….man’s place in the universe is somewhere between the beasts and the angels, but, because of the divine image planted in him, there are no limits to what man can accomplish….
– Pico Della Mirandola
I don’t think they see us as humans. When I first entered the entertainment business there was one thing that people could not stop telling me. ‘You are a product. You need to be the finest top-quality product to the public’
– Choi Jin-Ra/Sulli
How convenient it is to declare that everything is totally ugly within the habit of the époque, rather than applying oneself to extract from it the dark and cryptic beauty, however faint and invisible it is.
– Charles Baudelaire
Introduction
Since 2023, just after the boom of “K-everything” during Covid, YouTube has been flooded with video essays that attempt to shed light on the hell of South Korean society. Already a few years prior, such ideas were beginning to circulate as discourse on “the dark side of Korea”, with mainstream awareness about the problems of Korean society being spurred on by media depictions such as Parasite and Squid Game, which showcased the inner workings of a society shown to be deeply atomized and consumerist.
In the aftermath of the arrival of such discourse, the fascination with everything Korean that popped up during the height of the K-wave seems to have been replaced by a profound sense of the country’s deep malaise, underlying much of the boom that drove the uptick of interest in its cultural products in the first place. On my first visit to the country in 2018, before I had any broad knowledge about the country itself or its culture, I remember thinking to myself that it was unlike any other place I had been. It felt dystopian, but it also felt like the future. Not like Tokyo’s future of the past, but actually like the future. There was an eerie sense of being in a society that was already at a place where the rest of the world was only just beginning to head towards.
With K-fatigue beginning to set in, both locally and globally, we are seemingly coming to a point where the global K-wave is past its peak. As I will explain in this work and have previously explained in other writings, such a decline in popularity is often a much more interesting moment to analyze what happened and what the underlying mechanism was, if only to understand the ability of the thing itself to return. As things incessantly return in waves, getting lost in virality (in the colloquial sense) or “peak-wave” usually means missing the forest for the trees as opposed to understanding the wave before it reaches its peak to understand what’s to come, and after it has reached its peak to understand how its logic has spread - as cultural “death” in our contemporary world is always already synonymous with its totalization - and how it might return.
Now that awareness of dystopian Korean cyberpunk has penetrated the mainstream, and the craze regarding everything Korean has followed K-Pop into temporary retreat, we can use this opportunity to analyze its inner workings from a different angle. As things return faster and faster, we can surely predict that it will one day be back; as global infection will undoubtedly lead to that same global circuit returning it to its Korean point of origin, providing the input necessary for a further escalation.
This chapter will be the first part of a work which will present an alternative reading of the bleakness of Korean society. Instead of engaging in the by now well-worn outcry, we will try to utilize its bleakest elements to understand how Korea holds a peculiar position within the broader feedback loop between algorithm and locality. While accelerationists have often focussed on China (and perhaps not without good reason, as only a brief glimpse of the huge amount of “Chinese hypercity cyberpunk porn” the algorithm feeds you might be enough to give one the idea that Gibson’s cyberpunk visions have become reality in its Tier-1 cities), through this analysis we will come to argue that Korea provides the ultimate expression of an accelerated society, and yet one which remains strangely human in all its hypercapitalist dystopia.
It is through such an analysis that, in the following chapters that make up this work, Korean society will be named “future” not merely because it seems to be further along the dystopian timeline, but also because it seems to be unique in the way in which it retains the human. Via phenomena as diverse as compressed modernity, the idol system, the chaebols, beauty standards, anthropotechnics, hyperhumanism, cybernetic realism, Kondratiev waves, parasociality and other such seemingly unrelated matters, the work will paint Korea as the paradoxical promise of both a utopian and dystopian narrative. Putting the idol at the centre of the modern Korean nation, the work will analyze the idol system and its effects on Korean society and the broader world in an attempt to understand how the K-Wave turns into a global hyperstition, ultimately asking the question whether the idol offers the possibility for humanity to function as a parasite within accelerated circuits of technology and capital.
Throughout the series we will move from an analysis of Korean history to a theory of the K-Wave as a strange signal of humanness within accelerated times. This first chapter will provide the basis of that narrative, introducing the K-Wave as the ultimate expression of a mutated fusion between Capitalism and Korea’s sociohistorical landscape and the idol as both its dehumanized product and its hyperhuman engine. By understanding the particular sociohistorical reality that Capitalism needed to adapt to, we will lay the foundation for an understanding of how the uniqueness of Korea’s version of hypercapitalism came about and why, despite its extremity, it is exactly within this extreme form of Korean hypercapitalism that we find potential.
This look into Korean history will furthermore give us a first understanding of the strange temporal elements that make up Korean society and the way in which past and future operate beside one another in its landscape. By providing an insight into the history and the creation of the idol, this first chapter serves as a glimpse into the human potential within inhuman systems, laying the foundation for the analysis of how that potential turns into horror and possible cure in the following chapters.
Chapter 1.
Compressed modernity and Palli-Palli culture
A long discussion on the particularity of Korea’s modernity and the subsequent ways in which the Korean War shaped the trajectory that we will discuss in this article, while absolutely fascinating, would require an article in its own right, if not multiple, to be appreciated fully. In any case, the history of Korea that we are interested in really starts with the post-war boom. Despite the enormous influence of the pre-war period, the legacy of modern-day Korea really only began after the Korean War, when the nation split and the Koreans showcased a miracle, known locally as “the miracle on the Han River”, that would make Japan’s look pitiful by comparison. The idea that it is only post-war Korea that is of importance to the understanding of contemporary Korea is echoed by sociologist Chang Kyung-Sup, who argues that Korea’s distinctiveness is specifically not in some isolated characteristics inherited from its own past but rather in its explosive and complex (in)digestion of Western modernity.
Chang puts forth a theory of Korea’s “compressed modernity” that he argues is absolutely vital to understanding the Korea of today. Simplified, compressed modernity is an explanation of how the seemingly paradoxical society of contemporary South Korea came about via a “compression of modernity”, that is to say, a modernity that did not take its time as it did in the West but one “in which economic, political, social and/or cultural changes occurred in an extremely condensed manner with regard to both time and space”.
Such a compressed modernity specifically allows for a peculiarity. Instead of the destruction of tradition to allow for the future to come into existence, compressed modernity blends historical, present and future elements as well as indigenous and xenogenetic elements within a singular whole, not by fusing them but rather by allowing all of them to exist in various modes vis-à-vis one another. This of course already raises an important question. Chang himself likens modernization to a process of westernization and argues that the onset of such westernization is exactly what reinforces the traditional. But if that is the case, what makes Korea unique?
