Introduction
We ended chapter 1’s historical section with the move from Hallyu 1.0 to Hallyu 2.0, the latter being defined by the move to digital platforms and taking place from roughly 2007-2015. Although Hallyu 2.0’s move to digital platforms would pave the way for the K-Pop industry to grow into its most successful phase, it would take until the mid-2010s for K-Pop to become a global phenomenon. Much of this increase in popularity among non-Korean fans was owed directly to Hallyu 2.0’s move towards optimizing content for social media and the integration between Korean technological platforms and entertainment companies in the broader Hallyu strategy. Increasingly, the entertainment companies would forge a strategy for enticing and extracting desires through such social media platforms, directly leading to the influx of K-Pop content that we have seen.
While 2nd generation groups like SNSD and Wonder Girls had made some inroads into the West and the world in general beyond Asia, it would be the 3rd generation of K-Pop which would propel the genre to the global phenomenon that we know now, with BTS of Big Hit entertainment and Blackpink of YG entertainment leading the pack and remaining the two most popular K-Pop groups to this day. This 3rd generation coincided with the tail end of the platform culture of Hallyu 2.0, and the combination of the government’s promotion strategy, the early adoption of social media and the local tech stack would accelerate the spread of Korean pop far beyond its national boundaries.
Dal Yong Jin already notes in 2016 the particular success of the Korean wave as the first non-Western attempt to go global. As Kyung Hyun Kim mentions, it remains to this day the only global pop industry that has rivalled the West. Unless you have lived under a rock (and skipped the first chapter of this work), you have likely noticed this intense popularity and perhaps also the occasionally-raging stans online. While such elements were built on top of Hallyu 2.0’s move towards social media, the distinct parasocial element that would lead to this “stan culture” and which characterizes much of K-Pop today was largely made possible by the innovations of Hallyu 3.0, which in turn ultimately created the global circuit of K-Pop (and then of Hallyu more broadly) that we know today.
It would be Hallyu 3.0 that would really entrench the K-Wave as a global phenomenon, with people around the world becoming enamored with everything Korean. So what distinguishes Hallyu 2.0 from Hallyu 3.0? With Hallyu 3.0, there came a “Koreanness” with the K-wave as a deliberate strategy. The idol system, previously the chief and only export, now pulled double duty as the medium for the export of a lifestyle, with K-Beauty, K-Food, and similar K-products coming to transform social media and in time entire high streets around the world. The other part that defines Hallyu 3.0 is the move from general social media presence to the establishment of particular fan-centered platforms that would come to deepen the aforementioned parasociality.
Having seen the anthropotechnical drive of the idol and its potential, this chapter will discuss how Hallyu 3.0 allowed the K-Pop system to make use of the idol’s double nature as both human and product to create a sacred space for fans, with the platforms that would become prominent in Hallyu 3.0 serving as the vehicle for the K-Pop system to control not just the idol but the fan alike. This will provide us with the opportunity to set out to answer the two questions we ended the previous chapter with, namely how the idol spreads and, through an analysis of this spread, how the poison manifests and whether a potential cure remains. By starting on the micro-level of the fan economy, we will come to see a first glimpse of the mind-altering machinery that stands at the center of the K-Pop system.
Re-humanizing the internet and parasociality
In line with our broader analysis on Korea, Kyung Hyun-Kim argues that K-Pop maintains something of the pre-hyperreal, despite its intense emphasis on digital platforms. Kim explains that K-Pop displays something which he calls “meme-icry”, a term that stands for the idol’s ability to quickly mimic and perfect whatever the new global digital trend is and simultaneously connect this to a human embodiment of the newest internet culture. Kim argues that although this digital culture is supposed to be non-human, the idol system provides that digital culture with a physical embodiment. Interestingly, Kim notes that because of this, the idol embodies a weird glitch within the digital world, functioning as the “re-anthropomorphization of the simulacra of the smartphone era”.
In chapters 1 and 2 we juxtaposed the idol to Monroe, deeming the latter a human being turned image and insisting that the idol, despite seeming to be a radicalization of Marilyn’s condition, is in fact the opposite. Through his re-anthropomorphization argument, Kim has a similar insight, arguing that idols restore the human in the age of computer graphics and are thus manufactured human beings capable of functioning as a living and breathing piece of internet software. Kim describes the meticulous training the idol goes through and argues that this training is meant to make the human into a living and breathing embodiment of the internet itself. It is this that makes the hyperhuman truly “hyper” and go beyond itself in an anthropotechnical sense, as it is the human finding a way to embody the internet in what we described earlier as a strange reversal of cybernetic realism; not the human turning signal, but the signal turning human.
According to Kim, the idol then overcomes the hyperreal in a hyperreal world by giving a human form to the digital image. Yet this goes hand in hand with, rather than that it opposes K-Pop’s futuristic focus on commoditizing parasociality and desire. The idol system is, at its core, a system of desire-extraction. K-Pop idols are made into a beautiful human embodiment of the internet because the companies want to play into the fans’ desires. The turning of human beings into the breathing surface of a digital image is then, indeed, a humanization, but it is simultaneously another step towards capitalizing on desires, one that perfectly matches the entertainment company’s Korean dichotomy between past and future, as the pre-hyperreal humanization is achieved precisely through pushing beyond the digital image that prevails in the West.
The third iteration of the K-Wave would take K-Pop’s ability to extract desires to new heights by way of the dichotomy between the digital and the real-world that exists in the idol. This dichotomy, furthermore, does not only exist in the idol themselves, but in the system as a whole, as K-Pop prioritizes interactions between fans and idols in the real world as well as online. Kim points out that the ultimate K-Pop event for fans to participate in is the physical meet and greet “where fans are allowed to interact not only with the images or merchandise but with the physical bodies of the performers” who move from screen to real life.
Because of this, Kyung-Hyun Kim argues that the idol corresponds to the human desire to organically connect with what is now a postmodern cyberspace condition dominated by emojis and internet-based exclamatory expressions. “These young Asian bodies that execute cute body movements in K-Pop performances are perfect human-based ideograms of internet-era memes and other forms of online communication”. This longing for organic connection in a digital world draws in new admirers and new recruits who idolise (pun not intended) these embodiments of an internet made flesh.
In a world where digitalization seems to be making the human obsolete, the idol becomes its center product exactly because they can humanize the internet and offer a form of connection. Beauty beyond what seems possible appears on a fan’s screen accompanied by the promise of potentially being able to meet the idol in real life. It is the idea that there is a physical human being behind this beauty on the screen, a human one can one day meet and even connect with, that drives the K-Pop industry and its capability for parasocial extraction.
The strange combination between past and future we see exemplified in the idol as an avatar of contemporary Korea is further exemplified here. If we return to Morin, he made the argument that the idea of movie stars changed from the early 20th century to the mid 20th century. As the public increasingly wanted to recognize themselves in the star, the star became humanized and their private lives accessible; everything about them became known, and they became increasingly “normal”, complex and sexualized.
But the movie star never had a connection with its fans, even when sexualization and normalization made them look like every other person. The idol, however, shows almost the direct opposite. We already showed the dichotomy between Monroe and the idol, but if we combine Morin’s analysis with our analysis here, we see that something interesting happens. The idol is specifically designed to not be relatable, to look like a human being that is almost unreachable. As we said by way of Barthes, the idol is much more akin to the early movie stars who both he and Morin described as idealized archetypes.
Yet paradoxically, the idol is particularly designed to be accessible. Not as someone you can recognize yourself in but as the archetype that does not remain fantasy or pure image on a screen but that one can one day meet and connect with. Where Morin argues that stars had to come down to the human level to give onlookers the idea that they are mortal, the idol remains on a level beyond the human but then offers an amount of access that even the new Hollywood star does not offer. Fans have direct access to idols, they have the opportunity to meet them, to communicate with them, but this is always in a liturgical fashion: the idol steps down to meet the fan, providing the opportunity to meet with the archetype.
