We've known for a long time that North Korea and South Korea have floated balloons with propaganda and contraband to each other's countries. South Korea has sent over K-pop music, K-dramas, bibles, and more, all in the name of piercing the veil of a locked-down country. In turn, North Korea has been sending over balloons filled with trash and excrement - yes, gross - to South Korea.
You send me your shit, we'll send you ours.
It turns out that North Korea may not be as locked down as we expected.
According to The New York Times:
North Korea’s trash balloons have provided clues to life in the isolated North, South Korean officials said.The cargo has included patched-up socks and discarded clothes, some with images of Mickey Mouse and Hello Kitty, despite Pyongyang’s tirade against outside influence.
While reading this article, I was reminded of Robin Nagle's work. Robin is an anthropology professor at NYU and NYC's Department of Sanitation's anthropologist-in-residence. She conducted long-term, ethnographic research on garbage, which you can learn more about in her TED talk and her book, Picking Up.
In her words:
I consider the category of material culture known generically as waste, with a specific emphasis on the infrastructures and organizational demands that municipal garbage imposes on urban areas. Within this broad perspective, I’m especially interested in the people, history, and politics that are always inherent to labors of waste, and in the many ways that the form of waste we call garbage is implicated in every contemporary environmental crisis. I also consider mechanisms of evaluation that determine how and when a particular example of material culture is defined as “trash” and the varied consequences, in many contexts, of such a definition.
Like any good anthropologist, you can ponder the universe's biggest questions with the most quotidian of things.
What does our trash reveal about us? Our values? Our visible and invisible systems?
What does our digital trash look like? We have the wonderfully quaint, skeuomorphic trash bucket and recycling bin in our operating systems, but I'd bet that people's digital "trash" is all over people's desktops, folders, and drives.
How should we reconcile the permanent ephemera or ephemeral permanence of digital objects? Do things really go away? Do things really stick around?
Anyway, countries are sending shit through the skies and air(waves). It seems that propaganda comes in many flavors.