Indeed, in earlier writings we have described the Islamic world and Japan in similar terms as having a Western outside coming in. The particular theologico-cultural and historical reasons that underline their particular version of dealing with Western modernity have been described extensively in those articles. But to complete the idea of what makes Korea different from these two civilizations we must succumb to a brief description of the history of the country and intertwine this explanation with its particular culture, not to understand or describe that past in full, but to understand what makes up Korea’s compressed modernity.
As is the case with most non-Western countries, modernity first properly arrived in Korea via colonialism. However in contrast to the experience of most countries, the colonial overlord in the Korean case was not a Western country but rather the recently-Westernized Japan. Japanese colonialism laid the groundwork for a modern state in ways that rarely existed in other non-Western countries, as the proximity of Korea to Japan led to a colonial model which was not so much about resource extraction as it was about what might be called an oriental form of lebensraum. This means that a disciplinarian bureaucratic system was built that laid out significant infrastructural and political groundwork for later attempts at modernization.
This colonized past and the devastation that the Korean War brought post-colonization furthermore led to the wish to rebuild in a way that would guarantee freedom no matter the cost. South Korea’s resentment towards Japan was condensed into the idea of outdoing Japan regarding modernization. When the military dictatorship came into power in 1961, the several pasts of Korea were fused with a staunch capitalist and future-oriented mindset, allowing for the compressed modernity that we have outlined above.
The resentment felt towards the Japanese led to an intrinsic nationalism at a time where Confucian values were seen as a way to reassert tradition. Under the dictatorship, Confucian values would merge with an emphasis on development and the dream of becoming an advanced nation. In contrast to most other places in the world, the specific historical and structural circumstances and rapid advancement left little time for capitalism to uproot these traditional elements which remained not just at the center of everyday norms but which became themselves a specific driving force behind the acceleration of modernity in Korea and its “compressed” state.
It was the distinct combination of past and future oriented modes that would lay the ground for the characteristic collaboration between the chaebols and the government. The mutual dependence between the two, where the state would protect a number of the familial conglomerates that would come to define the country up until today, was characterized by favoritism and a capitalist state-led industrial policy, where the chaebols were simultaneously allowed full freedom and benefits while also having to deliver results to keep their position.
By the 1970s the chaebols had both become indispensable and dangerously entrenched. Under this system, there was a massive migration from the countryside to the cities; civilians, most of whom had been agrarians, largely became factory workers in rapidly growing export industries such as textiles and electronics. With the dream of freedom and of becoming an advanced nation, the resentment felt towards the Japanese and the simultaneously still deeply entrenched Confucian values were now fused with these modern industries and the alliance between the military dictatorship and the chaebols.
A direct result of this fusion was that human beings were often seen as resources that should function as efficiently as possible, so as to make South Korea into the nation it dreamt of being and which it would quickly become. Here, Confucian familism would be exactly the phenomenon which allowed for the use of human beings as resources, as the nation was presented as a family and workers were expected to sacrifice their individual well-being for the well-being of the nation of tomorrow. Together, these traditional Confucian values, the bureaucratic structures and institutions that were laid down by the Japanese, the entrenchment of the chaebols and the arrival of American capitalism all merged into an “acceleration of acceleration”, creating a unique accelerationist culture.
A particularly on-the-nose demonstration of this is the concept of “Palli-Palli” (or: hurry, hurry) culture. In many ways, the phrase “Palli-Palli” has, to Koreans themselves, become synonymous with the attitude of the nation. The nation demands that you hurry up, and that you do so as efficiently as possible, in service of furthering growth. In other words, the logic of modern-day South Korea is inherently accelerationist.
The accelerationist and futuristic tendencies of South Korea are already partly discovered when reading Chang’s description of Korea’s compressed modernity as a blend of past, present and future next to Mark Fisher’s description of the post-Y2K world. For the CCRU, Y2K was the moment where everything would change, as they believed that the millennium bug would plunge the world into chaos. While such a moment never seemed to arrive, Fisher would later comment that everything did, in fact, change during Y2K, in the sense that everything seemed to be happening while nothing ever really changed. In other words, Fisher remarked, the past, the present and the future would blend together.
Fisher brings this up to point out the lack of an actual future (one that would bring change) arriving, as society would become haunted by the ghost of previous futures, creating a longing for lost futures that never materialized. Instead, we argue here that, far from the future never arriving, Korea is where the future is taking place. This may partially be explained by the fact that the history of compressed modernity that we have described is a history that arrived before the complete destruction of everything that existed and that then fused with capital without having to be given up, thus allowing for a blend of past, present and future which existed as something real rather than as ghosts.
On the other hand, such an explanation seems insufficient. What about its specific form of modernity, its Confucian-capitalism or its chaebols would cause it to maintain a future instead of just accelerating faster to the abyss?Compared to Japan, which can be said to have a somewhat similar fusion of traditional and western systems, Korea did not end at Y2K, while it can be said that Japan very much did (as I mentioned in my article on Japan, the common saying goes that “Japan has been stuck in the year 2000 since the late 80s”). To understand what makes it so that the possibility for a future exists in South Korea, we must shift our attention towards that most human of enterprises: culture and cultural production.
Earlier Korean pop music and the cultural industry
From the 60s until the end of the dictatorship in 1987, the South Korean government gave little attention to culture. As mentioned, the government was interested in industrialization, as it dreamt of becoming a modern nation. In so far as there was a cultural policy, the cultural policy was about the uplifting of traditional Korean forms of art and culture. As opposed to popular belief then, Korea did not “westernize” overnight. In fact, in comparison to neighboring Japan, often seen as another example of a developed country that retained a distinct sense of tradition, its emphasis on traditional Koreanness maintained a personal culture for much longer, with the regime emphasizing the importance of traditional Korean drama, literature and other such forms.
Although much is to be said about other forms of culture, art and entertainment during this period and later, for reasons that will become clearer later on, our discussion here will center largely on music. Under the dictatorship, the state’s main stance towards music was that it should encourage a healthy nationalism in the Korean nation. Oscillating between censorship and outright bans, music from outside the country would be subject to strict import quotas throughout these years. Internally, the government promoted the production of “healthy” culture, with popular Korean music at the time consisting mostly of sanitized, state-approved ballads.
Due to the opposition towards Japan, early on there was actually a brief but relatively permissive attitude towards Western music, in part due to the close cooperation between South Korea and the United States. As opposed to this, Trot, which would later become the dominant genre during the dictatorship, was seen as Japanese-tinged. This started to change when the “newer” western forms of music, such as rock and funk, and its artists, were increasingly critical of the regime and, in general, were discussing themes which were seen as anti-authoritarian, leftist or communist. As a result of this, much of it became censored by the regime under the justification that these were a bad influence on the population. Instead, the government, many of whose supporters were big fans of the locally much more established Trot, started to “cleanse” Trot of its Japanese elements and instead support it as a nationalistic form of music in opposition to the “leftist”-tinged Western forms of music.