By combining in itself the archetypal humanness of the early movie star and going beyond the accessibility of the later movie stars, the idol allows for the idea that the archetype can be accessed. Where Morin describes the movie star as mere image, the idol refuses such a move precisely by retaining a human one can potentially meet and connect with. Far from de-sacralizing the idol, the idea of a re-humanized internet is potentially the perfect example of what a newly built sacred would constitute in our contemporary age. In a world where the internet has become an overwhelming force in our day to day lives, what can be more sacred than an internet turned to you, turning human and stretching its hand out?
If we painted a dichotomy between Barthes’ Garbo and Monroe in chapter 2, we now have to partially walk back our assessment in order to fully understand these platforms and their ability to use the idol to extract resources. In his original work, Barthes describes Garbo as the Platonic ideal of humanity, as an archetype and an essence to which he juxtaposes Audrey Hepburn. Barthes points out that there came an individualization with the move from Garbo to Hepburn; Hepburn was an individual person, not merely an abstract concept in the way that Garbo was.
The difference between Barthes’ Hepburn and Morin’s Monroe is mainly that the latter takes this further by rebelling against the Hollywood norm of curatedness and inaccessibility, showing that, despite the intense admiration, she was human just like the rest of us, moving further towards relatability. Paradoxically, this came along with a far deeper intrusion into the private life of the star, because the star’s humanization also came with the belief that the star was accessible and human like any one of us.
The genius of the K-Pop system is that it combines Barthes’ Garbo as abstract concept and Monroe as individualized and parasocial image into one. The idols are designed to look, act and be like the idealized face of Garbo, yet at the same time they are accessible and individualized. Within every group, each member has an entire individual backstory built up around them, and individual group members have their own particular fans and their own particular products.
Furthermore, as with Morin’s post-Monroe movie star, the idol likewise has an elaborate system built around itself to create a parasocial bond. In fact, this parasocial system, precisely because it is centered around the possibility of connecting with the idol, is much more elaborate than the Western system, which had always mainly centered on knowing about the star’s private life, i.e. getting a look into the normality of the star. The parasociality of K-Pop, however, thrives on the non-normality of the idol, the ability to meet the archetype and to connect with it. Everything about the idol, much like the ecosystem itself, is engineered to play into this parasocial aspect of being able to connect to an idealized archetype which comes down in human form to the fan, allowing for a connection that starts to feel sacred for many of them.
As Gooyong Kim points out, the idol’s body, their personality, their every action, move, interaction and public presentation are engineered by the companies to play into the audience’s need for affection. Different idols are conceptualized with different personas, with an entire lore built around them (often with little to no connection to the character of the individual human behind the persona) to play into the desires of a variety of audiences. When we say the human remains, what remains is then the archetype. That archetype is an expression of the human nature that remains within the idol, but the individuality shown is not the individuality of the idol themselves, but rather this curated persona that manipulates the fans’ deep desire for a sacred bond with the idol that removes them from the profane.
Hallyu 3.0’s embracing of the platform economy would continue the move towards the internet and the digital platforms described in the first chapter, leading to a version of K-Pop that perfected its capability to curate this persona so as to intensify the parasocial relations that fans experience vis-à-vis idols. Kyung-Hyun Kim makes the argument that the innovation of K-Pop lies less in the music (which is often largely based on Western and Japanese music) and more so in the non-musical side of things. Its main focus is on building the fandom, the innovation primarily existing in the perfecting and styling of humans who can entice fans to invest further in the system. Kim argues that for fans, the ultimate reward is being able to meet the idol in real life and establish a connection with them in the flesh. For the fan, the endpoint of the idol system is then the ability to meet the human form of the archetype displayed on their screen. To get to this moment of physical connection the fan must walk a long and difficult path.
While we have seen how, on the trainee side, the in-house pipeline is supposed to shape the human being into the idol-as-product, the entertainment agencies have likewise built entire ecosystems of parasociality that all exist to heighten the attachment that the fan feels to the idol. Such an attachment often starts when a young fan becomes a “stan” of a particular group, where being a stan is usually expressed online not merely as being a strong supporter but rather as vehemently defending them, following them everywhere, protecting them from any perceived attacks or slights and often engaging in attacking other groups. As every fandom is given a name, most fandoms furthermore find a form of community in the fandom where they bond with other stans.
Within the group, most fans have a “bias”, an idol member of the group whom they particularly appreciate; where the attachment is often due to a combination of being attracted to the member’s looks and the engineered character that we discussed before. While such things do not yet seem that different from Western popstars (who hasn’t come across the legions of mentally deranged “barbz” or “swifties” online?), it is not this element on its own that defines the K-Pop ecosystem. Rather, the ecosystem is the system that is built to exploit stans and their biases for groups and individual idols as a way to sell evermore products.
On the least intense level, this begins with the sale of a K-Pop album. As K-Pop has never been a genre focussed on cohesive albums, the entire idea of a K-Pop album already sounds somewhat absurd. Musically, K-Pop mainly focusses on big hits, with most groups having a “comeback” once every three to nine months in which they release a particular song that is designed by the company to function as one. It is these hits that blow up, both because they often are of better musical quality (and thus get attention not only from group stans but from the general public as well) and because companies build a lot of hype around their groups’ comebacks.
Now, alongside these comeback songs, groups will sometimes release a larger EP or album which will house the comeback title track together with a number of “B-sides”, songs which were not meant as the big comeback and thus received a lot less attention, no choreography and little promotion outside of the general album promotion. Furthermore, while some groups are lauded for their “good B-sides”, and some B-sides do go viral on their own, most B-sides are seen as of significantly less musical quality, having received much less polish than the title tracks.
If K-Pop is a genre of hit singles, one might wonder what the whole point of a K-Pop album even is. But the point is exactly that which we mentioned earlier. It is not primarily about the music, which is accessible through streaming platforms anyway, but about playing into the parasocial tendencies of the fans. As we will discover, the album is the entry point to the parasocial fandom. Each K-Pop album comes with a bunch of goodies related to the group, which range from stickers to calendars to whatever else you can think of. These goodies are often in some way linked to the members of the group, either featuring direct depictions of them or featuring locations from video clips or images of cartoon characters which have themselves been crafted and promoted as standing for the group members (and whose plushies you could buy as well – for a hefty price tag, of course).
Most albums furthermore have multiple editions, which means that many fans will buy multiple copies of the same album to ensure that they get their hands on all the goodies. One of the most important goodies that come with the albums are the so-called photocards. These depict selfies specifically taken by the idol for this purpose, almost always of individual members, printed on cardstock. While a selfie on a piece of paper sounds relatively unimpressive, photocards are actually one of the most desired items that come with the albums. As some photocards are made to be rare and every album gets a random selection of photocards, most fans aim for a photocard of their bias, and sometimes a particular one.
Some fans might even buy multiple albums purely to get more photocards of their bias. Furthermore, outside of the multiple standard editions, albums often also have special editions which are tied to specific events or specific retailers, which often include photocards that are specifically tied to that event/retailer and are not easily available through sales outside of it. This has itself led to a lucrative trade in photocards online, where specific photocards of highly “biased” members of the most popular groups can go for hundreds of dollars.
More importantly, however: the K-Pop album, the limited editions, the goodies and the photocards are all ways in which the company plays into the fan’s desire and their parasocial attachment to the group as a whole and to their bias in particular. But the album and what comes with it is really only the tip of the parasocial iceberg. While the social media platforms used by K-Pop have played an important role in its spread, once one becomes a “stan”, social media in the K-Pop world goes far beyond regular social media sites.
