Introduction
At the end of chapter 2, we set out to answer two questions: how the idol spreads, and whether the idol’s latent potentiality to become a cure for the spread of something hyperhuman can manifest. We mentioned that the latter question necessitates that we combine our analysis of the spread of the idol with an analysis of how that spread largely manifests as poison, so that, once we have done so, we can analyze whether that poison can be removed and whether any cure remains. In the previous chapter, we took our first steps towards providing an answer to these two questions by looking at the fan economy and the way in which entertainment agencies utilize digital platforms to establish parasocial connections with fans. The engineered sacrality that emerges from this relationship is what we deemed psychotechnological and we saw that it deeply alters the lives of both fan and idol alike.
But in discussing the death of Sulli, we already hinted that the psychotechnological effects of K-Pop go beyond the fan space. Rather, as Gooyong Kim said, the idol comes to change reality in Korea itself. To take a step further in answering our two questions, the next two chapters will provide an insight into how the idol system is deeply integrated into Korean society, the chaebol structure, its digital platforms, its history and its cityscape, analyzing how this entanglement comes to shape the country itself.
This first of these two chapters will focus on the digital world and the digital platforms that have become ubiquitous in Korean society in order to analyze how the dynamics we saw play out in the fan economy exist at a larger scale in Korea’s online world. The first half of this chapter will begin with a discussion of the digital world itself and the dynamics of Korean social media. Subsequently, the second half of this chapter will move to an analysis of how these digital dynamics come to shape physical reality in South Korea.
The platform duopoly
Not too long ago, I was working on a project for which I attempted to discover and archive old Japanese and Korean websites. Although I managed to get a smattering of interesting results, after searching for a while I came up mostly empty handed. So I decided to ask a friend who I knew as being pretty familiar with Japanese and Korean media in the hopes that he could perhaps use his media archeology skills to discover pieces of internet history that I was unable to find. Lucky for me, he returned with a pretty substantial list, with most of his findings being unfamiliar to me.
Looking at his results, there were a few things that stood out to me. The Japanese compilation of websites, mostly from the late 90s and early to mid 2000s, mainly consisted of archives of lost Geocities pages, strange self-made websites, avant-garde venues and old flash games. The Korean compilation was different. Here the results seemed much less obscure or, perhaps it is better to say that while the web pages might have been obscure, the websites were manifestly not. A large number of the results were from websites such as Naver, Namuwiki, YouTube, Arca, DCinside and Bilibili.
Now, none of this was too surprising (if slightly disappointing for the task at hand). While his list was far more impressive than my own, his comments on the search expressed what I had discovered in my own attempts: “[It] seems like [the] Japanese underground web was more site-based whereas Korea’s has always been more platform based. Thousands of strange independent html sites vs galleries/blogs/forums/cafes like Tistory and Naver. But a lot of the original late 90s networks (cyworld, egloos) shut down and weren’t properly archived because their database structures were so locked behind login walls that crawlers couldn’t scrape them”. The convergence of our two experiences provided me with the insight that if this chapter wants to grasp the structure and the dynamics of the contemporary Korean internet, any such grasping starts with understanding the platforms which have dominated the Korean internet for such a long time. In turn, to understand the platforms is to understand the companies that form the backbone of Korea’s cyberspace.
While those only marginally familiar with the Korean internet might think that this means we will start off this chapter by discussing the chaebols; interestingly, for all their dominance in Korean society, the chaebols have largely remained focussed on hardware, steel and physical goods. Instead, Korea’s digital world would largely be shaped by two new companies, which would create the Korea-native local digital platforms that the platforms of the fan economy would base their user interface on. These two companies were Naver and Kakao Corporation, both of which we briefly mentioned when discussing the Korean cyberstack in chapter 1. Naver and Kakao would in time come to form a duopoly that dominated Korean cyberspace.
Both Naver and Kakao started out as small companies. In 1997, around the time of the IMF crisis, Naver came about as a project created by two Samsung employees who noted that global search engines like Yahoo presented a problem for local use in their inability to handle Korean queries very well. They decided to create a search engine that was completely local and fine-tuned to Korean websites, news and the intricacies of Hangul. In 1999 Naver split from Samsung and became its own company after the first two years proved to be a massive success.
Since those early days, the company has expanded into a massive ecosystem. The search engine is still the top product of the company, but like Google, Naver offers its own map service, its own payment system, its own smart store and has experimented with the integration of its own AI model into its search engine and temporarily released its own model - Hyperclova X - which was likewise fully aimed at the Korean market. Naver is then, for good reason, often seen as Korea’s Google. However, a crucial difference between Google and Naver is in the way the Naver ecosystem works.
A few minutes of searching on Naver, whether in Korean or in any other language, quickly leads to an uncanny experience because of the deeply integrated ecosystem that the company has created. Whatever your search string, you will find that close to half of all the search results lead to other Naver websites. In particular, Naver seems to have a large stake in social websites, making it so that almost all searches on the platform result in a myriad of results from platforms such as Naver blogs, Naver Café (a forum, somewhat similar to Reddit), Naver shopping, Naver knowledge iN (functioning as the Korean version of Quora) and so on.
This proliferation of Naver content is largely because its algorithm selects for reliability, and always deems the company’s own content the most reliable. Furthermore, Naver blocks rival search engines from indexing the user-generated content hosted on its platforms, creating a situation where much of the localized Korean web is hosted by Naver and only accessible through its self-promoting ecosystem. While there are certainly Korean social websites that have little to do with Naver, one could spend days navigating the Korean internet without ever leaving the Naver ecosystem.