Simultaneously, the American presence in the country and the strong ties and even modeling of the largely destroyed country on the American model, as well as its resentment of Japan, led to a consistent undercurrent of Western music in spite of its proscribed status. Kyung Hyun Kim, in his book on Korean popular culture, gives prominent attention to early Korean performers for American soldiers who were expected to sing songs in English, a language they did not understand, and appeal to the sensibilities of the Americans, leading to a peculiar mix of a performed Westernness which was nonetheless still infused with an inherent Koreanness.
Thus, even at the height of censorship in the mid 70s, which featured the arrest of several artists, the presence of Americans in the country and the dependence of South Korea on America made it so that Western music never was too far. While the already small Korean rock scene went further underground, American bars and clubs still insisted on their performers, and American radio stations, established for the soldiers, reached far and wide enough for Koreans around the country to listen in, thus continuing to spread a taste for music that deviated from the typical state-promoted ballads and trot songs among small segments of the population.
As we know from history, attempts to keep modern culture out never last too long, and as rules loosened after the assassination of Park in 1979, the younger population, of whom a small but increasing number had been in contact with outside-music, began to embrace it more openly, thus leading to a new generation of youngsters who, as opposed to the performers of the early post-war years, were not merely performing but openly consuming Western music.
Again, the presence of American soldiers in the country would play a part. Although Park was assassinated, the dictatorship was not fully “over”, and while censorship and oppression of musicians lightened - a prominent example being the Korean rock musician Shin Joong-hyun, who had been tortured under the Park regime and was freed after his assassination - freedom was not yet complete, and milder forms of censorship continued, making it so that it was mainly the areas frequented by foreigners (at the time still mostly consisting of American military personnel) that would continue to provide most access to Western style music.
In the Itaewon area of Seoul - which continues to be the foreigner area of the city, though the military presence there has dwindled - American soldiers would not merely watch Korean performers who were trying to mimic American pop sensibilities but also increasingly begin to mingle with adventurous Korean youths and in establishments which were no longer merely run for the Americans by owners who had no interest in the music themselves but rather by musicians and music lovers such as the aforementioned Shin Joong-Hyun.
It would be in these mixed environments of Itaewon where Koreans would increasingly pick up on the newest trends and produce them as their own, leading to legendary acts such as the heavy metal band Sinawe, whose bass player Seo Taiji would come to be a prominent player in the early K-Pop era. Simultaneously, further opposition to the dictatorship and calls to bring attention to the atrocities committed under the Park regime would lead to the increasing prominence of Minjung-Gayo, or student protest music, which would become especially prominent around the mass pro-democracy protests of 1987.
Throughout the mid to late 80s and especially after the end of the dictatorship in 1987, increasing numbers of young Koreans would pick up on and be influenced by these developments. The wildly disparate styles of influence and the sudden freedom would lead to a large amount of musical experimentation due to the fact that many of these artists tried to mix the still widely popular local trot and ballad forms with various genres of Western popular music.
The hybridization to various degrees of local music with Western popular music would retroactively make the artists who sprung from these developments among the first artists of what is now called generation zero of K-Pop. Most prominently, it would be the aforementioned Seo Taiji of Sinawe, who, after leaving the band, would establish the group Seo Taiji and Boys in 1991 (whose member Yang Hyun-suk would go on to establish YG Entertainment in 1996) which is often seen today as the first prominent K-Pop group.
The group would become a primary example of the mixing of Korean and Western styles mentioned above, achieving wide success with their mixture of the fresh and trendy Western genres of Hip-Hop and New Jack Swing (which Seo Taiji had picked up from black and white soldiers in the streets of Itaewon) with the local trot and ballad styles. At a time where TV corporations held most of the power and were still focused on displaying Trot and ballad, Seo Taiji and Boys’ sudden arrival changed not only the music of the era, but the industry itself, as their independence would break the existing system of TV stations and networks deciding what the general public would see and thus what would be popular. In the group’s music, a sudden explosion of radically different undercurrents would culminate in the Korean public suddenly being confronted with a wide array of genres, styles and music ideas, which would exist side-by-side in a manner reminiscent of the compressed modern explosion and its various styles and ideas.
This development led to a strong increase in new acts attempting to copy this success, which in turn would lead to the establishment of various record labels to manage these artists, though often in a relatively loose way, with labels focusing on handling recording and basic marketing, and sometimes being led by people who were themselves part of the scene. During this time, artists were mainly scouted through dance teams, scene connections and occasionally through contests.
But by 1995 the industry would come to see another drastic change. SM Studio, a record label, was established by Lee Soo-Man, who did so after studying abroad in America and witnessing the rise of pop music and MTV. Banking on the success of Seo Taiji and Boys and the explosion of this new form of music, he would try to model his artist Hyun Jinyoung after this new group, a move which would pay off as Hyun’s second and third albums would find large scale success among the general public who had become hungry for the hiphop-influenced music of Seo Taiji and Boys.
Yet Hyun’s rise would be short-lived, as he would be arrested for possession of marijuana shortly after the release of his third album, which would be met with strong disapproval from the general population in the conservative country, leading to a sharp decline in his popularity. Around the same time, the company that SM had been working with for the distribution of Hyun’s albums would find itself bankrupt. These two disasters led Lee to take a drastic decision; instead of only focusing on the music side, he decided that real superstardom required total curation, not just of the music, but of the artist themselves, their character, their looks, their behavior and all aspects of their career.
By taking inspiration from the already existing Idol system from Japan, Lee’s company would radicalize this system and fuse it with what came to be called SM’s “in-house” system, housing all necessary elements to create, market, plan and circulate the music of their artists. Both the artists themselves and the distribution from this point onward would be meticulously curated, so as to ward off any repeat of the earlier scandal. The idols would, from this point forward, no longer be scouted from the existing scene and be integrated immediately, nor would they be allowed artistic freedom. Rather, before their debut, idols would follow a strict trainee program that would not only teach them how to dance and sing exactly how SM wanted, but also how to behave, how to interact with the public and how to look.
Establishing a pipeline of scouting -> training -> debut -> export, Lee would create what he called “cultural technology”: the idol as cultural product, allowing for a repeatable system that left no room for error as the idols were now products that could be shaped. The first result of this new system would be the boygroup H.O.T., which was established in late 1996, and its success would be what fully spurred on the new idol system, as new companies would follow suit almost immediately. By 1997 this would lead to what is now called the big 3 entertainment houses of the Korean pop industry, with the other two - YG entertainment and JYP entertainment - following in SM entertainment’s (formerly SM studio) footsteps, creating the first wave of Idol groups consisting of names such as the aforementioned boygroup H.O.T., girlgroup S.E.S. and NRG.