Instead, companies (in a curious resemblance to the digital companies of Korea discussed in chapter 1) have created specific platforms to build the relationship between fans and idols. One of the most prominent of such sites is Weverse, built by HYBE (as a quick aside, Big Hit entertainment, the company behind BTS that we described as “relatively small”, would come to grow into HYBE, which would grow to be larger than the original “big 3”, something which we will discuss extensively in later chapters). Weverse is utilized both by groups under HYBE and by many other groups as a platform to connect with fans. On Weverse, artists have their own “planet”, where they post content, updates, pictures, announcements and other messages.
Membership of a community on Weverse is usually free and fans on the platform can join a specific K-Pop group’s space, interact with other fans and like each other’s messages – similar to how one would on a social media platform. Messages with the most likes will be pushed to the top and might be liked and seen by the idol if one is lucky. The most prominent feature on Weverse are the livestreams, where one or multiple group members go live, sometimes just doing a random talk and other times coming with a more official and scripted program. These streams are not posted on any other platform and are thus exclusive to being a member of the group’s community on Weverse.
While a lot of livestreams and other content posted by idols is freely accessible, some of it exists behind a paywall. These might be more exclusive livestreams, specific content that might be highly requested, videos on demand and, in some instances, virtual concerts. Some of these require “merely” a fanclub membership on Weverse of a handful of dollars per month; others are much more expensive. Of course, there is also exclusive merch that can be sold to community members, some which itself requires fanclub membership to buy. In part, the argument for such paywalled content is that it deters trolls, but it is quite obviously yet another way to further extract money from the most parasocial of fans.
The other giant player in the K-Pop social media platform world is Bubble, which makes the parasocial extraction much more apparent. On Bubble, you can have what seems like a “private” chat with a member of your choice for roughly 5 dollars a month (meaning that, if you want to have a chat with multiple members of a group you like, you pay multiple times). Bubble closely mimics Korean messaging app Kakaotalk, and on the side of the fan it looks identical to a private conversation window one would have there. You can send messages to and receive messages from the idol, ask them questions, like their posts and get your posts liked.
There is no private conversation on the idol’s side, however. The idol sees all messages by all their subscribers in one giant groupchat, which can consist of thousands of subscribers. Though all idol messages on the fan’s side then look like private messages to them, they are in actuality messages to all these subscribers. This naturally means that most fan messages will never get a response. It is largely then a service for yet more exclusive content from the idols, though post frequency heavily depends on the idol, with some posting multiple times a day on their Bubble and others posting at most once a month. However, as idols do respond to fan messages in some cases, the promise of getting a response keeps many fans on the platform.
While Weverse is owned by HYBE, Bubble is owned by a subsidiary of SM Entertainment. What is most interesting about Weverse and Bubble is that they were fully built by two of the largest K-Pop companies. It is thus a sort of parasocial media platform, built by a company that produces idols, and created for those idols. The comparisons to Samsung’s Fordist vertical in-house system and to the in-house trainee pipeline conjured up by the same SM Entertainment which kickstarted K-Pop are obviously not hard to make.
Aside from these platforms, another way to interact with idols online is the fan call. These are much rarer and without assured access. A fan call is basically a private one on one video call with a particular idol and is, aside from the real life fan meet, the most desired type of interaction. For 60 to 90 seconds, one can talk to an idol who will express their deep love and appreciation and, insofar as what you are asking is reasonable, try to fulfill a wish or listen to you rant about how important they are to you. Often idols will do dozens of such fan calls in a day.
A fan call is incredibly rare and is almost always won via lottery. More importantly for our discussion, the fan call shows once again that the geopolitical Koreanness of the system cannot be separated from K-Pop. Lotteries for fan calls happen through retailers licensed by the company itself. These licensed retailers, such as Soundwave and Makeshift, are all located in Korea. This means that fans who are not from Korea must buy from these Korean licensed platforms or arrange, in groups, for a local warehouse to function as a storage location if they want to try their luck with getting these exclusive versions.
Western retailers of course stock the album, but they are not licensed for the fan call lottery. Each of the assigned Korean retailers gets a pool of winners, usually a very small number ranging from 120-250 (divided across the members of the group). As the chances are so tiny, many fans are (in a manner similar to what we saw with the photocards) enticed to buy even more albums, and rich fans often spend thousands of dollars to significantly increase their chances for a fan call.
Of course, this creates somewhat of a problem. A fan might buy 100 albums and still end up with no fan call, having splurged 3000 dollars and now sitting with 100 copies of the same album. While some very rich or extremely dedicated fans might do so regardless, this would cause many fans to not participate in the buying of multiple copies were it not for the fact that said copies come with photocards, which are what motivate many fans to partake in the practice to begin with. As we said earlier, specific retailers get specific limited edition photocards which other retailers do not get, and, as you might have guessed, these retailers are the same Korean retailers who offer the lottery for a potential fan call. Thus the photocard becomes a sort of consolation prize, by way of which the feeling of having spent all that money on albums is seen as less of a loss, as you will at the very least end up with a bunch of exclusive photocards.
Last but not least, we come to the coveted physical fan meet. The fan meet is structurally quite similar to the fan call, but with the obvious difference of it being a physical event. Idols sit at a table and fans who are lucky enough to win a fan meet get 1-2 minutes of time with their idol during which they can, in a manner similar to the fan call, ask their idol a question and the idol will express their gratitude, and quite often compliment them on their appearance, style or on anything else. The fan meet is won in exactly the same way as the fan call, though with the addition that they are both much more rare and that almost all fansigns are located in Korea, though there are some in other countries as well. This means that even if a foreign fan wins a fan sign, they often have to go to Korea to attend, though for many fans this is of course a small price to pay for 1-2 minutes of time with their bias.
It would be too extensive to describe the full extent of the possibilities a fan has to get “close” to their idol, but the picture painted already shows a meticulously crafted closed system from album to fan meet, where every part of the system influences one’s chances in another part, ultimately all culminating in the album, and specifically the album sold by the Korean retailer. Fans get attached to a group and often to a particular member and from that point onward an entire scheme of platforms, events and possibilities is set into motion, with the promise of one day having the chance to physically bond with the person you idolise.
But aside from the part of the system described above, there is another perhaps more important reason why all of this culminates around the sale of the album. As we said, albums are launched alongside comebacks with a specific promotion period. To remain popular on the chart, it is required for the companies that attention is kept on the comeback and the album in general, and thus that the title track charts and that the album keeps up sales. This is why the differing retailers will often hold their lotteries in differing weeks, ensuring a steady flow of success.
Of course, this is an inescapable trap, as every company has to follow suit once one company does this. Fans furthermore care deeply about the charting of their idol groups, where interestingly, even for international fans, the Korean charts such as the Melon chart are often the most important (unless the group is specifically aimed at another market (such as the Japanese or Chinese markets), but such groups often have fewer fans outside their target market). This is because charting on the Korean charts is intimately tied to various award shows where idols can win prizes.
This itself is already a reason for many fans to continue to both buy the albums and stream the music (though international fans cannot stream on Korean platforms), as these award shows themselves are a badge of honor for fans and are heavily wielded in so called “fan wars”. For the entertainment companies, of course, this is yet more attention. More prizes in Korea means more Korean companies wanting to invest in the entertainment company and in their specific idols and more album sales of course equals more money.
While such an extraction system had already been at the center of K-Pop since the early days of the idol system, it is with the third iteration of Hallyu that it is taken to new heights. Where Hallyu 2.0 is dominated by the use of social media platforms, most analysts define Hallyu 3.0 by global strategies of expansion after international dominance. And while this is certainly true, this global expansion from Korea (and to Korea, as Kim describes) is itself made possible by K-Pop creating its own social media platforms, such as Weverse and Bubble, further intensifying the parasocial element. What seems to really define Hallyu 3.0 is a Koreanness taking over the world through the parasocial promise of experiencing something presented as otherworldly in human form. As we will come to see in following chapters, this parasociality itself feeds back into the K-wave as a whole, as fans begin to want to eat the same food, watch the same shows and consume the same content as their favorite idols.