Interestingly, the popularity of Naver’s social websites has been attributed in part to Koreans’ preference for organic community-led discussions over purely government or company led algorithmic websites. As we shall see in this chapter, this has the ability to become deeply toxic and is furthermore strongly intertwined with the conglomerate-dominated landscape. For now, we can suffice with the understanding that the above has led to Naver having created a massive walled garden, hosting a large share of Korean web content and prioritizing its own website within its algorithm, minimizing the need for an internet experience outside of its ecosystem.
The comparison to the K-Pop fan economy platforms and their ability to keep fans inside the walls of the ecosystem is easily made. Indeed, Naver itself has spread K-Pop content through its algorithm and has many strategic partnerships with the industry’s entertainment companies. Outside of having significant stakes in YG Naver owned the platform VLIVE, which used to be the prime livestreaming platform for idols. In 2021, Naver acquired a 49% stake in Weverse, the livestreaming platform owned by HYBE that was discussed in the last chapter, and merged VLIVE into it.
If Naver already has a large stake in K-Pop, this is twice as much the case for Kakao Corporation. Starting in 2010 with the founding of Kakaotalk, the Korean equivalent to Whatsapp, Line (interestingly owned by Naver, but which never caught on in the country) and similar such services, Kakao would come to be Korea’s second digital conglomerate. Focussed on entertainment and lifestyle content, the company grew far beyond its messaging service beginnings, offering a variety of services, including a prominent digital banking service, an Uber like taxi service, gaming platforms, platform for webtoons and the music streaming service Melon.
Melon functions relatively similar to Spotify but is entirely aimed at the Korean market, requiring a Korean mobile number for signup. We briefly mentioned Melon in the previous chapter as an important platform for fans of K-Pop when it comes to the charting of their favorite idol groups. This is because the Melon Daily/Top 100 Chart serves as the cultural barometer for what the general public in Korea is listening to, and is thus a way for both national and international fans to estimate the popularity of their favorite groups in Korea.
While Melon has been overtaken by YouTube Music in streaming numbers, it retains an important cultural function because charting well on Melon is a prerequisite for winning a number of K-Pop award shows, such as Inkigayo or Music Bank and, most importantly, the prestigious Melon Music Awards – which is itself both a measuring stick for success and a way to become more successful for new idol groups – with the winning of a daesang (a grand prize) at the MMA being seen as a way to estimate who the stand out groups of a generation are.
Bohyeong Kim notes that Kakao has followed the chaebol model as its strategy, using aggressive mergers and acquisition methods to wipe out competitors and startups and eventually growing to 175 subsidiaries by 2023. She notes that in essence, Kakao is a full fledged neo-chaebol and, in the South Korean stock market, it has passed some of the most prominent chaebols such as Hyundai and LG in value. She goes on to note that both Kakao and Naver distinguish themselves from Western conglomerate platforms (which typically do not produce content) by way of this aggressive strategy, where they do not merely advertise but produce and own media content as a core business strategy to keep consumers within their ecosystem.
The most important detail for this work is that Kakao has two K-Pop giants as subsidiaries, one of them being Starship Entertainment, which over the past half decade has grown into a large company of its own after the growth of Starship Entertainment group IVE, and is now the largest K-Pop company in the country aside from the big 3 and HYBE. More interestingly still, in 2023 Kakao acquired roughly 40% of the shares to SM entertainment, the first K-Pop company founded by Lee Soo-Man, placing the company under Kakao’s corporate umbrella.
From 2023 onward, Kakao’s content revenue outgrew its advertising revenue. Some fans have made the argument that Kakao’s empire and its connection to Melon has led to them unfairly advantaging their artists on these platforms, getting them to dominate the charts and to win awards by manipulating streams. While this specific claim lacks evidential support, Kakao’s business practices have been scrutinized in similar fashion to the original chaebols, with the takeover of SM Entertainment itself leading to a large legal battle with HYBE and recent accusations of the companyextracting a larger percentage in distribution fees from rival music agencies than from its own affiliate labels.
Dal Yong Jin notes that Kakao and Naver have deeply integrated themselves into the K-Wave, acting as primary players in producing and capitalizing popular culture, including webtoons, genre fiction and, of course, K-Pop. The platforms created by the duopoly of Kakao and Naver form the digital backbone for K-Pop and they often operate in remarkably similar ways. It is through the algorithms and the platforms of these companies and the earlier established Western platforms that managed to break through to the country (most notably YouTube) that the idol spreads. Analyzing this spread will allow us to see the first glimpse of the K-Wave functioning hyperstitionally as it comes to influence the local landscape and dynamics through this spread, as we shall find out through the rest of this chapter.
Although the manipulation of Melon’s charts by Kakao has never been proven, and legal battles have been both won and lost by both companies, what at the very least has a large amount of evidence when it comes to both Kakao and Naver is the way in which these companies, their domination, their walled garden strategies and especially their algorithms have shaped and are actively shaping the cultural landscape. Functioning as the neo-chaebol of the digital landscape, this has had both positive and negative effects. Crucially, the platforms have, for a long time, functioned as a way to decrease the influence of Western discourse which so nefariously spreads throughout the world on social media, and instead have created a local sphere of Korean discourse in its stead, one that remains, till this day, somewhat distinct from the Western discourse which the internet has managed to spread throughout much of the rest of the developed world. And yet with Korean discourse come Korean problems.