In the years before this, the first post-dictatorship governments had already begun to see the potential in the cultural industry, which they began to frame not merely in cultural-traditional ways but economically. The following is a 1994 statement by then-President Kim Young Sam: “In the twenty-first century, the cultural industry itself will be the largest industry through the advancement of diverse audio-visual media. Since Western countries compete with each other in the cultural sector, we must develop new cultural products to meet global sense, and big corporations have to invest in the realm of culture”.
In the wake of the 1997 Asia Crisis, around the same time as this first generation of entertainment houses and their idol groups would pop up, South Korea was forced to seek a bailout from the IMF, which itself put a sudden stop to the rapid growth that the country had experienced and almost managed to crush the dream that at this point seemed all but fulfilled. Seeking further relief from these pressures, the South Korean government would continue to emphasize a strategy of promoting and exporting the cultural industry, leading to the 1999 Framework Act on the Promotion of Cultural Industries and the 2001 establishment of The Korea Culture & Contents Agency, with policy pivoting more and more towards the creative sectors to reduce over-reliance on heavy industry and the chaebols and the government increasingly collaborating with the bigger corporations of the entertainment industry.
As seen from the description of the beginnings of the Korean pop industry, some of these big corporations would in fact come directly from the pop cultural spheres as the three agencies named hereabove would, in time, turn into large entertainment companies. Dal Yong Jin, in his book on the new Korean Wave, notes that these entertainment houses would become the primary driving forces of Korean pop music, and the increasing emphasis on the cultural industry would make it so that these companies would receive extra support from the state in its attempt to profit off of the export of culture.
The attempt to export culture as a product would ultimately be given the name Hallyu, which in English would later be dubbed “the Korean wave” (or the K-wave), a name that would be used for both the conscious government strategy of exporting culture and the eventual explosive increase in Korean popular culture. The idea was simple: export popular culture so that money could flow back into the country. Despite this explicit focus on popular culture as opposed to traditional culture, the emphasis on familism in Korean society, the societal effects of which were also prominently displayed in Korean TV-Dramas, would in fact make the exported cultural products something which was, again, of two worlds. A fusion of those two broad sides of Korea as Confucian and capitalist, mirroring its strange and particular form of modernity.
We can already see here how this hybridization of cultures mirrors the compressed modern state of Korean society itself. The mixture of Korea’s past and its future is apparent throughout the genealogy we have attempted to describe above. Just as multiple modes of time existed next to each other throughout the dictatorship, allowing not for the retardation of its economy but instead for its massive growth (and the intensification of Korean society’s compression), the popular culture industry, and particularly the music industry, mirrors this logic of incorporating multiple modes, both in its art and in how it produces the artists.
Chang writes that an important part of Compressed Modernity is not merely the existence of Korea’s own tradition and the fusion of that tradition with an adaptation of the global Capital system (which itself was already a unique success in Korea, owing to its particular historical context), but the then-continued existence and growth of various forms of modernity or “multiple modernities” which come to exist next to one another. Turning to Chang’s emphasis on South Korea as a uniquely compressed-modern society, our discussion of the music system described above shows us that aside from the inherent Confucianism, the Western capitalist structure and the structures that were laid down during colonial times, there is a further mixture of the Japanese idol system and Western Pop which itself fuses with these structures and the capitalist and Confucian values, leading to the radicalization of its music industry.
In other words, all these elements from the past do not merely co-exist, but spur each other on. In this sense, if Korean popular culture was downstream from this fusion, the K-wave might be seen as the attempt to export its own modernity to the rest of the world. As Dal Yong Jin mentions in his book on the new Korean Wave, the K-wave does not denote Korean culture per se but the high tide of Korean culture in non-Korean territory. If Hallyu is a marketing strategy, it is a marketing strategy of the periphery taking on the cloak of the outside-enforced modernity (and in Korea’s sense multiple modernities) and exporting it again to the outside world. As Hallyu moved to its second stage, spurred on by the rapid growth of the internet and digitalization, the K-Pop industry would become the main driver of this export, propelling the K-Wave to unforeseen heights.
The K-wave makes it to level 2 and the continuing rise of K-Pop
The early K-wave era (or Hallyu 1.0), which has retroactively been defined as taking place from roughly 1997 - when post-IMF the government started to increasingly emphasize the importance of popular culture - to around 2008, was characterized by an intensification of emphasis on the export of cultural products but also by a relatively hands-off policy in which the government was mainly interested in promoting the cultural industries in a reactive manner; reacting to what would be popular and subsequently providing the infrastructure for its expansion. In part, this had to do with the fact that the Korean government noticed early on that it should not be too involved so as to avoid giving off the appearance of deliberately pushing a Korean cultural invasion into the East and South-East Asian countries which were the prime target for these exports.
During this time, the government would also revoke a previously-instated ban on Japanese cultural products, which in turn allowed for the opening up of Japan to Korean products, making it all the more crucial that tensions were not stirred. The early success of Hallyu was mainly led by TV-Dramas such as Autumn in My Heart (2000) and movies like Shiri (1999), as their emphasis on melodrama, family values and Asian cultural affinity found recognition in the tastes of those in other Asian countries.
Despite a splash of earlier success by groups like H.O.T. in China, for the music industry it would take until the onset of BoA - who had been trained and crafted by SM entertainment to appeal to the tastes of the Japanese market specifically - to be a large scale success. In 2002, BoA would be the first Korean pop artist to break through the Japanese market, a breakthrough which would, in fact, be so successful that she would be offered several awards for her contribution to the improvement of relations between Japan and South Korea. Together with later idol groups like TVXQ! and widely popular dramas like Winter Sonata (2002) during the early to mid-2000s, the K-Wave strategy would show its first fruit, albeit almost completely contained to East and South-East Asia.
During the mid-2000s, another development would lead to the intensification of these developments. The 1994 Korean Information Infrastructure initiative prompted rapid growth in the country’s IT sector, propelling it to be one of the leading exporters of mobile phone technology through chaebols such as Samsung and LG. Despite this privileged position, it would take the arrival of the iPhone in the country and its incredibly rapid uptake to wake the local powerhouses who had, up until that point, mainly engaged with mobile phone technology as a technology separate from computers. Within a year, Samsung launched its own smartphone and the country has, since the arrival of the iPhone, seen some of the fastest recorded rates of smartphone adoption.