While we had a detailed discussion of how the companies treat the idols as technology or as products in chapter 1, the analysis here provides us with the understanding that the fans themselves are equally altered. The anthropotechnical element of the idol cannot be seen as separate from the onlooker. The fans are thus not treated in that dissimilar a way, providing their time and resources their bodies. The anthropotechnical training is, in fact, almost entirely for this goal alone: so that it can call, like the statue of Apollo, and put the onlooker into motion.
However, the motion is one not of becoming free, but of becoming shackled to the idol, mindlessly following them while spending large parts of their day on social media marketing their biases and defending them from others’ fans. The humanization of the digital image and the archetype is precisely towards those inhuman ends. The extraction scheme is only possible if, behind all the digital shenanigans, after having spent thousands of dollars and days of your time, you get at least the hope for a chance to meet the human behind the product.
Like a zombie ant-fungus, the K-Pop system and the idol function like a parasite that infects the fans, zombifying them and extracting their resources using their admiration of the idol. As we will see many times over in the rest of this work, the onlooker is not spared what the idol manages to avoid in their paradoxical humanization, the horror described in Fisher’s cybernetic realism. Their interior is hollowed out to make room for the idol. The fan is a host for the system’s growth and spread. They are little more than fuel, lured in by the promise of affection in a digital world, while the digital ecosystems themselves allow fans to further spread the spores to future hosts.
Every action the fan takes within the system pulls them in deeper. Rilke’s statue then turns gothic. Changing your life means making it your life’s mission to experience closeness to the idol, for which the fan would move mountains in their devotion of this human-technology hybrid, at once human archetype and internet. And the most prestigious paths all lead to the place where the system emanates from and returns to. In their quest, the fan-turned-zombie must take the pilgrimage to Korea to seek out the hyperhuman who has been calling out to them from behind the screen.
The sacredness of parasociality and transgression
The platforms described above are meant to create a quasi-sacral environment that traps the fan so that they devote their attention, their capital and their lives to the idol. In this sense it is the creation of a space that fans encounter as something separate from the profane, as something beyond the world, with the lure being that the idol does not remain image but promises the real event. This breaking of the hyperreal that was described by Kyung-Hyun Kim is exactly what ultimately sacralizes the idol.
The image coming alive, especially in its digital form, allows for a strange moment where the image itself seems to point to something that is still real, where the realness is itself its main function. Walter Benjamin argues that in an age of technological reproduction, the work of art moves from possessing cultic value to possessing display value. Cultic value is associated with a special quality that is inherent in the original art work itself, giving it its aura. It is often tied to ritual and to something sacred, something that only a few can possess. Cultic value is then inherently inseparable from the original and any copy would be seen as insufficient.
Benjamin makes the argument that in the age of mechanical reproduction, cultic value begins to be overtaken by display value. Display value is what is created by the technological reproduction of the art-object, because it is fundamentally designed to be displayed, to be seen by as many people as possible. Its value is established not in some original, but rather in its circulation and accessibility. Where the cultic work of art retains a connection to a ritual origin and a type of authenticity through its physical and historical uniqueness, this aura is destroyed by the reproduction of art and thus of its special status, its sacred mystery.
Benjamin argues that the best example of this is photography, where the photographer themselves can draw out certain elements from the artwork that are not there in the original. These new elements, combined with its mass circulation, is what gives the artwork its display value and what liberates it from cultic value. Furthermore, the best example of photography itself for Benjamin was film, with its ability to bombard the viewer with a rapid display of images in a row, where no single image has the possibility to maintain the reverence that one has for the cultic work of art.
In early photography, Benjamin argued that the last stand of cultic value was the human face itself, as it melancholically reminded us of those that we loved and those that had passed away. But with the onset of new forms of photography and film, even this was slowly disappearing. Of course, if film in the late 30s bombarded the viewer with rapid images, this has exploded in our contemporary age. The internet and our social media algorithms are nothing if not a constant stream of images fed to us where even the human face points to nothing cultic or reverential anymore.
It might be for this reason that Barthes saw the face of Garbo as a kind of last stand, that idealized face before the full shift away from the ideal to the event. And yet if we understand the analysis of K-Pop’s platform economy, then the digital image of the idol, like Kim says, is nothing if not tied to the original copy. Simultaneously, it proliferates, but through that proliferation, the original copy is only increased in sacredness among the fans. The objects that we have described, from the photocards to the personal fan calls, are all ritualistic, because all of them point to that moment of meeting, to the original. They are only valuable insofar as they remind one of the original.
And it is precisely that meeting that is only for the selected few, as the cultic works of art that Benjamin described. The human face persists within the idol because it points to the real meeting and to a humanization of the digital image. It retains a genuineness and an authenticity that only cultic objects have. Benjamin argues that “the one-of-a-kind value of the genuine work of art had its underpinnings in the ritual in which it had its original, initial value.” For the idol, that original ritual is the anthropotechnical process. And yet, simultaneously, the idol’s image clearly is mass produced and is everywhere. Thus, through the fan community and its promise of a meeting with the idol, the idol seems to bridge Benjamin’s cultic and display value distinction, maintaining both the sacredness of the cultic work of art and the accessibility of the displayed work of art, mirroring our Garbo-Monroe axis.
It is this that makes the fan community and the ecosystem space sacred, as the cultic value that escapes the profane remains. As mentioned in the last chapter, Roger Caillois separates the profane from the sacred and argues that the latter remains in a separate space that nonetheless breaks into the mundanity of the day-to-day world and alters it. In a society that allows the profane to dominate, the idol then breaks this profanity by sacralizing it - that is, sacralizing the internet itself, which has become our mundane, day-to-day life. The fact that its sacred space are platforms on the internet allows for that sacred to remain accessible while maintaining its sacrality by being more than mere digital image.
The parasitization of the fan is then in many ways a hollowing out happening through the pull of this sacred. The fan hollows themselves out and participates in the rituals of the ecosystem that, in typical sacral fashion, remain illegible outside of the system so as to draw near to the idol and so as to be filled up by the sacred in parallel to Fisher’s Cybernetic Realism. As the sacralization is deliberately engineered by the system but, simultaneously, taken as real by the fan, it demands what the sacred spaces of old also demanded – that is, it demands purity of the sacralized object, as this is what drives fans to hollow themselves out in order to be controlled by the idol. It is for this reason then that the K-Pop entertainment companies are so adamant about crafting the perfect and pure idol, as the fans demand nothing less of the entertainers. By becoming the pure archetype which is nonetheless reachable, it offers both sides of the experience, an almost liturgical closeness.
This liturgical element is perhaps most visible during the K-Pop concert in Korea, which differs starkly from Western concerts. For their big comebacks, K-Pop groups will often include a “fanchant” guide, provided with instructions in a video made by the group themselves, in which they demonstrate the specific fanchant for the particular song. A fanchant basically consists of specific moments in a song where the fans shout specific parts of the song or other words related to the song or to the group, often including the names of the individual members, the group name and the name of the fandom.
This leads to K-Pop concerts being somewhat surreal. In Western concerts (including K-Pop concerts performed in the West) the tendency is to sing along wildly and loudly, the emphasis of the act of singing along to your favorite song being on the fan’s own participation in the ritual. But the fanchant is completely different. These are not conjured up by fans but prescribed by the company, often in videos where the members of a particular group will demonstrate how and when fans should call out specific phrases in a manner not too dissimilar to how in many sacred traditions wise men and saints have taught laymen how and when to engage in acts of devotion.