Digital platforms and beauty standards
The empirical literature on the dominance of the digital duopoly is rich to the point that we will have to refrain from mentioning it all. However, one interesting insight comes from Kim Kyung-Pil, who mentions that “Naver and Kakao have become the de facto rulers of the online world. Most Koreans engaging in online activities during this period used these portals. It has become difficult to consider online activities without Naver and Kakao, including relationships, business, consumption, leisure, and cultural life. They have obtained the power to control the media market and change the cultural products.” In similar fashion, Siho Nam argues that Kakaotalk has come to function as Korea’s public sphere and that Kakao’s proprietary platforms are discursively appropriated by both the company itself and the Korean government in ways that embed innovation and competitiveness as cultural values.
With multiple other articles providing similar insights, what seems to be the case is that Naver and Kakao have become two companies that shape the day to day life of Koreans and their culture. Here, Naver’s walled garden structure and Kakao’s vertical integration are remarkably well designed to create this effect. Were we to look at Kakao, a story can go from Kakao Page to a Kakao-produced Netflix series without ever leaving the ecosystem. Naver similarly operates a “one-source multi-use” model. Both companies then play a key role in dictating Korea’s day-to-day culture by funneling things through their specific platforms. As these platforms increasingly shift their attention to investing in or directly acquiring entertainment companies, they equally begin to funnel attention towards the specific entertainers that they are invested in.
If the entertainment companies create platforms to play into, feed and steer the desires of fans, the original template stems from the duopoly and, crucially, many of the platforms have since become part of the ecosystem of the duopoly. The vertical and integrated nature of the digital world of Korea allows the centralized fan platforms to function as a massive center for data collection which then feeds into and spreads to the other platforms owned by the duopoly. As the “rulers of the online world” they become central to what Koreans see and access, which in turn embeds and shapes the cultural values of the broader population as per Siho Nam.
While Nam focusses on the way in which this leads to values of innovation and competitiveness, American Journalist Elise Hu analyzes Korea’s digital world and its connection to the obsession with beauty in Korea. Spending multiple years in the country, she argues that while Korean beauty culture is partially rooted in the Confucian norm to make oneself beautiful as a way to be presentable to others, in contemporary Korean society what beautiful means gets decided by a combination between the K-beauty industry and the culture surrounding it, which have come to define beautiful not as presentable but rather as perfection.
The culture itself is especially prevalent online, which is where K-beauty standards and the industry surrounding it spreads, leading to a situation where the amount of perfection socially required becomes digitally determined. The onset of social media and new technologies leads to what Hu calls the “technological gaze”, a concept that denotes the way in which in Korean standards are not merely enforced socially but also increasingly through comparison with images one sees online, where a person will continuously evaluate their own worth based on how closely they align to digital ideals. While this does not seem to be too far removed from how things function in the West, a crucial difference pointed out by Hu is that the standard for this perfection is ultimately set by idols, something we will soon discover makes all the difference.
Korea’s digital giants coming to dominate in the rapid uptake of the internet post 1997 and their walled garden model would further perpetuate the fast spread of desires created by Capitalism. The beauty industry and the digital platforms work hand in hand to produce the technological gaze. Furthermore, as we have seen, the digital giants themselves actively produce such desires through the production of media and, most importantly, are deeply intertwined with the entertainment companies, with some of the important ones having become active subsidiaries. This then leads to an intensely fast spread of idol culture throughout these digital circuits. As the image of the idol spreads and is continuously perpetuated, they start to feed the technological gaze. Their face, continuously shown through the algorithm, starts to shape society by showing what is possible, and the possible in turn becomes desires which, through the blend of Confucian values and digital-era Capitalism, become a new norm.
In the previous chapter, we saw Gooyong Kim make the argument that idols create new realities in the country. In the same work, he argues that the K-Pop industry promotes a specific understanding of desirability through the proliferation of signs and images. He says that “[Idols] simultaneously become an object and a subject of simulation for the split personality, which can ‘train the broadest mass of people in order to create a pattern of undreamed-of dimensions’ in conformative social behaviors”. By becoming living currency, that is by becoming object as body while retaining their subjectivity, the idol can train those that interact with them simply by existing on their screens, with Kim mentioning that because idols are engineered to be broad public celebrities they become the face of daily commerce and spread throughout the digital world.
Kim argues that this is a form of governmentality, the shaping of a neoliberal subject as a continuation of that practice that stemmed from the Park era. However, in their research on digital dramas and K-Pop survival shows, Hye Kyung Lee and Xiyu Zhang argue that the situation is somewhat more complex than a mere neoliberalization of subjectivity. Agreeing with part of Kim’s thesis, they argue that K-Pop ultimately functions in a way where the social expectations that defined the Park era become something that is maintained and spread through K-Pop in the post-Park era and in turn shapes the Korean youth. However, they make the argument that rather than simple Neoliberalism, the subjectivity that is created in this process is distinctly Korean; being a combination of Neoliberalism, Confucian ideals and the Industrial ethics of the Park era (or what we, in other words, have termed Confucian-Capitalism).
Joanne Elfving-Hwang, who focusses on the influence of Confucianism on beauty culture, affirms the Confucian element of this insight by showcasing that many of the norms and expectations around a specific appearance exist within Confucianism proper. As she shows, the lasting influence of Confucianism creates a prevailing belief that success depends on a willingness to invest in bringing one’s appearance in line with societal ideals, the norm. If you fail to succeed, society may blame your unwillingness to “fix” your appearance rather than an unfair system or norm.
