri and Al-Zarqawi, [Taliban leader] Mullah ‘Omar, and those who display their pictures, kiss them, memorize their ideas and adopt them? Who does more good to humanity and the world, and even to Muslims –those who fly the flag of science, or [extremist Egyptian Sheikh] Abu Islam[5] and [the religious television show]Hatoli Ragel,[6] who hold up shoes [in a gesture of contempt for their enemies]?”
[1] Al-Watan (Egypt), March 8, 2013.
[2] Image source: elwatannews.com.
[3] Referring to the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, founded by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and Google cofounder Sergey Brin.
[4] See MEMRI TV Clip No. 3702 , Morsi in 2010: No to Negotiations with the Blood-Sucking Warmongering “Descendants of Apes and Pigs”; Calls to Boycott U.S. Products, March 20 and September 23, 2010.
[5] Abu Islam is Egyptian Salafi preacher Sheikh Ahmad Mahmoud ‘Abdallah, owner of Al-Ummah TV, who is known for his extremist fatwas. For example, addressing the phenomenon of sexual attacks on women protesting in Al-Tahrir Square, he blamed the attacks on the women themselves, calling them “demons” and “devils” and claiming that 90% of them are “crusaders” while the rest are widows who have lost their femininity. See MEMRI Inquiry & Analysis No. 942, Sexual Harassment On The Rise In Egypt, February 28, 2013.
[6] The show will air on the religious Al-Hafez TV channel and will be hosted by Salafi sheikh Mahmoud Sha’ban, who issued a fatwa sanctioning the killing of Egyptian oppositionists. See MEMRI Inquiry & Analysis Series No. 929, Fatwas Sanction Killing Of Egyptian Oppositionists, February 12, 2013.
Google Reader’s demise is awful for Iranians, who use it to avoid censorship. By
RSS readers take raw feeds of data—headline, text, timestamp, etc.—and display that information in a stripped-down interface along with many other feeds, which is what makes them so efficient. (Here is the RSS feed for Quartz.) Less obvious is how many RSS readers, including Google’s, serve as anti-censorship tools for people living under oppressive regimes. That’s because it’s actually Google’s servers, located in the US or another country with uncensored internet, that accesses each feed. So a web user in Iran just needs access to google.com/reader in order to read websites that would otherwise be blocked.
And, indeed, Google Reader has long been accessible in Iran, where it is the most popular RSS reader. Iran would probably have to block all of Google and its many popular services in order to keep its citizens from using Reader. YouTube, by contrast, is easier to censor, though it is also owned by Google, because the video site is located on its own domain, youtube.com. Reader is also harder, though not impossible, to block because it uses more secure technology known as HTTPS.
There are many alternatives to Google Reader, but switching is a more complicated prospect for Iranians. Many RSS readers do work like Google’s—with the service’s own servers, rather than the user’s, fetching new data from across the web—but those would be much easier to block, if they gained any traction, without the protection afforded by the popularity of Google’s other services.
The Iranian government has occasionally blocked all of Google, most recently in September 2012, but always for a limited time. It’s not clear if Iran’s move toward a domestic version of the internet will affect access to google.com. Google also hasn’t said what it might do with the Google Feed API, which is a service for programmers to access RSS feeds, usually for display on other websites. If it sticks around, the Google Feed API would potentially allow someone to build a service that replicates some of Google Reader’s core features and still rely on Google’s domain to do it.
Iranian bloggers were vocal opponents of the changes Google made to Reader in 2011, when the ability to share individual stories with other users was removed. The shared items of certain heavily followed Iranians served as de facto newspapers free from the government’s censorship regime, gaining popularity after the 2009 elections led to uprisings in Iran. The next presidential election is this June.
“Such bad luck!” wrote Vahid HT, an Iranian, on Google+ today. “What does the internet without Google Reader look like?…What harm will come to the online world?” Another person wrote in response, “Really what Google is thinking is that all revolutionary ideas do not fit with their absurd ideas.”
To fight world panic, Google doodles Douglas Adams. by Chris Matyszczyk
The author of “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and three episodes of “Dr. Who” would have been 61 years old today.
(Credit: Screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET)I know several people who believe that Douglas Adams left a zero off the end of his answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
The man who gave meaning to 42 would have been 61 today, had he not died of a heart attack aged 49.