The digitalization and its subsequent intensification through smartphone adoption allowed for much faster circulation of these cultural products within the country. Dal Yong Jin writes that since the onset of digital technologies, the digital world has, for younger Koreans become a total institution as described by Goffman, one that embodies and shapes everything and ultimately is what dictates a person’s identity. As the cultural products created by the entertainment industry became more prominent within this digital world, they would increasingly shape desire and dictate identity. We have already seen a glimpse of - and will encounter many times throughout this article - how this situation would provide the ideal platform for the popular culture industries to rapidly expand their reach and increase the spread of their products.
Simultaneously, the increase in internet usage around the world would also lead to a further intensification of the spread of these cultural products outside of South Korea as the proliferation of the internet and the subsequent smartphone revolution would allow for the faster and further travel of data, allowing those outside the country to have easier access to Korean dramas, movies and music and for the companies behind them to further their reach. The convergence between Korea’s own technology and culture would be utilized in order to boost the rapid spread of its cultural products and lead to an even further acceleration of the spread and the growth of these cultural products.
This acceleration would play a big part in the onset of Hallyu 2.0, which can largely be defined by the move from traditional mediums such as television and DVD exports to digital platforms as the main hub of cultural spread. This change would entice the government to take a more proactive approach as they began to recognize the potential of digital media in the further export of soft power. They would increasingly invest in IT–culture convergence and cooperate with tech companies such as the home-grown Naver and KakaoTalk.
An interesting thing to mention with regards to these home-grown tech companies is that the local cyberstack of Korea has, like the Japanese one (though perhaps to a somewhat less overt degree), always been relatively walled off from the rest of the world. While platforms like YouTube and Facebook would become equally popular in South Korea, platforms such as KakaoTalk, Afreeca (called SOOP nowadays) and others allowed for a situation where what came in via the global (or via the core) would initially be locally remixed by fusing these trends with Korean sensibilities, and these new trends would at first be maintained locally in a way where the relatively walled off cyberstack largely managed to keep them internal. Only after their wide-scale success would these remixed forms be exported to differing markets by the entertainment companies who slightly adjusted them to the perceived sensibilities of the markets they were hoping to infiltrate.
While the TV industry would certainly retain much of its influence during this 2nd phase of the K-Wave, it would be the Music companies that would become the true heirs of it. Despite the success of BoA and some other groups, the music industry had, up until this point, remained relatively small compared to the TV industry. Yet in his book Dal mentions that many have come to see K-Pop as Hallyu 2.0 itself, as the move from Hallyu 1.0 to 2.0 also meant the shift from TV and film-centered Hallyu to a more hands-on, more digital, more crafted and more music-oriented form of Hallyu, and it would be the K-Pop industry that, from this point onwards, would become the primary driver of the wave.
Hallyu 2.0, which lasted roughly from 2007 to 2015, largely coincided with the onset of the 2nd generation (which lasted from 2003 until 2012) and early 3rd generation of K-Pop (which lasted from 2012 to 2018), where 2nd generation groups like SNSD, Wonder Girls, Big Bang, Shinee and early 3rd generation groups like EXO and BTS would become massive successes, not merely locally but in the entirety of Asia and increasingly in the rest of the world. Especially from the early 2010s onwards, the groups named above would make inroads into other countries, particularly Latin America but also, to a lesser degree, Europe and the United States. Dal’s observation on the interlocking of Digitalization, Hallyu 2.0 and these new generation of K-Pop artists was made in 2014, before the full K-Pop boom took place. As we know by now, the world had not seen anything yet at that point.
From the mid 2010s the government would increasingly utilize both local and digital platforms as soft power apparatuses for the furthering of the Hallyu strategy, leading to an increase in cooperation and investment between the entertainment companies that were spearheading Hallyu. As digital platforms such as YouTube increased in popularity, the K-Pop industry was cemented as the king of the K-wave. The ability to spread music and short form videos far and wide became something that the entertainment companies would play into heavily, and as digitalization increased, people came to have continuous access to this short form content on their smartphones, causing the digital world and the idol system to lock into a feedback loop.
Like the chaebols, the entertainment companies behind this model would become major private actors whose interests would become deeply intertwined with state cultural, economic, and diplomatic policy. Where the chaebols’ export of technological products would become the main driver of the miracle on the Han River, the main driver of the K-wave would be the export of the “cultural technology” by these entertainment companies, with the idol as its pinnacle.
Here, social media platforms would further benefit the spread of this technology, as the hyperstylized aesthetics of the idols would unavoidably be amplified by social media networks, where their proliferation would increasingly lead to the users’ desire for them or desire to be more like them. Equally consumer product and human being, the idol would now be shown on screens across the world and, while seeming almost inhumanly perfect, their consistent appearance on these screens would simultaneously convey the idea that such perfection was within human reach.
Where the chaebols and giant tech companies would view technology as something to be increasingly optimized, the entertainment companies, with the human as their product, see the human as a process which can be ever more perfectly curated and optimized to play into the trends, desires and wishes of those who frequent social media. In this sense, cultural technology might likewise be called human technology - where the pipeline from trainee to idol is used to construct a human being beyond the bounds of what seems possible.
The trainee to idol pipeline and the idol as hyperhuman
The result of the pipeline established by Lee as a radicalization of the Japanese idol system and the in-house system was that the company would function like a family for the idol, whose entire career, persona and looks they would craft as if a machinic process. In this sense, they took the logic of production based on traditional Confucian notions of familism as it existed under the Park dictatorship - which turned the factory worker from an individual worker into a resource for the benefit of both the company and the country - and put the human being at its center. Where these industrial workers were seen as resources able to be utilized to craft products, the idol is seen as resource to be utilized as product to be crafted. Within the K-Pop industry, the duty to the nation’s economic miracle morphs into a duty to the nation’s global cultural success.
Fittingly then, the K-Pop system has been called a “star factory system” and, as the idol is a commodity, the entire system, despite its familial pretenses, is ultimately about production for the accumulation of capital. As we have come to see, this system is then eagerly played into by the government as a form of soft power. To optimize this, the entertainment companies have developed a rigid and highly sophisticated system, building onto the idol system established by Lee, so as to make sure that they get their money’s worth out of an idol, which is important because they invest a lot of money in them and the path from audition to stardom is a lengthy one. Where the companies invest their money, the idols sacrifice their time, a large chunk of their lives, their freedom and even their personhood. Chasing the dream of becoming a star (or rather, of being produced into a star) that the companies sell them, the idols have to prove themselves consistently, often from a very young age.