However as the old structures have ceased to exist, what the norm is is no longer dictated by the old meritocratic structures of the old Kingdoms and dynasties. Instead the norm is produced to create the contemporary version of such a subject. As Korea has turned into a “hyper-connected” society, individuals have become constantly subjected to the technological gaze. Being always online means being endlessly compared (and comparing oneself) to norms which now themselves originate online. This leads to the inversion of the old Confucian prohibition against altering the body into a compulsion to do so to look the part. As the norm is altered, plastic surgery turns into an act of piety.
Governmentality then plays an important part but cannot said to be strictly neoliberal. Rather, the ideal subject is shaped through a digital interpretation of the combination of Korea’s historical structures which exist side by side in its compressed environment. This allows for a norm which is created in part by the K-Pop industry, the digital platforms and the beauty and surgery industry, built on the substrate of Confucian-Capitalism. This combination and the governmentality that flows from them then continues the tradition started under Park of attempting to shape the norm and create the ideal subject.
We are left with the question whether the combination of these various elements consists of separate threads or whether they are connected. In addition to the entanglement of Kakao and Naver with the K-Pop industry, Gloria Davis and Gil Soo-Han show that, at least geneologically, these elements cannot be easily separated. They make the argument that the rise of Hallyu created the new standard of beauty that became the norm. Clinics started to provide free surgeries to these new celebrities in exchange for endorsements. As the rise of these industries coincided with the onset of high-speed internet, these surgically enhanced celebrities flooded cyberspace, establishing them as the “ideal” look for ordinary Koreans, and, based on the Confucian etiquette, becoming the norm and thus the expectation.
Koreans who do not care about K-Pop still get influenced to alter their physical appearance as, once it becomes the norm, it becomes something that is expected by companies and with that it becomes a socioeconomic “must”. Citizens come to see their own bodies as human capital, projects to be designed, objects in the words of Gooyong Kim. In this sense, then, the harsh process that the idol goes through becomes something that becomes the experience of the citizens of the country, with the idol becoming a role model to emulate.
As perfection becomes digitally determined and as the idol spreads, the question of who decides how much perfection is required is then answered by the idol. Hu argues that K-pop idols come to serve as cultural icons whose looks are idealized and in turn their rigorous beauty standards become the new ideal that people aspire to, the idol becomes the technological gaze. Here, the idol’s ability to become a psychotechnology that steers people through desires becomes most apparent; moving beyond the fan, they come to shape Korean society itself.
Imitation and mimicry
As we have seen, the platforms that dominate Korean cyberspace are largely controlled by the Kakao/Naver duopoly. But interestingly, Davis and Gil point out that much of the actual beauty standards spread via Social Media. In part, this happens through the walled gardens, but it equally happens through platforms such as YouTube, where tutorials that teach you how to emulate particular idols appear frequently. So what about our thesis where all this originates from a blend of top-down digital platforms, entertainment companies and the beauty industry, with the walled garden structure functioning as a funnel that directs people towards these norms?
Let us start by saying that while we indeed argue that the algorithms of Kakao and Naver optimize for such funnelling, this is not to say that the eventual spread to the non-fan is some insidious plan by these platforms (that is to say, it is not the case that executives at Naver and Kakao are thinking about ways in which they can get young Koreans to get plastic surgery). Rather, the platforms operate on simple capitalist logic, where they promote that which leads to their own growth, that is that which the algorithms deem as capturing attention.
But the norm itself is engineered, because the norm is based on celebrities whose appearance is crafted so as to be maximally algorithmically optimal. Naver and Kakao, as the two companies that dominate the Korean internet and shape its architectural infrastructure, are invested in and sometimes actively own the industries that engineer the beauty ideals and the markets that monetize them, and their platforms are initial ways in which news and updates on idol culture funnels people towards these newly engineered ideals. A beauty ideal can be produced (through the entertainment arm), publicized (through portal news), socially validated (through comments and rankings on various Naver owned websites), peer-transmitted (KakaoTalk), and purchased (integrated K-beauty commerce) without ever leaving these two ecosystems.
But where the ecosystems operate as infrastructural and commercial substrate and gatekeepers, the spread of the norm itself is mainly one between citizens, who try to emulate the idol through the technological gaze and, in due time, to emulate one another as more and more citizens start to follow the norm set by the idol, further entrenching the standard. While the line between these three (the engineering of the image, the funneling through the duopoly and the spread between citizens) might be blurry, research by Fanny Amnell and Linn Israelsson showcases that this is in fact exactly what happens. They mention that where K-Pop sets the blueprint, once this blueprint spreads, social media then takes these routines and turns them into viral trends.
The researchers show that beauty standards are created by idols, and even shift as new generations of idols (with new looks) become popular, but that these standards ultimately truly spread by trickling down. As regular people come across the blueprint, they start to try to emulate it and share these results, transforming the idol’s lifestyle from an idealized celebrity standard into an everyday peer-pressured trend. This constant, daily exposure normalizes the idol’s extreme beauty, making it feel like the baseline for average beauty rather than an elite exception. As such, even someone with no interest in idol culture will be influenced by their peers to mimic this ideal.
But how does this spread between peers happen in the first place? In his book Virality, Tony D. Sampson gives an updated reading of the theory of imitation by Gabriel Tarde, connecting Tarde’s theory to media, algorithms and social media networks. Tarde believed that social life was not constituted by macro-structures existing in the background but rather was constituted through imitation – the spread of beliefs, desires and practices from person to person where repetition between people causes things to be copied and passed along. Sampson deems social networks as the ultimate Tardean device, allowing for the rapid spread and contagion of ideas and drives. The empirical analyses of Davis & Gil and Amnell and Israelsson suggest that this is equally correct in the case of Korea, as beauty standards are ultimately spread between Korean citizens themselves on the internet and in social media spaces. But then what about the norm setting by the platforms and the companies?