Google’s fine and whimsical doodlers decided to commemorate his birthday with a doodle that whispers to the world: “Don’t Panic.”
In his 49 years, Adams certainly had a life. He not only wrote books, among them the very famous “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy” (which started as a radio series), but he also penned three episodes of “Dr. Who.”
On his 42nd birthday, he performed with Pink Floyd. Not many people can say they did that. (Audio evidence below.)
He worked with Graham Chapman of Monty Python and is said to have contributed to some of the group’s sketches.
Naturally, there are as many myths about Adams as there are true stories. Did he really have the idea for writing “Hitchhiker’s” while lying in a field, as he told David Letterman in 1985?
The doodle is a loving and interactive tribute. Among the surprises when you click is Marvin The Paranoid Android.
Author Neil Gaiman told The Washington Post: “Douglas Adams was a genius. He was a profound and brilliant British humorist who was also a very reluctant novelist.”
Gaiman explained: “Douglas wrote a radio series that then became a huge and enormously successful novel, so he found himself stuck as an incredibly reluctant novelist who would have to be locked in a room by his publisher to finish a book.”
Gaiman believes that the true message of “Don’t Panic” is that we shouldn’t.
Perhaps we shouldn’t because nothing really makes too much sense. How can it when so many good die young, so many dictators live to see their 80s, so many camels smell strangely, and so many people spend their days online shopping?
Google’s Private Cell Phone Network. By Tom Simonite
A small cell network over the company’s HQ could herald new competition for established carriers.
(Ron’s note: see also Patent US6885864 - Virtual private network for cellular, Patent US5734699 - Cellular private branch exchanges, and Patent US6829477 - Private multiplexing cellular network)
Filings made with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission reveal that Google wants to start operating its own, very small cell phone network on its Mountain View campus. It’s the latest in a series of hints in recent years that Google is unsatisfied with the way that mobile networks control the mobile Internet.
Google tells the FCC it wants to install up to 50 mobile base stations in buildings on the Western edge of Google’s Mountain View campus, just a block or so away from its main Android building. Up to 200 mobile devices will be used on that “experimental” network and the area covered will be small, with indoor base stations reaching only up to 200 meters, and any outdoors ones reaching no further than a kilometer. The WSJ reports that the frequencies used belong to ClearWire, and aren’t compatible with any U.S. mobile device. They are in use in China, Brazil, and India, though.
Google might just be experimenting with devices for those parts of the world. Or it might be trying something more radical. The search and ad giant has been rumored to be exploring the idea of working with TV provider Dish to launch a wireless Internet service, has already got into the business of providing broadband (see “Google’s Internet Service Might Bring the U.S. Up to Speed”), and has a history of showing interest in ideas that would loosen the grip of cellular providers on mobile devices and what people can do with them.
Google lobbied U.S. regulators to encourage them to open up unused TV spectrum into so-called “white spaces,” as they did in 2009, allowing that portion of the airwaves to be used by any company or device rather than being licensed exclusively to one company (see “Super Wi-Fi”). In 2008, the company filed a patent for an idea that would appall mobile networks—having mobile devices automatically hop to the cheapest cell network in an area rather than being locked to just one provider at all times.
Google’s biggest strike against the way wireless networks work today came in 2010 and was something of a flop. The company tried to break the U.S. convention of new mobile phones being tied to carrier contracts, only offering the flagship Nexus One smartphone online and unlocked. That experiment lasted only about six months, after Google struggled to cope with customer service requests and learned that U.S. consumers are apparently happier paying a significant markup for a device over two years than a smaller sum upfront.
Google has since played more nicely with cellular networks. Yet the relationships are still fraught, with fallings out over Google’s contactless payments system (blocked on Verizon handsets) and Android’s tethering function (also blocked by some carriers). It’s too early to know whether Google’s private cell phone network in Mountain View will add to that drama, but mobile networks are surely watching closely.
“Last week, members of parliament asked five German publishers (German) whether they’re in need of government funding. No, said the five publishers in unison. But we do need you to make a law to get money from search engines like Google, or rather just Google, which has a 96% market share in Germany (German). Publishers have accused Google of making money off of their content, which they are especially sensitive to since they haven’t yet figured out how to be profitable online.” More.