When timed perfectly by a large enough number of fans, the sound of the fanchant will create a certain call-and-response effect which adds to the song, not too dissimilar from a congregation answering to a priest. Outside of the specific prescribed moments to chant, the rest of the concert is listened to in relative silence. The group and the idols thus maintain the focus, with the fans’ participation being about responding when called rather than the free expression of Western contexts. The fanchant is then yet another example of the idol’s liturgical juxtaposition of being near while retaining distance.
Yet, precisely because the idol equally maintains this Garboesque purity alongside its accessibility, it equally creates taboos. For Caillois, the sacred is always constituted by the pure and the impure, the latter being defined by the taboo, as that which is not to be breached. The taboo is not a part of the profane but rather deeply intertwined with the purity of the sacred as it is that which threatens to bring disorder to the sacred world. Within the idol world, the taboos exist on both the fan and the idol side. For the idol, the taboos are relatively clear; these are the dating bans, the need to appear perfect, to always be as kind and as pleasant as one can be and to avoid scandals that could upset fans.
However, as we shall see, taboos exist equally for the fans. As Caillois mentions, in ordinary life the sacred is placed outside common usage, protected by restrictions designed to prevent any attack upon the order of the universe, any risk of upsetting it or introducing any source of disturbance in it. Quoting Caillois, “what is shown to be sacred for the outsider is what is not allowed to be scoffed at”, and in this sense within a sacred space, violence is never too far away and such disturbances can become a reason for a violent response. In the fan system, when fans engage in online feuds, they are essentially protecting the sacred space that they have created with their group and/or their idol of choice.
But this violence can equally be aimed at the idol themselves by those devoted fans. Morin mentions that “the star is like a patron saint to whom the faithful dedicate themselves, but who must also to a certain degree dedicate himself to the faithful.” The faithful wants to possess the idol and ultimately devour them, demanding a reciprocity from the idol where the idol does not attempt to break the taboos that could either make them appear less pure, less than that idealized archetype, or less accessible to them (i.e. breaking the spell of sacred parasociality).
Pierre Klossowski offers us an insight into why this is, one that simultaneously explains how violence can come to be aimed at the idol and what the role of the system is in this relationship. In his work Living Currency, he provides a radical understanding of economics. Klossowski argues that produced goods are ultimately based upon phantasms: deep and often irrational personal desires. These phantasms, because they are deeply rooted, are always imperfectly represented by simulacra. For Klossowski, economic norms are the expression and representation of these desires.
In the pre-modern age, such goods as representations were embedded within a particular custom. Thus, what a simulacrum meant and represented was always also tied up with such a custom; you enjoyed the good according to whatever the custom dictated. However, as cultural goods are fixed and static, once the production process became decoupled from custom and turned into the hyper-efficient modern production machine, we started experimenting outside the bounds of culture and tradition so that every good could be assigned a particular price and phantasms could be steered and played into to a higher degree.
Through this, we start to engage in a search to see which objects can most efficiently trigger deeply rooted to generate profit. Thus in the modern age we have built an elaborate and efficient industrial system that attempts to extract value from such desires by manufacturing simulacra of those desires and selling them to us. Our fantasies then turn into industry and this industry, in order to extract a profit from us, creates a laboratory of waste through experimentation, where it continuously aims to find the best way to turn our phantasms into simulacra and to sell them back to us.
As the produced desires are always externalized and can never fully satisfy us, our participating in this system just leads to our wanting even more and further strengthening it. We then become slaves to the system, because it represses us and guides us in our desires, forcing us to keep participating. By keeping our deepest desires commodified and locked behind a price tag, it ensures that the monstrous wheel of mass production and consumption keeps turning forever.
In such a world, money becomes a translator between our deep internal, irrational and often monstrous fantasies and allows them to communicate with the rational world, the world of institutions and of laws. But as our desires need to mean something for them to fulfill us, Klossowski argues that money derives its ultimate value from privation. It derives its value not from the object itself, but rather from the difference between having access to the object and others not having access to the object. It thus derives its value from scarcity and with that from the suffering of those who do not have it.
From this, Klossowski draws a radical argument. In a capitalist economy we are already always buying humans, as we are always already buying the time, the bodies and the effort of other humans. Money acts as a translator that hides that this is what is happening. If what we really buy is other humans and if, simultaneously, the value that arises from money is the gap between those that have and those that don’t have, then what we are really buying is some kind of emotional response in the other that does not have. Capitalism then produces our inner fantasies, our deepest irrational emotions to be that of the Sadean pervert, our raw desires being turned into simulacra which ultimately represent the buying of humans.
Klossowski gives the example of the entertainment industry with its scandals to show that we are already being steered by exactly those emotions. The stars of the industry are mass produced precisely to harvest human emotions and play into their deepest fantasies. With this, the artist is an industrial slave. However, crucially, the industrial slave is not yet the full Sadean vision. As she is accessible to everyone, the entertainment star becomes trivialized. She is a simulation of value, there is no depth to it.
In Klossowski’s full vision of the future, we move from the industrial slave to a living currency. The industrial slave tries to maintain a separation between their job and their soul – that is to say, they are not identical to what they are paid but retain a separate identity outside of their job – and precisely because of that they are cheap as they can be turned to a mere image separate from the human. With living currency, on the other hand, the body and the price tag collapse into a single unit. The body becomes the commodity, they become the object, and with that they become valuable.
If we return to the idol, the uncanny parallel with the idol as going beyond the industrial slave is easily made. Because the idol is literally a product of technology, simultaneously the idealized human face of Garbo, the individuality of Hepburn and the accessibility of Monroe, the distinction collapses. Here, the idol retaining its humanity is a positive precisely because its humanity is necessary to experience that sensation. It needs to be an object that still has the human behind it, the simulacrum is no longer image, but rather is alive and thus a singular body, that is, the idealized face of Garbo becomes as accessible as the star of the Post Monroe era.
This move towards privation in a world of mass production, where even the billionaire is increasingly no longer being able to distinguish themselves just by having money, is what creates the secular sacred of Caillois. Indeed, in an analysis of Hollywood, Caillois lamented that the proliferation of the image was causing the profane to proliferate and that as cinema proliferated beyond the American borders, so too did the profane. Simultaneously, Caillois maintained that there was a possibility in cinema to become a new expression of the sacred.
Writing in 1951, he wondered whether from Hollywood a new sacred would come to exist “from hitherto profane things”. Writing on the piece, Gary Genosko points to Morin’s work on the stars as being the fulfillment of that promise, as Morin pointed out that “a new religion was being established” in the cinemas of the villages and the cities. But of course we have argued, through Morin’s analysis, that the later stars from the Monroe period onward lost part of what made this possible.
Instead, we argue that the idol is the figure who combine both and who, by becoming living currency insidiously becomes the fulfillment of Caillois’ search. The collapse of the distinction between Garbo, Hepburn and Monroe upon a singular human body is, as we saw in Kyung Hyun Kim’s explanation, no longer merely image but rather offers the possibility of image coming alive in a digital age dominated by the image. The idol is then the exemplar of living currency and is its most perfect form as a divine archetype that can be turned into an object to buy.
The K-Pop ecosystem and privatized platforms like Bubble are where Klossowski’s living currency becomes most apparent. In Bubble, the private environment allows for private experience, even if that experience is simultaneously mass-produced. The photocard economy equally ties the collapse of the object into living currency. As living currency has no image outside of themselves, the images displayed are themselves a way to trade the objects that they represent, and the buying of the albums a way to get access to the actual object. It is a reminder that such an object exists and that one can buy access to it if one only pays enough.
Simultaneously, as living currency has no image beyond the self, the image is never fake, because it points at the real meeting. It does not exist as something separate, but rather as a reminder of the real object. Those objects are, furthermore, never equal to fans, as they want a particular photocard of their particular bias, one that reminds them most of the endpoint. Here we see Klossowski’s living currency further confirm the collapse between cult-value and exhibition value, where the photocard itself is mass produced and yet, because the idol is living currency, always points at cultic value, retaining its status as a sacred object downstream from the original that could one day become accessible.