The concept of cultural contagion, which denotes the way in which fashions, trends and cultural drives tend to happen through specific moments of cultural spread and contagion, can allow us to understand how on the one hand we have seen that Naver and Kakao shape contemporary Korean culture and on the other hand the spread happens through the citizens themselves. Sampson argues that in the age of social media networks, the companies behind such platforms and networks engineer such moments of contagion that feed upon users and use them to spread whatever they want to be spread. That is to say that cultural contagion is increasingly engineered by companies and the capitalist system to play into our drives and hijack them by playing into the drives of the network, and it is only after that that citizens start to spread the culture among themselves.
The Kakao and Naver duopoly, the relations to the idol industry and their walled garden structure where every element of their broad subsidiary structure feeds into another make it easy to understand why this happens so effectively in Korea. As we have seen, as opposed to Western giants such as FAANG, the Korean platform duopoly is much more entangled with and directly invested in the entertainment industry and the beauty industry. The entire structure not only engineers, but equally funnels and promotes these desire-capturing experiences and then, through their own platforms, causes them to pass on to an increasing growing number of people who in turn spread them both on and beyond the platforms by way of social media.
Simultaneously, the entertainment companies engineer their “products” in a way that ensures this happens at the level of pre-cognitive affect. Sampson points out that companies make use of the spread of viral love to play into this pre-cognitive affection, which he theorizes through Tarde’s concept of love. Tarde’s view on the importance of love is that imitation begins through the imitation of a recognized superior; starting with devotion and loving admiration. According to Tarde, this is the most contagious mechanism, precisely because of this devotion.As is surely clear by now, everything about idol production is designed to create such viral love and spread such feelings of admiration.
In Tarde’s terms, the majority of people are swept up by the contagion of a small group. While Sampson somewhat tediously removes much of the elitism inherent in Tarde’s analysis in favour of a liberationist reading, he retains Tarde’s concept of somnambulism to describe the phenomenon of most people unconsciously being swept up in waves of influence that radiate from a select source, arguing that love, devotion and obsession with a select someone is the most powerful way to establish such an influence. In a perhaps not-so-coincidental choice of words, Sampson calls such selected individuals “idols”.
According to Tarde, love is so contagious precisely because it is asymmetrical. The lover copies the beloved, but never the reverse. The influence of the idol then always works one-way, from idol to fan and broader public. The K-Pop system’s creation of the idol is then ultimately a way to engineer this love, devotion and obsession. The online platforms of the duopoly in turn offer the infrastructure to retain the idols in the public eye with the public themselves ultimately creating the viral moment by imitating them and spreading their imitation on social media, leading to the repetition of an increasingly large group of people and for the new norm to spread and entrench itself.
But Tarde’s framework, while explaining the spread, does not explain to us what that spread actually does to those who attempt to imitate standards that they can never reach and what that would do to a society if this would be promoted and spread on a mass scale. Here René Girard, whose theory of mimetic desire is often compared to Tarde’s theory of imitation (and who, perhaps somewhat unfairly, criticized Tarde for not focussing on the violent element of mimicry), functions as the hinge through whom we can derive how the mimicry of the idol, itself a product of Korean’s competitive society, comes to strongly exacerbate and influence that competitive element.
Girard argues that once people start to desire an object, someone else starts to emulate those desires. In this theory desire is then triangular; there is the object that is desired, the original model who desires said object and, last but not least, there is the subject who mimics the model in their desire. The crux of mimetic theory is that in mimicking the original model, the subject and the original model come to desire the same object. Girard notes that in the most pure form of mimesis, the object is merely a specific thing that someone attaches to while the real desire is a desire to become like the model. A successful person has a particular job, and thus you desire to have that job and come to mimic them, but the desire is not merely for that job but for what that person represents, for who they are, to be like them. Thus, according to mimetic theory ultimately, all desire is a desire for the being of the model that is mimicked.
When it comes to such desire, a further distinction is made between internal and external mediation. With external mediation, the model is unreachable in status; there is a spiritual gap and thus the person, because of this distance, can openly declare they are imitating the person. The object here is often something abstract, such as skill, vision, intelligence or beauty. Internal mediation on the other hand happens when the model is close by, someone one knows in real life or that seems surpassable. Here the object is something they want or aspire to, often more tangible, but because of the lack of distance, the imitation leads to rivalry between the subject and the model.
But this distinction becomes blurry when it comes to the idol because there is no external object to begin with. We saw through Klossowski that the idol is themselves an object so that, in so far as the object remains, the idol is the object and the model. This goes beyond the external mediated abstracted object, the skill that one wants to imitate, because, as we have seen in the previous chapters, the beauty of the idol is what they are reduced to and how they are objectified. The drive to be like the idol, to be like the model, is a desire to be that object.
This potentially seems like a speculative and farfetched theory, but Gooyong Kim notes exactly this in his study on K-Pop idols: aspiring idols specifically have the desire to become objects of desire themselves, that is, to become the idol who is so widely praised and loved. This makes it so that the idol forms the peak of what Girard calls metaphysical desire, which is a desire he describes as being so deep that the distinction between object and model collapses.