By Felix Salmon
Is Google becoming a key arm of the law-enforcement complex? It certainly seems to be so with respect to art thefts. I first came across this idea back in November, when Bloomberg Marketsprofiled Jeff Gundlach, who was hit by art thieves in September:
The cerebral Gundlach also gave investigators a tip for solving the crime. He says that while he was at home in his family room, it dawned on him that thieves would do a Google search using his grandmother’s name to find out more about the paintings and how much they might be worth.
Gundlach told the authorities that they should check the Internet to see who might have googled the name Helen Fuchs. He says exactly two such searches were executed: one by him and one by the thieves.
Now, another man has been arrested for art theft, and was found in much the same way:
In their investigation into the art theft, [officials] found that Mr. Istavrioglou had searched the Internet for reports about the robbery after it took place but before the story became news.
Law enforcement officials, it seems, have pretty easy and routine access to Google’s search-history database, and this is surely only the beginning when it comes to sifting through huge amounts of data to find evidence of crimes. The SEC, for one, has had a large data-mining team in place for a good five years now, going through enormous quantities of data to look for signs of suspicious activity.
Even journalists are getting in on the act of using data to uncover criminal activity. The Sun Sentinel, in Florida, managed to obtain a year’s worth of SunPass toll records for cop cars. That meant that they had data on the amount of time it took cops to drive from one toll plaza to the next. All they needed to do then was measure those distances, divide the distances by the time taken to drive that length of road, and come up with an average speed, for cops who were often just commuting to or from their houses, out of their jurisdiction. The result? The Sun Sentinel found “almost 800 cops from a dozen agencies driving 90 to 130 mph on our highways” — in a state where speeding cops have caused at least 320 crashes and 19 deaths since 2004.
Part of the reason why it has taken so long to bring Libor prosecutions is that going through millions of email and IM records, looking for smoking guns, is still a laborious and time-consuming process. But as data mining techniques continue to evolve, and as databases become increasingly unified and tractable, and our lives are lived almost entirely online it’s going to be harder and harder for criminals not to leave a discoverable data trail — especially opportunistic criminals, who break the law when they’re given a chance, as opposed to more considered criminals, who spend a lot of time plotting a crime before committing it.
It stands to reason, given advances in computer power and given the size of the networks that we all involve ourselves in every day, that the kind of data crunching that used to be solely the domain of places like the NSA and GCHQ is now going to be available to local police forces and even ordinary citizens, including journalists. The privacy implications are profound, of course: millions of innocent people are going to have their personal data combed on a real-time basis, every day. But that seems to be inevitable, insofar as it isn’t already a reality.
TALKS
Eli Pariser: Beware online “filter bubbles”
As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there’s a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a “filter bubble” and don’t get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy.
Pioneering online organizer Eli Pariser is the author of “The Filter Bubble,” about how personalized search might be narrowing our worldview. Full bio »
With the help of “citizen cartographers,” Google Maps has filled in some of North Korea’s streets and prison camps. A map of Camp 22 shows previously unidentified structures — such as guards compounds or the office of director. Photo Jethro Mullen, CNN
SEOUL—Google Inc. GOOG -0.39% on Tuesday revised its Google Maps application to add information for North Korea, which has been blank since it started providing maps online and for mobile devices eight years ago, and included outlines of some of the country’s notorious, city-sized prison camps.
The information for the North Korea map was added by people who are interested in the country under a Google development program called Map Maker, a collaborative effort that has become known as crowdsourcing.
The release came just three weeks after Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, visited North Korea in a highly-publicized trip with former American diplomat Bill Richardson. Mr. Schmidt encouraged officials he met in North Korea to make the Internet available to its citizens and end its attempts to restrict information.
A company spokesman said there was no connection between the visit and the new map.
“This data has been in Map Maker for a while now, but it commonly takes the Map Maker community a few years to generate enough high quality data to make something that works in Google Maps,” the spokesman said.
He added that Google has relied on “citizen cartographers” to help it create maps in 150 countries and have made huge contributions in places where governments have done little mapping—such as Afghanistan.