One of the most prominent examples of the photocard being closely tied to the collapse of the image is the girl group TripleS. TripleS is one of the largest K-Pop groups to ever exist, consisting of 24 members. These 24 members are themselves regularly divided across a variety of subunits, where a specific number of the 24 will become part of a separate unit under the TripleS name and release a number of albums. Part of the appeal of TripleS is how these subunits are formed.
What is revolutionary about TripleS is that fans can vote on the formation of these subunits, as well as on other events such as choosing title tracks, concepts and styling. This voting happens on the Cosmo:the gate app, where specific voting events take place to decide a variety of matters relating to the group as a whole, subunits and specific members. The app being named “the gate” mirrors both the description of the company, which portrays cosmo as its own universe that the app is a portal to, and our sacred space. But in this sacred space, the sacred and desired object can be used to barter, directly influencing the human idols which are represented in this space.
To partake in this voting system one must collect “COMO” and spend it in the Cosmo app. COMO is a digital token tied to the collection of physical photocards and NFTs of TripleS members. In other words, collecting enough photocards allows you to directly affect the subunit formation and the styling of your favorite idol. Furthermore, one can vote on member participation in specific variety shows, leader positions within a specific subunit, character names and more. The more COMO you put in, the more weight your vote has – as such, collecting these photocards becomes a way to dictate the idol’s career trajectory. Fans furthermore can trade these photocards amongst one another, with perks being unlocked if you collect all photocards within a particular selection of one particular member. TripleS and the Cosmo system is perhaps the best example of Klossowski’s living currency and the collapse of the difference between image and subject onto the body turned object. Fittingly to the point of remarkable coincidence, within this system, the collective name for these photocards and NFTs with which you can influence an idol’s career is “Objekts”…
Sasaengs and violence
The K-Pop trainee lets their body be turned into pure currency for the system, the engineering that perfects them ultimately being the creation of a technological asset as we have seen. But we have seen equally that the fan empties their interiority and lets it fill up with the idol as the product of something that enamors them, that calls upon them as that object of devotion that is willing to step down into the parasocial space where they can meet; for the image of the digital to become real and for the platonic ideal of humanity to meet them where they are. The fan then pays in both their money and their own hollowing out; that is the trade they make for privatized access to the idol as living currency.
With this we can finally return to the question of taboo. As the fan steps from the profane space into the sacred space of the idol and pays with the hollowing out of their own body to worship the sacred, what they demand back as part of the trade is the privation of the idol and the totality of image and human. The taboo of the idol that we already partially named then becomes clearer, as the dating bans, the hyperproduced anthropotechnical body and the inaccessibility of the platonic ideal all combine to create the privation that humans crave according to Klossowski. The fan demands the privation in return for their devotion.
The fan’s own taboos are as of yet unnamed. But their taboo within this system is simply not to rebel against their object of devotion. However, as we noted, Caillois says that taboos always need a form of impurity, a form of transgression. The violence against the idol that we named through Morin, the need to devour it, shows itself in such a form of transgression through what is called the sasaeng. Sasaengs are fans who are incredibly obsessed with idols; they are thus the ones who pay the most, money wise, by buying the idol objects often worth thousands of dollars, living a life so totally in service of the idol that the boundary between a personal self and a self devoted to the idol completely disappears.
But with this, they also demand the most in return. In mild cases, sasaengs operate in a way that shows they see themselves as deserving of the time of the idol and of the role of keeping them to their “side” of the living currency deal. They will hassle and touch idols in public, find out which planes they are flying on and book seats close to them, and publicly comment on idols if they gain a kilogram or two. In more severe cases, sasaengs have chased idols to the point of car accidents, kidnapped them and, in several cases, attempted to poison them. The sasaeng as the devotee who gives everything likewise demands everything and will transgress to the point of, in the words of Morin, demanding to devour their object of devotion.
While sasaengs are an incredibly tiny sect of the fandom, there is another, broader form of transgression which centers around the scandal. Elli Schmidt makes the argument that the deliberately engineered nature of the K-Pop idols as being idealized necessitates that they feed into the illusions of the fan. In our terms here, the idol needs to keep up the idealized-but-accessible image to maintain the secular sacred sphere created around them. Schmidt points out that the fan’s love for an idol can easily turn into intense hatred when the idol is perceived to have broken one of the taboos.
She provides the example of aespa’s Karina, who, in 2024, was rumored to be dating. Within weeks, hordes of angry fans demanded the end of the relationship, with Karina breaking it off and providing a public apology. While Schmidt’s essay focuses on the argument that the problem is with the deliberately engineered idealized nature of the idol and the fans that, based upon this, overstate qualities and see idols as larger than life, in our view here, this is exactly what the idol system is.
The transgression against idols perceived to be breaking a taboo can take on forms as intense, or worse, than those of the sasaeng. In this sense, the outbursts mirror to a relatively close degree the transgression that Caillois describes through the festival. During the festival, established rules are temporarily suspended to allow for orgiastic acts and the breaking of taboos. As Caillois sees the sacred as consisting of the combination between the pure and the impure, this taboo breaking, far from being an act beyond the sacred, is precisely what maintains the order.
While the festival is often a planned, yearly activity of release, Schmidt shows us that moments of transgression against idols often happen with the excuse that idols have broken their “side of the deal”, that is, they have transgressed against the taboos themselves and with that are de-objectifying themselves. But of course, while idols are engineered to be perfect, there will always remain those human moments that cannot be taken away.
However, similar to Caillois’ festival, the established rules for the fan (respecting the idol, providing loyalty and defending them from others) are then abolished during such perceived acts by fans and the rules are deliberately broken, with the fans engaging in the taboo act of directly committing violence against the idol. Thus when an idol is perceived to have let their appearance go or to have engaged in dating, the most loyal section of fans can turn on the idol and attempt to make their lives a living hell.
However, the festival of Caillois still operates differently in the sense that the festival ends through the scapegoat. The scapegoat is charged with the collective sins of the community and either banished or killed. However, in the sacred space that the idol creates and that the fan then steps into, the idol functions as both Garbo and Monroe, both beyond the human and deeply human. When an idol breaks too many taboos, they are then stooping down to the level of the human, refusing to be living currency and refusing to retain their cultic value, breaking the engineered sacred space by showing themselves as all too human.
The violence aimed at the scapegoat in the festival is in the K-Pop fandom then aimed at a particular idol who breaks the bond, and with that the sacred space. As with Caillois’ scapegoat at the end of the festival that is chosen to re-establish order after a period of transgression, the scapegoat in K-Pop is chosen to move beyond the transgression, but also to re-establish the sacred space altogether. The most tragic example of this happened to the late Sulli, of (f)x, who committed suicide after an intense period of bullying.
Having struggled with the harshness of the industry, and having felt that she had been turned into a living product, Sulli explained that in her loneliness she wanted little more than to date and experience love. Likewise, she wanted to be free from all the restrictions and thus started to defy the image that was expected of her. In her last interview before her death, Sulli said: “I couldn’t give voice to my opinions. I didn’t know how to speak up. I didn’t even know if I could at all. When I did speak up about my difficulties, the system wasn’t going to change. Nobody told me ‘make your own choice’, ‘it’s up to you’, ‘what do you think’, ‘how are you these days’. I sound like I’m bad-mouthing K-Pop. You know Nikita? It’s just like that movie. We were basically puppets. Who cares if I’m exhausted?”
Sulli is referring here to Luc Besson’s film and its television adaptation “Nikita La Femme”. In the series, the main protagonist Nikita is a young street kid who gets falsely convicted of murder and is given an ultimatum by her government handlers: either receive the death penalty or become an agent for Section One, a top secret government organization. Section One runs on rigid discipline and clinical evaluation. If a recruit fails or becomes a liability, they are terminated. The organization erases Nikita’s past while Nikita is handled as an object, a disposable weapon. The only source of humanity that Nikita has left in the film is her love relation to her trainer Michael, but this is itself forbidden and gets exploited to her detriment.