If we again turn to Gooyong Kim’s text, this is precisely what keeps the idol system running. The objectification of the self that the idol goes through is itself a desire to be like those who have received the love of others, as the idol was also once a young kid or teenager who desired to be the object of desire. As we saw in chapter 2, they were driven through this goal to thrust themselves into the anthropotechnical engineered trainee system. Mimicry here is not merely a mimicry of the model by way of some external object, but rather it is a mimicry that is predicated on the desire to be the model who is also object. The young teenager who auditions to become a trainee, desires their own objectification because it provides them the opportunity to become idolized. Returning to Tarde, the love and devotion that spreads then also leads to the spread of wanting to be the idol who is loved, and nowhere does this become more apparent than in the digital channels who induce the constant comparison of the technological gaze.
The nature of the idol, the way in which they are designed to be perfect at first glance, makes them a perfect candidate for external mediation, as in Girard’s framework, the external mediator is a far away model, a sort of avatar that is seen as unthreatening and who is acknowledged as inimitable. But as we have seen, the idol is both Garbo, the faraway platonic ideal, but equally Monroe, the ever-proximate. While the former behaves characteristically like an external mediator, the latter does not because they are designed to be too familiar to fully retain that distance. Thus, while the idol is external mediator, they already operate on the proximity that is usually beholden to internal mediation.
One might question whether this is unique to the idol. Isn’t this true for an admired sportsperson as well, who also has a giant gap with onlookers and yet is also easily followed on Instagram and seen on TV? There are two important differences. First, the sportsperson does not primarily engage in parasocial relationships where an important part of their function exists in the accompaniment of the onlooker. Secondly, the idol is not really made to have a particular skill like a basketballer or even a classical musician, where there remains an unbridgeable gap between the skill of the admired and the skill of the admirer. Rather, the skill of the idol is primarily just to be a much more beautiful, much more talented human (who then accompanies you).
Where external mediation is the mechanism which societies use to keep violence at bay, internal mediation, on the other hand, leads to violence because it leads to rivalries between the subject that desires and the model. In internal mediation, this ultimately leads to wars, violence and other forms of intense competition between people increasingly upping the pressure on one another through their mutual mimicry.
But as the idol is an external mediator operating as an internal mediator, there is no violence to keep at bay, as imitation retains the appearance of possibility (while being equally impossible to achieve). The violence that internal mediation leads to is only calmed when there is a murder victim who functions as a scapegoat. As Sulli’s suicide and the sacred nature of K-pop fandom showed, often it is the idol themselves that becomes the scapegoat. Although the external mediator can not function as the scapegoat, it is when the idol loses their sacred status that they come to function as such. In the terminology of mimetic theory we might say that, once the idol is no longer sacred, the spiritual gap that makes an external mediator “external” disappears, and thus the idol becomes a human being close by, part of the violent circle.
Girard notes that after the death of the murder victim, the scapegoat is often re-sacralized within the mythological framework. This goes for the desacralized idol as well. After the death of an idol, there is often a “discussion” around the industry and around the treatment of idols, with everyone of course maintaining that they played no part in the tragic vents. Girard argues that societies often discuss such murders only in the abstract, while veiling the individual responsibility that people had in committing the murder in the first place. In the K-Pop system this happens constantly. Abstract discussions about the “industry”, the pressure, the demands, but never change or accountability. The murder victim is canonized while their human moment of rebellion is forgotten, as was the case with Sulli. There were some discussions about idol’s mental health and the need for the system and an abstracted body of fans to keep mental health in mind, but ultimately Sulli (alongside others like Jonghyun and Goo Hara) was remembered as a legendary idol who was tragically taken away from us by something abstract, and the system kept on turning as it did every time.
Because the system keeps on turning, there is also never any relief. While Girard argues that the murder of the scapegoat is supposed to give temporary relief from the violent cycle of internal mediation, the idol is not a singular figure but rather a system. The death of a single idol does nothing to provide relief because the demands that are being made through the norms that are being set are being made by a system that produces hundreds of idols. The industry simply churns out and engineers new idols who become equally loved and who can create new moments of cultural contagion. Without the relief of the ritual murder, rivalry intensifies further and further. It is in this way that the imitation through social media as described by Sampson and Tarde leads to a competitive dynamic which continuously spirals further out of control.
But mimetic hypercompetition is not the whole picture of Korean society. Through the distinct theory of mimicry that Roger Caillois sets out, we get a view that is opposed to Girard, but that is in many ways not less apt to describe what is happening in Korea. Where Girard argues that all desire is ultimately a desire for being and that as such mimicry is done for this purpose (to establish an identity that is that of the model who one wants to become) Caillois argues that mimicry happens primarily as a way to disappear.
Basing his theory of mimicry on the biological study of insects, Caillois makes the argument that mimicry is done out of a desire to be similar to nothingness. Rejecting the standard Darwinian view that insects mimic their surroundings for protection by noting that it does not fool predators in many cases, he argued instead that it is rooted in a desire to be nothing, to disappear into the background of space, yielding to the surrounding environment and becoming just like it.
Caillois argues that this is done in order to lose oneself in the environment, to not have to be anymore. It is then the opposite of Girard’s theory of desire in the sense that where both are interested in the relation between the self and what is outside the self, Girard’s mimicry, even the mimicry of the other, ultimately manifests because one wants to build up one’s own being. For Caillois, on the other hand, mimicry is done precisely because it removes the distinction between the self and its surroundings.