Before a person can become a trainee they have to audition, and before they can audition they have to be scouted. Scouting of an idol can happen in a variety of ways, ranging from casting people on the street - which happens solely on the basis of “visual potential” - to holding open auditions in a variety of local, global and even online locations for which young teenagers with the dream of becoming a star can sign up. Teenagers will often move to or visit Seoul for this exact purpose. Aespa’s Karina mentions walking around in the Hongdae area of Seoul - which used to be somewhat of a youth and student hotspot where scouting would often happen - in the hopes of being approached by company scouts, though ultimately she was approached not in real life, but on Instagram, as company scouts have, like K-Pop fans, increasingly moved to the digital world.
If scouted on the street (or online) one might have the luck of skipping the pre-screening that happens before they can participate in an open audition. Again, looks are a decisive factor during pre-screening, but other skills - such as showcasing dancing and singing skills with your application - are also important. Those that participate in such auditions are almost always young teenagers, many in an age range of 13 - 17, though trainees can be as young as 10 years old, with popular idols like Yeri from Red Velvet and Taemin from Shinee having joined their company at 11. This average age range exists in part because, in addition to the other standards, pre-screening heavily selects for age. While auditions are usually said to be open for those up until the age of 23, one’s chances of making it through pre-screening quickly decline past the age of 18 if not compensated for with exceptional talent in multiple other departments such as looks, dancing, singing or any quality that makes one stand out even among the already highly selected group of auditionees.
Applicants that make it to the audition phase have to perform live, showcasing their dancing, singing and entertainment skills, their ability to charm and their charisma and stage presence, with there usually being multiple rounds through which the initial group of selected applicants is increasingly culled. Once the trainee contract is signed, the long grind towards potential debut status begins, though most trainees will fail long before they reach this level.
The trainee period can take as little as one year (though this is incredibly rare) and as long as a decade or more. This period is characterized by intensely long days, often more than 12 hours long, during which trainees follow classes in vocal training, dance practice, language lessons (Korean, English, Japanese or Mandarin, depending on market focus) and stage expression, amongst other things. Trainees are periodically ranked and reviewed by company staff, with this ranking determining whether a trainee moves a step closer to debut or whether they have to work harder or are cut from the company altogether.
This situation often creates a hyper-competitive attitude between trainees, most of whom live far from home in dorms provided by companies with the exact trainees they are competing against. Within these dorms, and within daily life altogether, there are strict rules. Trainees have to adhere to a curfew, romantic relationships are strictly forbidden and harsh eating schedules are common, with trainees being weighed periodically and obliged to maintain a target weight that ensures a slender build. In addition to this, while school attendance of the mostly middle school to high school aged trainees is sometimes maintained, other times it is sacrificed in order to spend more time on training. This situation leads to many trainees struggling with mental health, especially as, along with the harsh standards, there is the constant fear of being cut from the company, and many end up spending multiple years of their lives as trainees while never debuting. As they are products to be perfected, trainees, like the factory workers of the 70s, are disposable if they do not promise to bring enough return on the investment made in them.
The long and harsh trainee process is often accepted because of the promise that lies at the end: stardom, success and eternal fame. In this sense, the trainee pipeline mirrors broader Korean society, where harsh beauty standards, long working hours, intense pressure to study and other such elements are seen as hurdles on the path to a more successful life. The dream that existed during the phase of extreme rapid modernization of the compressed modern society taught South Koreans that a better life equals stronger growth and stronger growth, in turn, needed continuous optimization of technology.
Gooyong Kim argues that the continuation of this dream is precisely located in K-Pop as the “most salient example” of the K-wave state of art. He mentions that “as much as Korea’s manufacturing industry giants achieved their fortune by exploiting cheap, docile, and abundant workers from the ’60s to ’80s, the K-Pop industry capitalizes on the competitive spirits, perseverance, and physical strength of young trainees and idols who dream of being successful and famous.” In turn, Kim argues, the idol, and especially the female idol, became the poster child of the country’s success. In this light, in 2013 then-President Park Geun-Hye, the daughter of Park, declared a second miracle on the Han River, which she stated would be realized through Korea’s popular culture.
The compressed modern growth of the first miracle, during which multiple modernities coincided to produce the explosion of modernization, then allows for the possibility of this second miracle, in which the fusion between neoliberal capitalism, Confucian familism and the dream of further growth argue for human beings as technological commodities to be consumed globally while being touted as role models by the state, as Kim argues. To maintain this, just as the industrialization of before, the human at the center of the system needs to always be as perfect as they can be, so as to be perfectly marketable.
As the company staff attempt to shape the trainee into a perfectly marketable human and ultimately into perfectly marketable groups of humans who will go on to debut as rookies, the compressed modern blend of Confucianism and capitalism allows for a situation where the human being is seen as something to be perfected so as to be fit for consumption. To achieve this, meticulous and continuous behavior regulation and harsh training is utilized to turn the idols into objects of ever greater desire. On top of this, cosmetic surgery is rampant in the industry, both among trainees and among idols, as these further allow shaping the human into something greater and more desirable. Every new technological or behavioral step that offers success then feeds back into the technology so as to make it possible to further perfect the human.
The trainee system is then one of creating a human which embodies perfection in all realms that might play a role in aesthetic entertainment. Groups and the idols that make up these groups are expected to look perfect, act perfect, have perfect choreographies and perfectly crafted catchy songs so as to cement themselves into the hearts and minds of the humans that consume these avatars of perfect beauty and perfect behavior. In this sense, the creation of the idol is one in which the human at its center is made into a product which capitalizes (in the literal sense of the word) on a deeply human desire, namely the desire for beauty and perfection in both our surroundings and in ourselves.
Vincenzo Cicchelli and Sylvie Octobre, in a case study on French K-Pop fans, mention aesthetic perfection and beauty among the top reasons named by fans for their investment into K-Pop as opposed to global American pop or their local forms of pop. The researchers state that “this obsession with beauty coincides with a quest for perfection. The cult of perfection is considered to be the apex of beauty by young fans from a wide variety of backgrounds.” They go on to state that the way in which these fans view the idols echoes the ancient Greek kalokagathia, as they associate the perfection they see in the K-Pop idols not merely with beauty but with other terms such as “depth”, “truth” and “virtue”.
Within the trainee to idol ready to be exported pipeline, this kalokagathia is produced by pushing the human being to near-inhuman heights. In this sense, the human being becomes a machine utilized for optimization. At this point it would be good to reiterate that, for all their technological crafting, these idols are ultimately human beings. They do not change into something beyond human beings, even when partaking in the feedback loop of commodification as the product at its centre. Aside from the tragic existence and the missteps in the industry, which have been highlighted continuously in both local Korean and Global media and academic studies and which itself make it important to recognize the idols as human beings, there is additionally another, more theoretical reason to do so.