The comparison between Nikita and Sulli is almost too apt. The control she describes and the erasure of her identity is something we have described in depth in the previous chapters. When asked how she dealt with this pressure, Sulli mentioned that “The only thing I could control, the only time I felt in control, was when I was giving myself pain. That was my way of being in control. The kind I was capable of. It was tough but it probably kept me going”. Yet Sulli’s pain and her eventual tragic end did not just come from company control. Rather, layered on top of it was the pressure put on her after a dating scandal in 2014.
After this, for a while she rebelled against the industry norms, but the disregarding of norms just led to the intensification of the bullying. Already struggling with depression, she was bullied for years by former fans, anti-fans and online bullies in general, whose anger eventually spread to a broader part of the general public, ultimately resulting in her taking her own life. Once the event was over, the scapegoating of Sulli re-established order, with discourse suddenly centering on the protection of the idol, thus re-establishing a form of sacrality.
We see here then that the transgression against the sacred itself can spread, even beyond the fan community, to Korean society more widely, and that as the transgressive energy spreads, hardcore fans, anti-fans, sasaengs and increasingly the general public on the internet start to participate in the trashing in what might rightfully be called a Confucian-Capitalist display of anger against someone who perceived to have stepped out of line. As we shall see in our next chapter, this spreading of the sacralized culture of K-Pop to the rest of Korean society is ultimately what gives the idol its influence.
The living currency that the idol becomes within the sacred fan space is then one of deep objectification. Yet, in our analysis of the fan-economy, we mentioned that the fan is hollowed out and thus loses their humanity as they make space for their object of devotion. The idol, on the other hand, retains their humanity, but is, precisely because of that, turned into re-humanized technology, an archetype turned real, and with that into living currency. Both the fan and the idol then are ultimately fuel for the growth of the K-Pop system. The fan becomes a parasitized zombie without interior, and the idol gets turned into an object made to be devoured alive.
It is through the concept of living currency that our two threads regarding the idol, the technologically productive thread and the thread of the sacred, come together to combine what has up until now remained disparate. Technological production is what produces the human as a product, but that engineering process keeps a need for something human within it because the remainder of the human is better able to capture the parasociality that the system thrives on.
Where this fuses with the sacred is that the living currency becomes the living embodiment of what should not exist, the face of Garbo that remains accessible. It becomes a capitalist technological product that somehow shows a perfection that is not merely image but that we can meet, that we can connect with and that promises us affection. In a de-sacralized world it becomes a sacred because it promises its love. As we saw Kyung Hyun Kim say, the idol bypasses the hyperreal, because it re-humanizes the image-based production of the digital capitalist world. Through anthropotechnical training, the archetypal human then moves for the first time from image to the real, without losing any of the accessibility that the post-Monroe star offered.
This is what fulfills Caillois’ promise of the sacred object and what makes fans devote their lives to the idol. In a world where our desires are steered by images, and where we have lost the sacred, and are thus slaves steered by the production process, something comes to exist that is not supposed to exist, something which retains its cultic value in spite of its mass circulation. That which comes to exist is the combination of something divine and something accessible. The idol as living currency is paradoxically why they retain their humanness, both because they need to be human to be as attractive as possible and because they participate in the human drive towards excellence.
This is why the fan gives themselves up, to meet something that is not only human but that, by existing within the circuit of capitalism, becomes so human that it should not exist, becoming the fulfillment of the perfection capitalism offered but never provides, the fan being promised to meet this perfection in real life, as a human, at the end of the road. This is then, to go back to chapter 1 the reversal of Fisher’s cybernetic realism, the human that should not exist coming out of the system and engaging in the deeply human practice of self-perfecting. The K-Pop fan economy is the extraction of this secular-sacred experience of the human on both the idol and the fan side. The fan being hollowed out and the idol being produced are part of a grueling system that eats both of them alive, and yet, strangely, something human emerges out of it.
The idol as psychotechnology
Returning to Klossowski, we saw in his analysis that phantasms, or our deep irrational desires, are, in a capitalist world, produced by the system and that the logical and absurd endpoint he envisioned was a system of living currency. Through the K-Pop system, we understand that that absurdity might now be here. However, there is yet another part of Klossowski’s analysis that offers an insight. As we have said, Klossowski argues that in a capitalist world we become slaves to the system because the system produces our desires.
But that system requires efficiency and efficiency requires calculation and quantification. In part, Klossowski’s vision was that the living currency would showcase Capitalism’s true nature, what lies underneath the symbolic nature of money. As it is money that translates us towards the rational and common world, Klossowski’s bet was that by actually establishing a world of living currency, Capitalism could no longer use money as a translating tool to hide the fact that it was trading in human bodies and was akin to a desire-oriented slave market. With this exposed, there would be no reason to be a rational participant in the system of Capital, and with that, all remaining desire-based value would come from this open trade in human bodies and the direct response of the other, their emotion, or their terror – thus making it so that our desires would no longer be co-opted by the system.
But of course, it is not the case that the entire economic system has become living currency. The idol retains a uniqueness. Yet it might be precisely here that opportunity opens up, and it is precisely here that we see again that the idol, in all its horror, seems to offer potential to turn into cure because of its uniqueness as living currency. As capitalism steers our desires and as we come to live in a world of images, we begin to desire what the machine desires of us. In this sense, Klossowski makes the argument that the machine is now the agent, that we are now being steered by the machine and that it is this that his living currency offers an escape from. It is precisely for this reason that we have said in chapter 2 that we hold the position that external opposition is impossible, because these channels of desire override what people want.
But can this only happen when the entire system is living currency? Or is it, once more, precisely the idol’s double nature that provides us with an opportunity? If we are still steered by capital and yet the idol is living currency, then the idol, as we have said, exists within the circuits of capital. If Klossowski says that the industry is able to steer you towards desiring what it produces and if it then produces something that emergently escapes from the exact problem, it is there that we argue opportunity lies.
That is to say that if the system manipulates your phantasms, making it so that you come to desire the thing that the industry produces, but that which it produces is now beyond the system (as living currency), then it is that manipulation itself that offers the opportunity to steer people beyond the system. The idol as the engineered sacred that collapses the distinction between the ideal and the day to day and its ability to zombify people then provide the ultimate opportunity for the immanent reversal we discussed in chapter 2.
Earlier, we saw that the idol hollows out the onlooker’s interior in order to make room for itself. Like a parasite, the idol zombifies the onlooker by mesmerizing them, capturing their attention and steering it towards themselves or, as we have seen, towards Korea in general. Social media platforms and the particular ones built by entertainment companies all exacerbate this. The reason why this functions so well once again has to do with the idol’s status as (cultural) technology.
Returning to Stiegler, one of his ideas, strongly tied up with the pharmakon, is the idea of psychotechnologies. For Stiegler, psychotechnologies are what defines most technologies in an age of algorithmic capitalism. They are defined by their ability to gain control of psychic apparatus and fixate it upon themselves. Such psychotechnologies lead to a lack of attention, as attention is delegated to the psychotechnology itself. Instead, they “short-circuit” the psychic system, leading to a disruption of the ability to think for oneself, to foster connections to the environment, all for the benefit of capturing attention and feeding it back into the technology itself.
Stiegler argues that such psychotechnologies lead to an almost animalistic way of life, stripped down to pure drives of survival, with consciousness increasingly being outsourced to them. For Stiegler, the problem with these digital technologies is that they ultimately lead to the destruction of attention itself and thus to a proletarianization of the subject, destroying their ability to develop their own skills and leading to their “de-individuation”, ultimately preventing them from becoming full fledged separate individuals.