Remarkably, if we were to look at this dichotomy through the lens of Korea’s Confucian-Capitalism, it seems like both of these are true. The desires that spread and the hypercompetiveness in Korea, the demand to be perfect, these all seem Girardian. But these sit on the Capitalist side of Confucian-Capitalism. If we analyze the Confucian side, we see that the desire is to follow the norm, that is: to go up into the crowd by becoming like the norm. It is here that Caillois’ theory of desire is much more apt. The desire of many Koreans is the desire not to stand out, to adhere to the norm in a way that is as perfect as possible.
This paradoxical combination between Caillois and Girard’s theory can be understood through the continuation and inversion of Confucian norms in Korean society that Elvfing-Hwang pointed out. Failing to succeed to “fix” your appearance is a problem because it is perceived as an unwillingness to adhere to the collective norm. But as Capitalism arrives in Korea, rivalry and competition comes to dictate what that norm is. The engineered idol and the various industries entangled with them stand at the base of that dictation, returning us to the idea of governmentality, where this entanglement of industries that engineers and spreads the idol further intensifies the baseline expectation through that engineering, which then spreads throughout society.
What we then see by collapsing the dichotomy between the two thinkers of mimesis and adding this collapsed dichotomy to the view of social networks laid out by Sampson is that there exists within Korea a special situation. One where Girard’s sacred mimicry comes to be alive through Capitalism, which consistently ranks up competition and continuously raises the ceiling of what is to be expected, and where Caillois’ insect-based mimicry exists as the background condition, the group pressure to meet the baseline so as to remain part of the group. This baseline itself is then continuously increased through competition, while competition maintains itself through the background condition.
Girardian mimicry drives the competition to ever higher heights while Cailloisian mimicry enforces the participation in this competition. It is through the combination between Confucianism and Capitalism that the digital algorithms which allow for cultural contagion create the standard for a perfection that becomes the expectation one should strive towards that is fused with the need to not stand out. As the technological gaze shows, what is demanded from the outside and what is demanded from the self become the same thing, which is to be the most perfect among the crowd. Tarde’s theory of imitation in turn allows us to see the massive role that platforms, social media and the internet play in the spread of this competitive drive and the image of the idol, who functions as the originator of the mimetic drive.
Empirical reality shows that this collapse between Girard and Caillois is not merely a theoretical flourish. While Koreans are internationally known for their love of minimalist style, this love is really a hatred for standing out and are extremely prone to follow trends. Korean social media is filled with such examples. From the 2017-2018 “long padding” trend, where everyone started to wear the same knee-length black padded coat to the point that schools began to ban them, up until the lack of color in the public space, with Koreans themselves arguing that too much color makes you stick out like a sore thumb.
Foreigners who visit the country often remark that Koreans tend to all follow the same trends. Not just subcultures and not just young people, but nearly everyone. Trends manifest in rapid cycles, often in weeks, and while Western microtrends have certainly accelerated, the majority of people are not aware of them, even among the young. In Korea, however, there is an intense pressure to dress according to the latest trends, be aware of the latest trends and consume the latest trends.
The degree to which this is so in Korea remains anomalous even when we compare it to neighboring East-Asian countries. Despite both having similar cultures that prioritize the preservation of social harmony, the necessity of hierarchy and the emphasis of the whole over the part, Japan is known for its alternative fashion subcultures. In fact, even in the “post-Harajuku” age, many of the most interesting subcultures still seem to come out of Japan, as Japan has a tendency to differentiate between fully lived private life, during which you can do as you please, and life spent with the company/school/family/etc. during which one should adapt.
Similarly, while China is much less internationally renowned for it, Chinese social media is filled with people with alternative styles and new subcultures. According to some researchers, these rise out of its regional diversity and its “Biantong” culture, while others point to the cultural revolution under Mao leading to a split between the CCP’s top-down enforced broader social and political culture, and bottom-up subcultures which emerged from separate communities because of the lack of the emphasis on aesthetic conformity.
Thus while in both other nations there exist massive social pressures to conform, people are allowed an out. On top of that, both in Japan’s and in China’s pre-modern times both country’s already flirted with heavier aestheticization. Korea on the other hand, had no such history and the temperament of the late Joseon dynasty was almost the opposite. In its strict interpretation of Neo-Confucianism, most forms of excess were shunned and to be an upstanding or elite citizen meant to dress austere, to eat simple and to live somewhat frugally. Furthermore, because Joseon ran a civil-state exam, everyone competed on the same axis for the same prize and could, theoretically, become part of the elite.
This was as opposed to the earlier Korean aristocracy’s of the Silla and Goryeo periods, who themselves had a much more maximalist and colorful taste in artistry, as well as to a country like Edo Japan, where a merchant class locked out of the upper classes developed their own artistic traditions and aesthetics. Add on to this the relative homogenous nature of Korean society and history already provided the structural background for the appearance of Cailloisian mimicry, which would get inverted and utilized by Capitalism with it’s onset in the country. Furthermore, where Capitalism arrived in Japan during what might be seen as the subcultural era of the 1960s-1980s, Korea at the time was under a dictatorship, and only became a full blown advanced country in the early internet era, with its trend culture maturing in a hyperconnected society where everybody could now watch and observe everybody else
Although this is already a complex structure, the above leads us to a conceptual problem which we have to address. While we have mainly spoken about the internet and its effect on competition, the fact that the background condition exists and that these historical examples all seem to play a role necessitates that there is something prior to contemporary competition, something that steers it, a particular structure. Of course, we have emphasized this continuously. It is compressed modernity, Confucian-Capitalism; that is, Korea’s deep history. The arrival of the internet and social media further accelerated forces that already existed under Park, and whose ultimate origins trace back much further.