If we recognize the human essence which remains within all idols, then what the K-Pop system is doing in pursuing a drive for beautification and perfection (or kalokagathia as described by the fans in Cicchelli and Octobre’s research) of these human beings can only happen by turning them into technology ready to be commoditized, as commoditization both drives and allows for the further pursuit and continuation of these heights. Yet because this human essence remains, this technology is ultimately deeply human, as what this perfection amounts to is a perfection of extremely human traits. It is not the crafting of the human into something which it is not, or into something which is beyond it, but rather crafting the human into something which it is, but intensifying it. Despite the inhumanity of the system, there is thus something deeply human about the idol system which we see echoed in the descriptions of perfections of the French fans stated here above and the relation to the Greek idea of kalokagathia.
Here it helps us to briefly stand still and discuss what exactly humanity is. If we look at the history of humanity, what has differentiated us from animals since the beginning is our ability to utilize tools to bring forth new and higher forms of complexity. This increase in complexity is consequently ordered into what we usually call civilization, so as to make it manageable. This ordering, in turn, creates specific social relations, bonds and formations that allow for the increase of intelligence and beauty. The latter we put into art but also into culture, while the former is often used to craft new tools, which ultimately further kickstart the process to further bring forth new and higher forms of complexity which then again get ordered etc.
The human process is thus, at its heart, one that utilizes intelligence to craft and utilize tools which bring forth and order complexity, from which both beauty and new tools which ultimately further that process arise. If the idols are seen as cultural technology (or human technology) who produce beauty and virtue exactly by them being crafted as technology, then what the idol is, is a combination of these two drives into a singular human by way of systematizing and commodifying the human being. Technology systematizes the human being into this process and the capitalist system ultimately commodifies it but, as the human essence remains and the entirety of the process exists to craft these elements, the end result, while harsh and in some aspects inhuman in its ethical treatment and objectification of the idols, is simultaneously deeply human as a process, as idols are turned into technology exactly to perfect that which is deeply human.
The emphasis on a telos of what we might then call kalokagathia in the production of the idol, while artificially produced, does not lead to something which is artificial but rather to the machinic and commodified optimization of this human process. The idols in this case paradoxically become the avatars of a perfection that has yet to be reached by the majority of humanity but which is nonetheless human. If what the human is, is this human drive, and if the K-Pop idol shows this drive reaching heights beyond what is thought possible, what the K-Pop system produces in its perfection of the idols might be aptly described as the hyperhuman who is cybernetically produced and becomes part of the capitalist system yet paradoxically, through that, is intensely humanized.
The hyperhuman here is to be distinguished from the idea of the post-human and the inhuman exactly because, while it technologizes the human being at its center so as to export it into a technological global system, what it eventually produces is not the surpassing of the human nor the rejection of the human but rather the affirmation of the central drive of humanity, using not technology as external augmentation to eventually move beyond the human but instead utilizing the human as technology to continuously push the human condition to new heights.
The hyperhuman as idol thus re-introduces the human as process within the very cybernetic circuit of commodification, technologization and mediatization which has dehumanized the world. In this sense, one might oppose the implication here that this is a “humanizing” process by arguing that the idol, exactly because of its integration in this circuit, is nothing more than a simulation which ultimately reinforces the removal of any authentic humanity from the human it technologizes.
But while the idol as simulation idea certainly has merit, such criticism ultimately misses the point. Mark Fisher in his Flatline Constructs describes the gothic horror of cybernetization which he, via a Baudrillardian reading of McLuhan, points to the reversion of McLuhan’s idea of technology as an extension of man to instead describe technology as something that is revealed to be inside the human being itself, with media turning the body into a site of direct inscription, leading to a loss of the sense of self as the subject is unable to further distinguish itself from the technology which is within him and is thus overwritten by it. In this sense, humans become indistinguishable from their technological and digital environment.
In his work, Fisher uses the movie Videodrome by David Cronenberg as an analogy. In Videodrome, the horror is shown to be not in technology and media invading the human body from outside, but rather that the human body is revealed as having no inside separate from its environment, and that the body is thus always being manipulated and used by forces in its environment, something which becomes inescapable in a hyper techno-media landscape. The realization that body horror is always already something inside the body, or the revelation that the body is a techno-cybernetic system which is worked upon by its environment, is what Fisher terms cybernetic realism.
The idol does not oppose this revelation but rather provides the ability to restructure this reality from horror into the human drive for beauty. Where the cybernetization of reality decodes distinctions between human beings and environment, within K-Pop this manifests as its intensification through technological mediation, showing the human as a process rather than a static essence, based on the simultaneous existence of past and future. While the body remains a medium, it becomes a medium for the drive for the kalokagathia recognized in the idol by its admirers.
It is Korea’s compressed modernity, its combination of capitalism and Confucianism, which allows for such a re-framing and the re-framing itself for its revival of a human teleology within the human being, asserting both its cybernetic nature and its primordiality by way of that primordiality becoming its telos. The compressed modern society allows exactly for the structures necessary to produce the idol system, as the familist values existing within the country that lay at the basis of the rigid idol system are able to consistently re-incorporate that which would lead to fragmentation in the West as it already always saw the human as a system of relations worked upon by its environment. When technicity floods inward, it meets a cultural topology already predisposed to interpret such invasion as discipline, self-cultivation, or relational duty.
If we look at the difference between Marilyn Monroe, who is mentioned by Fisher as an example of a person who became hyper-commodified, ending in her pure fragmentation, the difference between her and the idol then lies in what the structural environment allows the star to become. Monroe could not become what idols become not because they are fundamentally different in their tragedy or their commodification but because there is no tradition to steer her individual stardom into a systemic hyperhuman drive.
Edgar Morin points this out specifically in his 1957 work “the Stars” when he mentions how the system of film stars had undergone a change from the early 20th century moviestars up until the time of Monroe. Separating the star themselves from the actor, Morin argues that what makes the star a star is not primarily their acting skills but rather that they are seen as beautiful and virtuous because of their beauty. According to Morin, already around the 1950s, this star system started to become individualized.
Where earlier stars were seen as divine archetypes, from the 1930s and 40s onwards, the star system saw a change. Precisely because of their obsession with stars, the public started to demand stars that were more relatable, more like them; participating in moral life and exhibiting a rebellious streak. It was thus a move away from the perfection towards an individualism, so that the public could more easily identify with those archetypes and believe that they too could become like that. With this, Morin argues, also came a sexualization of the star, who was increasingly eroticized, as opposed to the “pure” stars of the early film age.
Monroe was the archetypal product of such a move and we might even say its radicalization. She was curated, but the entire fantasy that was sold was about her sex appeal, her bombshell image that made her a sex symbol. As mentioned by Jie Wen, female idols are instead encouraged to present purity and innocence alongside a controlled sensuality which remains somewhat distant and hidden.
