Artificial Intelligence (AI) has changed the rules of phishing. It no longer relies on clumsy English or poorly spoofed addresses. Today, it’s powered by large language models (LLMs), social graph mining, and contextual mimicry.
Are North Korea Watchers just different? Or is there more to their distinct proclivities? We’ve all felt it before. At least, anyone who’s spent more than their fair share of time amidst North Korea Watchers, has felt it before. A disturbingly acute sense that not all is quite right.
For decades, diplomacy on the Korean Peninsula has been trapped in a rigid and repetitive cycle, largely shaped by the strategic interests of others. American security priorities, Chinese strategic concerns, Russian opportunism, and Japanese anxieties have each carved deep grooves into how the world thinks about Korea.
In whispered conversations amidst executives behind the closed doors of corporate offices; amidst researchers at water fountains in strategy think tanks; and amidst political movers and shakers under the stained flaps of late-night soju tents; a new line of thinking on North Korea is gaining traction.
Maybe it’s my 1990s Australian teenage years of wagging* school and watching corny American television repeats, but I often listen in on conversations between academic, political, and/or government colleagues and get bored, so I return to form and act as a tabloid talk show host. I become a foreign policy Jerry Springer, throwing out difficult topics, inciting anger, and provoking responses.
Every North Korea Watcher sooner or later questions what they do.There’s the relentless routine of reading write-ups on North Korea, scanning academic dribble for insight, and dissecting the latest KCNA image. They see highly respected and feted North Korea Watchers rehashing the same crap year after year, and they know that their own ideas will never be heard beyond two graduate students and a dyslexic professor who ended up in the wrong room at an academic conference.
As the war in Ukraine winds down (hopefully), attention will turn to what happens to the foreign contingents who joined the fight—particularly North Korea’s troops deployed in support of Russian forces.
There are a small number of North Korean defectors who make it onto the global stage. Some of them, don’t just tell their stories—they tell the right kind of stories.
Now, if we are, in fact, living in a simulation and this simulation is created by advanced beings that share similarities to ourselves, then the question then becomes: What is the simulation for?
On Tuesday morning, North Korea watchers in Seoul awoke to the news that President Trump made a video call from the stage at the Commander in Chief Ball, and asked U.S. service members in South Korea a question - How’s Kim Jong Un?
