When Kevin calls his family, he often shares information about world politics as it pertains to them. When there are big spikes in international humanitarian aid going into North Korea after diplomatic talks, Kevin tells his mother to wait to buy rice on the black market because prices will decrease for a while. (For decades, much of foreign humanitarian aid, especially sacks of rice, has not been given to people, but rather has been sold on the black market. Defectors talk about buying rice on the black market from rice sacks marked with “USA,” “South Korea” and “United Nations.” The North Korean government detested the fact that its people knew that the rice was coming from outside sources rather than their “self-sufficient” government, so they then required donors to provide rice in unmarked bags or else refused to accept the much needed aid.) When international sanctions stiffen, Kevin advises his mother to buy rice right away because the prices for rice will soon soar. Information that helps Kevin’s family survive is always welcomed.

Information that is critical of the North Korean regime, on the other hand, is too dangerous to listen to, and so Kevin’s mother insists that Kevin does not share any of that. Kevin’s frustration is obvious to me. He wants his family to defect like he did.

But when I ask Kevin about why his family doesn’t follow his footsteps to escape North Korea, Kevin is visibly annoyed at the naiveté of my question. He rambles to describe how dangerous the escape route is, especially for his older mother (his father passed away from what they think was cancer). And even if his family were to make it to South Korea safely, his sister, cousin and aging mother are just too set in their ways. “North Korea is their home. North Korea is still my home, too,” he tells me. Life is simpler in North Korea.

But life in North Korean is changing. For a younger generation, information from outside the country is becoming part of the daily routine.

***

When YeonMi Park watched a pirated copy of the movie Titanic, her understanding of her world shattered. How could a movie contain a love story that was between a man and woman, and not one between a person and her love for her country? How could someone be silly enough to want to die for her lover? These thoughts deepened YeonMi’s questions about her country, and quickly transformed into her decision to defect from North Korea. This 4’11 teenager soon crossed the Gobi desert with her family, and after many months, arrived in South Korea.

YeonMi, a North Korean millennial, is a part of what some North Korean watchers call the “Jang Ma-Dang Generation.” The Street Market Generation—named for the North Koreans who were born during or after the “Arduous March” (a euphemism for the famine in the mid-1990s that killed an estimated 1-2 million people) and have been exposed to widespread illegal street markets that sprung up to replace the broken Communist Public Distribution System. So, although young North Koreans continue to follow state laws and pay respect to their leader, their minds may not be fully aligned with their outward behavior. Young people are savvy, and know how to survive in their oppressive system while sating their curiosities. Young defectors share anecdotes about how many of their friends back at home in North Korea make jokes about the leader (a highly punishable crime). Most households, they say, are involved in black market activity to survive, and their generation has grown up accepting this. Defectors I have spoken with—ranging from college professors, to teenagers, to married women—have had experience selling, buying and trading all sorts of goods in this country that continues to demonize and criminalize capitalism.

Young people wear clothes with Western cartoons on them, sport shorter skirts than previous generations of women, quietly whistle South Korean pop songs and use South Korean slang that they picked up from secretly watching movies. Perhaps someone might add a flourish to her hairstyle that does not exactly fit into any of the 18 state-approved hairstyles for women (or 10 state-approved hair styles for men).

South Korea and the Western world, particularly the United States, are no longer seen as purely evil among this generation. Changing fashion preferences or secretly singing South Korean pop songs are small signs that one is unintentionally turning away from the state’s strict policies around permitted behavior.

Small social and cultural changes inside parts of North Korea are undeniable. Illicit flows of foreign media and information that’s inextricably tied with unofficial trade networks with China is changing the psyche of North Koreans in different parts of the country, especially the border regions between North Korea and China. But these social and cultural changes are not necessarily linked with current or near-future political changes. There’s still a long way to go.

Some question whether sending information into North Korea is strengthening self-determination and self-consciousness among North Koreans, or if it is merely another form of Western propaganda. Of course no one should live under a dictatorship, but is the answer sending in American movies, books and South Korean dramas full of ideals cherished in developed democracies?

Yes, some governments and international NGOs often strategize about sending information into North Korea through the expansive networks that already exist or new ones—satellite, blue tooth, short wave radios. But the most ardent proponents of sending information into North Korea are people like Kevin: North Korean defectors, who have seen movies and political shows, and want their families and friends to watch media other than regime-sanctioned monotonous propaganda. Some defectors film footage of the most mundane activities—shopping in a super market, hanging out in a dog park, the notorious Seoul traffic—to convey to their former countrymen that even the most ordinary activities outside North Korea are filled with options, diversity and bustling life.

When I ask defectors how they select materials to send in, they often tell me that they try to recall the content that they yearned to watch and read when they were inside North Korea, and then find similar materials to send. Mr. Jeong, who escaped 10 years ago, showed me Kakao text messages he receives from brokers with requests for specific dramas from their clients inside. Strong demand for outside information unquestionably exists. People continue to risks their lives inside North Korea to quench their thirst of knowing the outside world in the form of film, articles, books and stories spread by word of mouth.

Some lessons could be drawn from loosely parallel situations in other totalitarian regimes where outside information changed an oppressed people’s behavior dramatically. People living inside the Soviet Union were sealed off from the outside world and were punished for seeking exposure to information outside their territorial borders. However, once some people started learning about how people on “the other side” were living, they started to seek more information about the reality outside their regime. Internal dissidents and defectors worked to help fellow countrymen access more information through radio programs and stealthy literature circulation. While information access inside these sealed countries may not have been the primary reason for regime collapse, access to information certainly had a large role in hollowing out believers of these regimes.

A “North Korean Spring” or “Pyongyang Square” demonstrations are unlikely to take place anytime soon. But human nature is such that people’s perception of their reality fundamentally transforms when compared to alternate realities that exist. By gaining access to information about a world outside North Korea and quietly turning away from the government’s propaganda machine, North Koreans will have a much wider set of realities from which to choose.

Names of North Korean defectors have been changed upon request.