Though one might certainly say Monroe was beautiful, the imagery that she stood for was not necessarily about beauty in a deep sense but about lust, freedom, lack of restraint and invitation into an individual self through pornification as opposed to the idols evoking aspiration and idealization through celestialness or what we have - echoing the French K-Pop fans mentioned above - described as kalokagathia. This is not to say that there is not an extent of fantasy within idol culture, nor that idols are not eroticized, but rather that that fantasy is not sold as an individualized sexuality in which the public can recognize itself. The idol is never made relatable, but rather is presented as the most perfect product imaginable.
The spread of the eroticized archetype throughout the West leads to a culture where people prize exactly such individualization towards the non-human, such a rebellion against the broader whole, while inviting those watching. If Marilyn, and those that came after her, “sold sex”, what would be copied is not any sort of drive for self-cultivating beauty but rather acting in the manner that Marilyn acted (or was perceived to be acting), the stars “normalization” Morin discusses leading to a public that can rest easy at being faced with something that seem simultaneously more than human and yet “just like them”.
Even if we look at Disney stars, who, due to the shared lineage to Motown acts and some structural similarities might be said to be the closest equivalent to K-Pop idols in the West in systemic terms, we notice that, while being successful as stars, actors and actresses, they usually only become culturally influential exactly once they start rebelling and turn themselves into the more Marilyn adjacent archetype, which is often at the onset of adulthood and which is culturally applauded and even expected. One might then still argue that if such a Marilyn-like lineage causes a move away from the genuinely erotic and sexuality, exactly because it proliferates as simulation, as Baudrillard argues, then surely the K-Pop idol’s cultivation of beauty must do the same with beauty itself (which might then be even more disastrous if we have said that such beauty is ultimately to be highly exalted).
But here we should understand that it is exactly the spread of the Monroe-type rebellious and individualized but inviting sexuality which, when copied en masse, leads to that disappearance, not merely because it is simulated and proliferated but because it deterritorializes, as Fisher mentions, and thus has a specific end to it in a human sense (even if we allow, in Fisher’s more Deleuzo-Guattarian reading vis a vis Baudrillard, for there to then exist pure potential beyond that). K-Pop’s beauty cultivation and its copy, on the other hand, spreads something that is both deeply human and shows that it is processual exactly via the system it operates in, as it believes in self-cultivation of the self in favor of the broader whole.
While both Western stars such as Monroe and idols are “commodified and transformed into their own image”, the lack of any deep societal tradition under Western capitalism beyond liberal individualism coinciding together with capitalism removes the ability to stabilize the cybernetic into something beyond the individual, who is thus confronted with the horror of their own empty interior being worked upon by forces of technology and media. However, as within the Confucian system the idol is always already seen as a system of relations, the idol system does not lead to such horror and dissolution of the human but into its affirmation as part of this system, which then guides it to its own self-cultivation to the benefit of that system.
The “whole complex of relationships involving Monroe” is in the idols case then a whole societal complex of relations which is steered by the “family” back into the betterment of the self, of the company and of the country. When this fuses with capitalism during an age of deep dehumanization, it allows exactly for the steering of this process into a reaffirmation of the human because it plays into a deeply-felt desire for beauty and aesthetics that most of the world seems unable to produce without losing the capitalist glitter and glamour.
Korean Confucian-capitalism or compressed modern capitalism can play into this desire because its tradition allowed for the human to exist as resource, as opposed to being replaced by resources. This could not happen in the West because its self-imposed modernity caused the lack of a tradition and culture that aims for consistent self-improvement at the benefit of the broader process of the whole, thus not allowing the creation of an apparatus which could steer humanity into this circuit. The idol then becomes the avatar of a radical human becoming or a re-implementation of human teleology within the cybernetic circuit.
It is in this sense that we can understand why the future seems to be taking place in Korea and why people are drawn to it. In Fisher’s reading of the post-Y2K world as one where the future never seems to arrive because nothing ever changes, this becomes understandable if we understand that the process, as it has arrived in the West and in much of the world, is not any longer for us; thus while everything changes, nothing changes in the sense of things seeming to become different. The hyperhuman idol then plays into that sensibility by showing a human being that is beyond what we know, but which simultaneously seems radically human and thus radically for us and of us.
In Korea’s case, the “inside” was never treated as sacral private depth in the Western, post-Christian, Cartesian sense. Instead, the human was always seen as programmable for the benefit of the nation, which during the Confucian-capitalism of the Park era was then restructured around continuous industrialization where the human became a resource to utilize for continuous technological improvement. As the leap is made from continuous technological growth to human technology, it is the human that becomes not merely resource but that same technology which continuously improves.
Where cybernetic realism, via Wiener, then says: “we are patterns that repeat themselves”, the K-Pop idol changes this into “we are patterns that perfect themselves.” Thus, paradoxically, it is the technologization of the human as a radicalization of the human as resource which reverses Videodrome’s human that becomes signal and instead, by showing the human process as being not only functional but accelerated within this system, instead turns this on its head, by making the signal human.
If we understand Fisher’s idea as arguing that this technological horror is always something that is already inside the body, the idol, as human technology, shows that it is this drive for kalokagathia which is always already within the body. It should be mentioned that none of this, as we have seen before and will mention many times over, negates the individual tragedy of the idols or the disastrous effects that Confucian-capitalism seems to have on Korean society, as we have shown examples of above and as we will discuss in more detail later in this series.
Simultaneously - by being crafted into an object of deep desire and becoming part of the cybernetic circuit produced as a “simulation” - it is by its radical proximity to the world via the inescapable digitalization of the world, as argued by Fisher in his work and as shown above by the digitalization of the K-wave, that the idol exports the human process not merely inside Korea but far beyond it, to societies with different histories, traditions and cultures which could not have allowed such a system to come from within. It is this idea which then completes the idol as not merely hyperhuman themselves but as avatars of hyperhumanism, as they are not merely worked upon themselves to produce kalokagathia but consequently, by way of partaking in the cybernetic-commodified circuit, are exported, desired and copied; producing this same drive within others.
Though we might now understand how the idol is created and what their relation is to Korea more broadly, we are still far removed from understanding how the idol as “avatar of hyperhumanism” exactly embodies these (hyper)human drives, and in what way it then spreads this drive beyond itself. Furthermore, even if granted, we have yet to explain whether there is, as we proclaimed in the introduction, any benefit to this at all. In the next chapter we will come to see how the idol’s hyperhumanism within the system provides it with the only opportunity to reverse the system through an analysis of the idols anthropotechnic drive.