In a blog post, Google said that it determined the work on North Korea had reached a level of detail and credibility where it could be incorporated into the Google Map product.
Hwang Min-woo, a 28-year-old South Korean who contributed to the North Korea map, said he began working on it after trying to use Google Maps on a trip to Laos four years ago and finding it inadequate.
“I thought if I could fill in information on North Korea, it might be useful in an emergency or a tragedy if Google can provide a map for aid agencies,” Mr. Hwang said.
He said he used information from maps of the North on a website run by the South Korean government.
The new map of North Korea has far less information than files available through other private efforts using a different Google product, a satellite image program called Google Earth.
View Larger Map
Google Map image of North Korea.
Curtis Melvin, who has spent years leading a crowdsourcing effort to map North Korea using Google Earth, said he was surprised to learn of the separate work for Google Maps.
“It’s not even a fraction of what I’ve already published,” he said.
Mr. Melvin, who also publishes a website called North Korean Economy Watch, recently collaborated with 38 North, a North Korea website operated by the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, on a digital atlas of North Korea. He has relied on information provided by people who have visited North Korea or former citizens who defected from it.
The Google spokesman said the company has noticed that the community of people interested in mapping tends to be separate from those who concentrate on satellite images.
Jayanth Mysore, senior product manager, wrote in a blog post that the North Korea map is “not perfect” and added Google encourages people “to continue helping us improve the quality of these maps.”
One of the striking features of North Korea on Google Maps is a highlighting of the areas where the country operates gulag-like work camps, believed to be some of the largest and most inhumane prisons in the world. Brown shading stands out against the light beige background, instantly imparting to a user of Google Maps the enormous size of the prisons.
However, only a few of the prisons that Mr. Melvin and other observers have identified are shown on the Google map.
Last week, Audi announced that it became the first automaker—and second company, after Google—to get an autonomous vehicle license in Nevada.
The Electronic Research Laboratory is where the Volkswagen Group works on all of its truly innovative technologies, like advanced driver assistance, navigation, and of course, piloted driving.
There is no super-fancy technology involved; all the ultrasound sensors guiding the car are already found in Audi vehicles.
Piloted parking will be commercialized in the next few years.
Autonomous vehicles could be available by the end of the decade.
Audi’s Cars Can Now Park Themselves; Driving Themselves Is Not Far Behind. By Ariel Schwartz
Move over, Google. Audi just became the second company to be licensed to run autonomous vehicles in Nevada. As we saw at an exhibition of the tech from its Electronic Research Laboratory, its cars are already well on their way to ditching the driver.
A funny thing happened during my visit to the Volkswagen Electronic Research Laboratory. About halfway through the tour, a bus chauffeured us (a group of reporters and business executives) through the entrance of a well-to-do gated community in Belmont, California. We stopped in front of one of the homes, where a man stood waiting, smartphone in hand. He was there to demonstrate Audi’s autonomous vehicle parking technology in the garage of an ERL executive’s house. I had to wonder what the neighbors thought, whether they ever noticed the car driving itself into the garage.
The ERL is where the Volkswagen Group works on all of its truly innovative technologies, like advanced driver assistance, navigation, and of course, piloted driving (Audi prefers the term “piloted” to “autonomous” because it implies that the human in the car still has ultimate responsibility). Last week, Audi announced that it became the first automaker—and second company, after Google—to get an autonomous vehicle license in Nevada. That means the company can now test its autonomous vehicles on the state’s public roads. At ERL, I glimpsed the first hints of our autonomous vehicle future: self-parking.
The garage self-parking demo began with a few hiccups; the Audi refused to enter the garage for the first couple tries, presumably because it didn’t think it had enough space. But eventually it worked, as you can see in the video above. Our demonstrator activated the vehicle’s engine with a smartphone. When the car was snugly in its space, it automatically shut off the engine and locked the doors.There is no super-fancy technology involved; all the ultrasound sensors guiding the car are already found in Audi vehicles. In a parking garage, the situation is a little different—the garage’s central computer helps guide the vehicle to an open space. Eventually, Audi cars will also use camera systems to assist with guidance.
Back at ERL, I saw demos of piloted parking in an outside lot, where a vehicle easily maneuvered in and out of a tight parking space. When a car drove in front of the vehicle while it was exiting the space (on purpose, of course), an ERL employee simply pressed “pause” in a smartphone app to prevent a collision. In the event of a real emergency, the car can stop itself.