What is most interesting about the idea of psychotechnologies is the way in which they reverse the relation between humans and technology. Where the usual view is that humans are in control of machines, psychotechnologies exist by their nature to steer the subject towards their own growth. They are the contemporary variant of the production system’s steering mechanisms as described by Klossowski. Social media algorithms are a perfect example of this. When we are confronted with material on TikTok or Twitter, that material itself leads to a change in our behavior. We might, for example, come across content that depicts people on the other side of the world in a happy relationship, making us unhappy with our own relationship.
As we start to see more of those videos, the algorithm sends us even more similar content, hooking us to the content and thus getting us more invested into the platform. Simultaneously, the content itself might make us unhappy with our day to day lives, to the point of steering us towards ending the relationship we are in or making another drastic change. Such technologies are of course everywhere nowadays, and despite objections or people who try to make a distinction between “online” and the real world, much of society is now directly downstream from the online world.
Psychotechnologies, then, might best be described as those technologies that steer humans to the point of their being unable to become their own individual. We have, in part, seen this in the description of the K-Pop ecosystem: its hollowing out of the fan leading to the fan’s zombification, living their lives in service of the idol and, with that, of the system itself.
The destruction of the individuation is described by Stiegler as downstream from the way in which psychotechnologies bypass the taming of the id, Freud’s term for the instinctual drive that wants immediate gratification, by the ego. Instead of learning how to control ourselves and become responsible members of a society, psychotechnologies are used by the media complex to play into our immediate “drives” rooted in the id, allowing us to constantly chase hits of dopamine and what feels like fulfillment, ultimately turning us into beasts driven by pure instinct.
Interestingly, despite having the commitments the opposite of Klossowski’s, Stiegler converges upon the same understanding, namely that the system plays into our immediate and pre-rational drives and comes to produce them so as to steer us. For Stiegler, psychotechnologies in this way rupture the connection to an intergenerational process of transindividuation, as they lead us away from the schooling and affection which happens between generations, the transmission of knowledge through care, and as such from becoming responsible citizens in the way communities co-create an environment that can function and transindividuate. Instead, as our id is suppressed or bypassed, we are never socialized in our environment so that we can easily adapt to the logic of the market and the psychotechnological forces.
This psychotechnological logic is strongly mirrored by the idol and the K-Pop industry. As we saw earlier in this chapter, the fan becomes a zombie exactly through its interaction with the idol system and its devotion to the sacred idol. Gooyong Kim argues that although K-Pop fans play an active role in the industry, this role itself is part of the business strategy of maximizing the audience’s affective attachment to the idols, creating the strange duality of the sacred space of the ecosystem and engineering the maximal extraction of the fan.
The entire point of the system is to create moments of connection to keep the fan within it, similar to how the promise of stardom keeps the trainee in. Far from a brief activity or a drive that gets immediately satisfied, the investment of fans in idol subcultures is often intense and lengthy, pushed by that ultimate dream to connect with the idol. As Kim says: “in idol-saturated contemporary Korean popular culture, the K-pop idol resonates with deep affection or emotional meaning.” The fansigns and the fan calls become moments of connection, the photocards tertiary retentions that remind the fan of their connection and, in some extreme cases, even what they are living for.
Of course, one might argue that this is not based on any kind of real affection or connection. It is ultimately engineered. In his work Taking care of Youth, Stiegler provides the example of the sophists by way of Plato, where the sophists offered a short-circuit to young men where instead of focusing on truth, they would teach them sophistry to teach them how to persuade the minds of men. Stiegler calls this a mental deformation, as it relies on the capturing of the minds of men to steer them instead of the slow process of learning and engaging their mind. But interestingly, Stiegler himself argues that psychotechnologies can equally be captured and used.
In his typical pharmacological sense, Stiegler argues that psychotechnologies can be turned into “nootechnologies”. As he believes technology can be both a cure and a poison, he calls for a “noopolitics” which would not merely regulate psychotechnologies but would instead actively manage them in such a way that they turn into a cure. Instead of being for the benefit of the market, these nootechnologies would be for the benefit of the noetic, fostering spiritual growth and autonomous thinking. Ultimately this would lead to the possibility for transindividuation, meaning a collective process of individuation which would foster the co-becoming and co-creation of new worlds.
But what if this is not yet pharmacological enough? As we said in the previous chapter, the problem with Stiegler here is that he believes that this can be managed. For Stiegler the problem with psychotechnologies is that they function according to the logic of the market. His proposal, which is based on schooling, political action and institutional efforts to manage psychotechnologies, assumes that you can oppose this logic. But of course, his own solutions are themselves dependent on the logic of the market, the institution, the school, and political leaders. They all need the global market to even be able to become a viable opposition. But any external management of technology will either need the market itself or will lose out. That is the whole of the problem.
As the idol as living currency comes from within the system, they are themselves a deeply capitalist product (as we have seen repeatedly). Gooyong Kim makes the argument that the idol becomes a hyperreal simulation; by being the human turned into a product, he argues, the idol turns into a curated image that comes to pervade throughout Korean society. Here, Kim’s analysis converges closely upon Stiegler, though steeped in a Baudrillardian frame. He argues that the image of the idol becomes so pervasive throughout society that their image starts to shape society, pointing to the Capitalist and Neo-Liberal companies as using this image to produce Korean society and steer its population in a way that further leads to the growth of these companies.
The entire system we described in this chapter shows the tight circuit between steering and growth on the level of the fan economy. The idol as cultural technology is shaped to play into the public’s deepest desires, creating a deeply devoted fanbase that comes to see them as sacred. By pointing out the idol’s relationship with Korea proper, Kim goes even further and argues that the admiration and devotion that the idol receives changes the social landscape and becomes the new “real”. That new reality and this admiration and devotion make it so that others start to want to become like the idol. This then creates a new batch of trainees that chase that perfection themselves, ultimately feeding the growth of the companies and the system beyond the fan system itself.
Yet while all of this is correct, the thesis of Gooyong Kim that the idol is a product of and the cause of the further spread of the hyperreal is complicated by Kyung-Hyun Kim’s notion that the idol ultimately defies the idea of the hyperreal by centering real life, the meet up and the connection to the fan and by re-anthropomorphizing the internet and the digital world. The idol’s hypercapitalist nature is the Confucian-Capitalism of Korea’s compressed modernity, where this human defiance of the hyperreal (or its re-anthropomorphization) emerges.
Stiegler is then correct to say that all this is for the benefit of the market. But as external resistance is made structurally impossible, the idol’s capacity to re-anthropomorphize the hyperreal makes it so that the opportunity lies precisely within it being a hypercapitalist psychotechnology. Thus the idol as both human and (psycho-)technology already always has the pharmacological potential in itself precisely because it comes from within the depths of hypercapitalism and yet turns the capitalist produced image into reality, going beyond the screen as its status as living currency is not reduced to mere image. Our controversial thesis here is then that the potential of the idol is precisely in the idol’s ability to function as a secular-sacred because of its status as a product. That it succeeds in the hollowing out of the fan-turned-zombie. That is to say that the potential of the idol is in the horror of interiors being hollowed out and its ability to steer the fan and, as per Gooyong Kim, far beyond.
Kim argues that “as idols become pervasive and influential [in Korean society], there is a continuous emergence of new realities that are initiated or motivated by [them].” If we have in this chapter looked at the ecosystem of K-Pop fandom, how it turns sacred and how the idol uses that sacrality to hollow out the fan who becomes little more than a puppet, Kim’s argument then suggests that far from the fan alone, the idol becomes a force that steers Korean society as a whole. It is here that the idol truly provides the potential to become a product for change. As we saw in our discussion of the fandom system, all roads lead to Korea. If the idol is the creation of new realities in Korea, then its hyperstitional qualities allow for the possibility to utilise the idol system as a weapon coming from within hypercapitalism.