You describe cell phones in Parasite and in North Korea more broadly as tools that simultaneously enable connection, surveillance, and social mobility.
How does the emotional experience of using cell phones shape how North Koreans navigate both modernity and control? Could this tension between fear and freedom help explain a broader form of affective adaptation or resistance among younger users?

The experience of cell phone use in North Korea reflects a broader emotional structure that is far more globally familiar than many assume. While North Korea is often described as an isolated or exceptional society, the emotional landscape surrounding mobile technology reveals profound similarities with the rest of the world. North Koreans constantly fear surveillance, a common thread among societies across the world. 

What distinguishes the North Korean context is the uneven distribution of mobile phones and the symbolic weight attached to them. In South Korea or the United States, owning the latest smartphone is no longer a significant status marker, given the ubiquity of the technology. In North Korea, however, cell phones are widely available but not universally accessible, which transforms them into potent symbols of mobility, privilege, and aspiration. The ability to communicate, to participate in informal market networks, and to discreetly consume foreign media – all facilitated by the cell phone – becomes a means of accessing modern life within a tightly controlled system. The stakes of this access are high. While mobile phones allow individuals to hide SD cards and transfer forbidden content, the emotional weight of this act includes the constant fear of exposure. In this way, North Korean mobile culture offers a lens into how people navigate authoritarian modernity through tools that both empower and endanger them. 

You note that many North Koreans encounter South Korean content without realizing where it is from, only later discovering its political significance.
How does this delayed recognition shape how people relate to media, memory, and identity? Rather than an act of resistance, could this emotional engagement be understood as a way of creating alternate forms of connection within an authoritarian society?

The emotional power of foreign media in North Korea does not always lie in its origin, but rather in its content, which often resonates on a deeply human level long before its political implications are understood. When individuals engage with South Korean songs, dramas, or films without recognizing their provenance, they are not resisting the regime in any deliberate or conscious way. Instead, they are responding to universal narratives – stories of love, friendship, ambition, and longing – that remain largely unacknowledged or underdeveloped within the prime virtues of socialist states.

Misrecognition of origin allows for a form of emotional engagement that is unburdened by the weight of ideology. A song like “Chingu” or “Friend,” which celebrates bonds of friendship outside the family unit, introduces values not foregrounded by the North Korean state, yet these values are immediately understood and felt. Rather than serving as acts of resistance, these encounters often generate alternate emotional vocabularies and shared sentiments that exist outside the purview of state ideology. 

You compare the emotional toll of surveillance in North Korea with digital violations in South Korea, such as those revealed by the #MeToo movement. What does this parallel suggest about how people in both societies experience life under observation? Can media still serve as a mirror of this burden, even when it often deepens ideological divisions?

Despite the global expansion of communication technologies, media tends to divide more often than it connects. The expectation that technological access would foster cross-cutting empathy has largely proven false. In places like South Korea and the United States, people increasingly cluster by ideology, consuming content that reinforces existing beliefs. North Korea represents a more extreme case of this fragmentation. Forbidden content does not circulate publicly. It passes privately, quietly, and at great risk, in forms that cannot be captured or shared online.

In these fragile environments, media can reveal the burden of surveillance, but only within small circles of trust. These networks resemble what might I call an offline blockchain – discrete, decentralized, and self-contained. The emotional connections forged through these interactions are real, but they remain cloistered. While media does not unify across ideological lines, it can create intimate languages of solidarity within the boundaries of silence.

You emphasize that accessing forbidden media relies on trust, social signaling, and careful performance within small and often high-risk networks. How do these calculated acts of sharing and imitation shape social bonds and perceptions of risk in North Korea? Are these practices primarily about survival, or do they also suggest subtle forms of resistance?

Risk defines the fabric of everyday life in North Korea. As some media scholars have described, the country operates as a risk society, one in which exposure to danger becomes an inherent requirement for accessing even the most basic forms of modern life. Participation in the informal market, the consumption of foreign media, and the maintenance of private social circles all demand a calculated engagement with danger. It's not just about public shaming. It's not just about being ostracized from your work or your community. It really is about risking one's life. The consequences are not abstract; they entail much larger, serious, sometimes fatal consequences that we just have no capability of understanding. Under Kim Jong Un’s leadership and especially during the COVID-19 era, laws targeting reactionary thought have intensified, with punishments ranging from imprisonment to public execution.

Despite these extreme costs, many North Koreans continue to engage in risky behaviors, particularly when it comes to consuming South Korean media. Resettlers often note that while some people may never have seen a K-drama or listened to a South Korean song, almost no one has only done so once. The appeal of these narratives – humanizing, expressive, and emotionally resonant – appears strong enough to justify repeated risk. 

With my limited interview group, I asked them questions like: What is risk? What is trust in North Korea? Though it varies from person to person, the general consensus is that it is very wise not to trust anybody, sometimes even family members. Trust itself becomes a transactional currency in this system. 