This was not my first time seeing the Volkswagen Group’s autonomous technology. In 2010, I sat inside Junior 3, a robotic Volkswagen Passat, while it parked itself at Stanford’s Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Lab. At the time, it was surreal; I felt like a ghost was driving me around. During the ERL visit, the technology seemed much more in reach. And in fact, Audi representatives told me that piloted parking will be commercialized in the next few years. Autonomous vehicles could be available by the end of the decade.
The Volkswagen Group and its brands have a long history of working on autonomous vehicles, but other automakers are catching up. Like Audi, Ford is working on traffic jam assist technology that can take over for drivers in heavy traffic. Volvo’s self-driving road trains, expected to be on European roads by 2020, wirelessly link cars on the highway to a lead vehicle, driven by a person, that controls movement.
While it isn’t a car company, Google is working on autonomous vehicles as well. According to Brad Stertz, corporate communications manager at Audi of America, one of the main differences between Audi and Google technology is that Google is developing a kind of autonomous driving “black box” that can go into other cars, while Audi’s system is deeply integrated into each vehicle.
In the coming years, automakers will take baby steps towards producing fully autonomous vehicles, starting with piloted parking technology. By the time self-driving cars hit the road, they won’t seem so sci-fi.
Ariel Schwartz is a Senior Editor at Co.Exist. She has contributed to SF Weekly, Popular Science, Inhabitat, Greenbiz, NBC Bay Area, GOOD Magazine and more. Continued
While the world was quasi-agog last week over images of Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) chairman Eric Schmidt watching students at Kim Jong Il University utilizing his company’s search engine, it’s a safe bet they won’t be networking with potential employers after graduation.
A small slice of North Korean society may be permitted to access the Internet in limited ways (according to analysts, only a thousand or so of North Korea’s 25 million people can get online; the best most can do is view the country’s walled — and heavily restricted — intranet, where state-sponsored news is available). Expats living in-country (a small number of diplomats, NGO workers, and a tiny sprinkling of brave businesspeople; a 2005 census reported 124 foreign nationals residing in Pyongyang, a city of 2.1 million) are, however, able to get online via satellite — though even they face restrictions.
“LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD) blocked me when I listed my North Korean address — and I was not the only one,” Felix Abt, a Swiss entrepreneur who spent seven years living and doing business in North Korea, tells me.
Abt, co-founder of the Pyongyang Business School, former managing director of the Pyongsu Joint Venture Company, North Korea’s first-ever foreign-invested pharmaceutical enterprise, and author of the new book, A Capitalist in North Korea (Amazon Publishing Services, 2012), was unceremoniously booted from the site in 2009.
“Maybe LinkedIn’s legal department thought it was too risky or something,” Abt, now living — and working — in Nha Trang, Vietnam, says. “I don’t know.”
In fact, “as a matter of corporate policy,” LinkedIn does not allow “member accounts or access to our site from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, or Syria” under the conditions of international sanctions imposed by the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. (LinkedIn is not alone; other major tech names such as Google, Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), and Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL) among others, also restrict access to their products from sanctioned countries, though one wonders if Eric Schmidt notified Google’s legal department that its products are being utilized at Kim Il Sung University.)
Abt’s book offers an extraordinary first-hand account of life in a place where it is almost impossible for outsiders to know what is actually happening on the ground. He could travel without being accompanied by official government minders, and (obviously) had daily contact with his North Korean staff at PyongSu — who impressed Abt as budding capitalists in a rigidly communist system.
“At the beginning, we had philosophical differences about how a business should be run,” Abt tells me. “The North Koreans were used to the socialist way of running a business. I was raised in a market economy.”
Abt’s first obstacle? Marketing.
“I explained that without it, we could never sell what we produce,” Abt tells me. “They would say, ‘No, no, in our country, nobody does that.’ Finally, I said, ‘Okay, let’s start manufacturing and see what happens.’ And nothing happened.”
With a warehouse full of product and no customers, Abt says his employees “started realizing, ‘Maybe he’s right.’”
