Schmidt, Daughter Talk About North Korea Trip

Eric Schmidt attracted headlines when he visited North Korea, but until now he has said little about the trip. Today he broke his silence with a Google+ post. He says in part: "As the world becomes increasingly connected, the North Korean decision to be virtually isolated is very much going to affect their physical world and their economic growth. It will make it harder for them to catch up economically. We made that alternative very, very clear. Once the internet starts in any country, citizens in that country can certainly build on top of it, but the government has to do one thing: open up the Internet first. They have to make it possible for people to use the Internet, which the government of North Korea has not yet done. It is their choice now, and in my view, it’s time for them to start, or they will remain behind." His daughter had some interesting things to say as well, "The best description we could come up with: it's like The Truman Show, at country scale."

Comments

Re:Information bubble in the USA too?

[Paul Fernhout]

The US may be farther from 1984 than NK (debatable given what US credit card information and internet communications reveals), but the USA sure is a lot closer to "Brave New World":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World
"Social critic Neil Postman contrasts the worlds of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World in the foreword of his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. He writes: "What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the *rgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.""

BTW, "How to escape The Pleasure Trap":
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

Overall, what you say is true and reflects what the point I am trying to make. That said, I also think most people, even in the USA, have little understanding of what most political thinking is like outside major US-Left-leaning US urban areas. GW Bush was re-selected after launching a ruinous illegal war. What does that say about the country? Of course, the UK went along with it... And even within "progressive" areas of the USA, there is another sort of totalitarianism the US Right is correct in pointing out (expanding government intervention in all areas of life). So, the deeper point is that there are similar social forces at work both in the US and NK (or most any country for that matter), they just play out differently based on history and circumstances. Egypt had "god kings" for thousands of years and did very well -- but it was on much more fertile ground than North Korea with an easier climate, and also it was not surrounded by vastly more technologically advanced countries for much of that time with radically different political forms. But no doubt thousands of years of culture in Egypt may have selected for a sort of personality receptive to the god king idea -- or cult of personality which is a lesser manifestation of it.

So much of our day-to-day reality is socially constructed base on group norms:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm_(social)

See also:
"Groupthink: Collective Delusions in Organizations and Markets" by Roland Benabou
http://www.princeton.edu/~rbenabou/papers/Groupthink%20IOM%202012_07_02%20paper.pdf
"This paper investigates collective denial and willful blindness in groups, organizations and markets. Agents with anticipatory preferences, linked through an interaction structure, choose how to interpret and recall public signals about future prospects. Wishful thinking (denial of bad news) is shown to be contagious when it is harmful to others, and self-limiting when it is beneficial. Similarly, with Kreps-Porteus preferences, willful blindness (information avoidance) spreads when it increases the risks borne by others. This general mechanism can generate multiple social cognitions of reality, and in hierarchies it implies that realism and delu