With the state’s monopoly on resources deteriorated since the economic collapse of the 1990s, social and financial capital have taken on new importance. People evaluate whom to trust not just based on intimacy but also on pragmatic calculations. Will this person protect me? Does their family have the means to intervene if I am caught? In some cases, friendship offers no safeguard. Instances of betrayal are not uncommon, and the decision to share media is often shaped by an assessment of risk that resembles the logic of a nascent market economy. Trust, in this context, is less about loyalty and more about liquidity; it is an asset to be tested, weighed, and, if needed, quietly withdrawn.

Some North Koreans do not just consume South Korean media, rather, they emulate it.
What do these moments of aspiration tell us about the politics of desire? Are they quiet acts of rebellion, or do they risk reinforcing new forms of inequality?

The performance of aspiration in North Korea often takes the form of emulation. To watch a drama is one thing. To adopt its aesthetic codes is another. These choices are rarely loud or public. They must remain subtle enough to elude surveillance, yet deliberate enough to be recognized by those who know what to look for. A particular turn of phrase, a borrowed fashion detail, even a hairstyle becomes a mode of signaling one’s cultural awareness, of performing a connection to another world without naming it directly.

These acts might be understood as quiet forms of resistance, not because they declare opposition to the regime, but because they constitute a reorientation of desire. They reflect an intentional alignment with alternative sources of beauty, value, and modernity. The fact that these performances remain just under the radar is not a limitation but is the condition of their possibility.

At the same time, emulation introduces new layers of inequality. Not everyone can afford to imitate. Access to South Korean media already presupposes a degree of economic and social privilege. The ability to reproduce its aesthetics through tailored clothing, stylized makeup, or linguistic fluency requires even more. In my book, I note a case of one former Pyongyang resident who hired a tailor to make a three-piece men’s suit. He said he had never seen a three-piece suit until he saw a South Korean drama in which Lee Min-ho was wearing one. In this case, and in many others, it is not just a statement of style but a display of means. Those who cannot afford to emulate remain excluded from this quiet system of distinction, revealing how the politics of desire under authoritarianism can reproduce inequality even as they subvert the state's ideological boundaries.

You argue that the term “millennial” in North Korea should be understood not by birth year but by one’s openness to cultural, technological, and economic transformation. Why was it important to define generational identity through behavior and access rather than age? And what does this reveal about how identity is shaped and performed in daily life under authoritarian rule?

In North Korea, generational identity is not dictated by the calendar. It is enacted. To be part of the so-called millennial generation is not to be born in a particular year, but to inhabit a specific mode of social and economic engagement. It is to use a mobile phone not just for communication, but for navigating the marketplace, comparing prices in real time, and exchanging information across regions. It is to perform fluency in a technological and cultural world that the state neither fully endorses nor entirely controls.

This framing disrupts conventional notions of age-based generational categories. A person in their fifties may be more deeply embedded in the informal economy than someone twenty years younger, especially if they possess the capital to participate in market transactions or the savvy to use technology effectively. Geography also matters. Proximity to the border often correlates with access to outside information, making regional location as significant as age in shaping generational identity.

This performative identity also resonates beyond North Korea. In the United States, generational labels frequently fail to account for structural disparities. A millennial from a low-income immigrant family may bear economic responsibilities that differ drastically from peers of a similar age but a different background. In both contexts, identity emerges not from demographic generalizations but from the lived negotiations of constraint, opportunity, and aspiration. What North Korea makes especially visible is how identity becomes something cultivated through behavior, not simply inherited through time.

Your book captures a generation formed by contradiction, one that aspires, adapts, and moves through constant surveillance while building new forms of belonging. As technologies evolve and the regime promotes its next wave of leadership, how might these lived tensions influence the future? Do you believe this everyday knowledge of risk, aspiration, and constraint could lay the groundwork for a new kind of political awareness, even if it does not translate into overt resistance?

To know is not necessarily to act. In North Korea, the possession of knowledge about the outside world does not reliably lead to dissent. Awareness alone does not catalyze resistance, particularly in a system where the cost of political engagement is not individual but familial. Under the logic of guilt by association, the decision to speak out or defect carries consequences not only for the individual but for extended family. This practice shapes individual behavior more powerfully than personal ideological conviction.

Still, knowledge is not without consequence. Even if it does not generate overt resistance, it alters the emotional and cognitive map through which people interpret their circumstances. And there are moments – rare, but telling – when the population has pushed back. The regime’s attempt to impose monetary reform that threatened the functionality of the informal market prompted a level of discontent significant enough that it was forced to reverse course. What this suggests is that while political change may remain elusive, economic disruption is a red line. North Koreans who have tasted the flexibility and relative autonomy of market life are unlikely to relinquish it without protest.

The contradictions of aspiration, risk, and survival may not produce revolution, but they do cultivate a form of awareness that is incompatible with absolute control.