“When it turned out that I knew what I was talking about, they started agreeing with me,” Abt continues. “Eventually, my staff started suggesting doing ‘Another advertising campaign, and another advertising campaign,’ and that was pretty amazing in itself.”
A Hermetically-Sealed Country? Not Quite.
A popular Western trope is that North Koreans are a robotic, brainwashed populace with little to no understanding of the outside world. Abt says this not true.
“I regularly took my staff to China for business, so they saw what was going on,” he explains. “I brought them to supermarkets, to restaurants; some went to the dentist or the doctor and saw how well-equipped, how well-organized, how competitive they had become — but also how expensive they were.”
Abt educated his employees on the finer points of consumerism before landing in China, describing them as “perhaps a little vulnerable.”
“The shop assistants can be very competitive and aggressive and the North Koreans are not used to this,” Abt says. “So I taught them, ‘Okay, they will set the price very high for you at the beginning, offer them half. When they say ‘no,’ walk away, they’ll call you back and go down a bit, and so forth.’ I must say, these guys learn fast.”
According to Abt, details of these experiences were quickly shared with other North Koreans via Pyongyang’s “bush telephone.”
“Of course they had to make reports to the authorities and security officials when they got home,” Abt tells me, “but they also showed their photos with friends and family. People communicate a lot; you read all these horrible stories and think the people are all afraid to talk to each other because somebody’s always watching, but I did not have this impression, really. Of course they are cautious, but not overly so.”
For this reason, Abt takes exception to reports claiming that the North Korean regime will collapse once information begins “trickling in.”
“If that were true, the system should have collapsed a long time ago,” Abt says. “People know quite well what is going on. From the South Korean soap operas they watch at home to foreign books they read at the university, there is always some information. It’s not a hermetically-sealed country, and it never has been.”
To be sure, North Korea’s reputation as one of the world’s most brutal dictatorships is well-deserved. The country reportedly detains between 150,000-200,000 political prisoners in a vast network of labor camps, though Abt avoids the topic in his book.
“There are surely gulags that may be horrible, but I didn’t come across them so I cannot write about anything I have not seen myself,” he explains.
A Middle Class Emerges
Though far from becoming a global beacon of freedom anytime soon, Abt says that, “by North Korean standards, there has been quite a practical change in society and the economy.”
“Most North Koreans today are involved in some kind of business, so they seem to have an income that allows them to buy their daily necessities in the markets,” Abt tells me. “The most important thing is that a middle class has emerged in the cities; in the countryside, there is more private farming going on — throughout North Korea, you can see plenty of farming going on on the slopes; the flatland is still reserved for the state-run farms.”
Today, the regime is slowly introducing a capitalist component to the agriculture sector.
“Workers on the state farms were promised last year that they will be allowed to sell up to 30% of their harvest to free markets at a premium,” Abt says. “Should that be realized, it’s the beginning of quite a big change, like early reforms in China and Vietnam.”
Is North Korea Now Open for Business?
Not quite. But Abt tells me he believes opening up to commerce has “become a more important priority” for the North Korean government over the past ten years.
“I’m getting a lot of proactive proposals from the North Koreans, which we haven’t experienced in the past, so there is quite a big change on that front,” Abt says. “My business partners in Pyongyang can use [file-sharing service] Dropbox, they can travel more often now, and more North Korean companies have been allowed, particularly in 2012, to interact with foreign ones.”
Still, obstacles exist for anyone seeking to do business in this most frontier of frontier markets.
Power cuts are frequent, infrastructure is crumbling, and sanctions remain strict. On the other hand, Abt says the hardships he encountered cemented deep personal bonds between him and his colleagues.
“We had to solve practical problems every day; it was a daily struggle that brought us close,” Abt recalls. “We worked hard together, but we also partied together, went to karaoke, had good dinners, went on excursions, and had fun together. I never had the feeling that I was an alien in their eyes or a potential enemy or a spy — the relationship was quite relaxed and friendly, driven by our joint goals.”
Abt and staff members celebrate International Women’s Day in Pyongyang (Photo: Felix Abt)
So, would he do it again?
“I like to go back from time to time to eat some good food and have a merry evening, but otherwise, of course, I am happy where I am now,” Abt says.
Pyongyang
Nha Trang
“Seven years is a long time.”