But this forces a concession. Where Sampson’s entire book moves against any sort of structuralist understanding, in a radicalization of Tarde’s own microsociology; Korea shows that both of these are important. While in Capitalist and digitalized Korea individual contagion mechanisms are massively important to understand the spread of Girardian mimicry dynamics, one cannot disappear into the background without there already being a background structure and Confucianism is itself the product of a particular historical trend in Korea. The violence of individual Capitalist mimetic competition in Korea is the product of its structure shaped by its long tradition of Confucianism, the austerity of the Joseon dynasty, colonialism and history under Park, and in turn its structure is being changed and inverted by these dynamics.
Thus while the story of Girardian mimicry can be told through the online microdynamics of Sampson’s Tarde, to understand the way in which Cailloisian mimicry comes to take form in contemporary Korea and the role that governmentality plays we need to pivot back to the structural side to come to see how Korea’s entrenched structures shaped its recent history and how both of these interacted with the Tardean dynamics of the digital world. To do so, we will return to recent history in order to look at the way in which embedded structures and governmentality shaped the online network and how in turn the online network manifests itself within day to day life and accelerates and intensifies these structures.
Putting both these sides together in the coming section will then allow us both to see how these double-mimicry dynamics materialize in the day to day lives of individuals and what this tells us on a structural level about the country. As we will soon find out, in the absence of relief through the killing of a scapegoat, mimicry dynamics in Korea continue to scale up, intensified by the interplay between historical modes, collective trauma and online dynamics. In such a situation the Korean dream of making it to baseline turns for some into a somnambulist nightmare.
Hypercompetition and survivalist modernity
In his 디지털의 배신, Lee Kwang-Suk argues that in a hypercapitalist environment, cyberspace increasingly bleeds into the real world and starts to affect it more than the other way around. The digital world becomes more real than the real world in the sense that the digital world starts to spread and create desires, which is our psychotechnological thesis restated. One example of how the imitation that happens online through the technological gaze leads to an altering of the real world is through the role that digital images - via filters, angles and other such things - play in Korea. Initially, filters are used by people on social media to imitate the beauty standards set online, in an attempt to adhere to these standards more closely than they could with their personal face.
But this imitation does not remain online. Elise Hu quotes sociologist Michael Hurt who describes Korea as the first hypermodern society. He says: “Fuck it! You look better, so go [alter your face]…If I can make my meat face look like the better, hyper-photoshopped digital version of my face, why wouldn’t I do that? It’s not THE FUTURE…It’s right here in Korea today. Koreans get beat up for looking fake, they’re body-shamed, but basically Korea is doing what everybody will be doing very soon”. In this way, Hurt argues that Koreans alter their real face based on the way the filters make them look, imitating the re-anthropomorphization of the digital world that the idol engages in. The digital image starts to set the standard and faces in the real world start to mimic the digital image.
The technological gaze thus pushes young Koreans to continuously adhere to the standards set online. But what for? Is it purely to engage in a competition about who is the most beautiful? Not precisely. Although that is part of it, the competition goes way beyond simply wanting to feel more beautiful than the next person. SeoYeon Leem writes that the Gangnam beauty that is formed in plastic surgery clinics in Korea is a way to attain socio-economic mobility, where the body becomes increasingly seen as a project to alter. She furthermore makes the argument that the ideal beauty created in these clinics is a hybridized beauty, one that combines older East Asian ideals of beauty with the Western ideals that arrived later in the country.
As people start to view their own bodies as a project to alter in search of mobility, they are engaging in a direct mimicking of the idol. They start to experiment on their own bodies in the hope of becoming as close to the ideal that the idol sets, which returns us to the horror of Videodrome and cybernetic realism. If the idol escapes becoming hollowed out by perfecting itself, here “we are patterns that perfect ourselves” returns in a perverse manner, with the subject being the body dysmorphic imitator who begins to attempt to mimic the idols perfection
Here Videodrome is no longer the onset of anything external, instead being the capturing of the mind to the extent that one’s desire becomes treating their own body as a project. Their body becomes a project to operate on. The psychotechnology then spreads the anthropotechnic drive in a horrific way, with socio-economic competition as its ultimate base. The patient becomes part of the same process as the idol. Just as the idol is living currency and an object whose body is so objectified that it becomes a socio-economic unit, the imitator, through the spread of this norm and the technological gaze, starts to view their body in the same way: as a project to be shaped, cutting themselves open in search of a prettier self.
Leem interestingly points out that when the Gangnam-beauty goes too far in a desire to achieve absolute perfection through continuous medical enhancement, the result is what is locally called a “plastic surgery monster”. By maximizing every possible aesthetic metric, the resulting face becomes uncanny and monstrous. It is a staunch reminder that perfection is not for the non-idol, who by necessity needs to spend their time in perpetual anxiety of not being enough as when they attempt to get too close, they turn themselves into a horrific monster.
However, there is one important difference. The ideal can never be reached because the onlooker is not the one who sets it. As we saw through Tarde, love and obsession – and thus, as we learn through Girard, mimicry – only moves one way. As Elise Hu says in quoting Sharon Heijin Lee: “If the metric is trying to be like a K-pop idol, it’s never-ending…It’s limitless. There is not enough time and labor that can be put into looking like the perfect Korean woman”.
Yet as we have seen, this process is not just something that originated online out of nowhere. It is first of all a norm that is set by the companies, the entertainment agencies being the ones who engineer the idol, and, in the words of Hye Kyung Lee, Xiyu Zhang and Elfving-Hwang, something that goes back to both Confucianism and the particular understanding of the connection between the human and the nation that emerged under Park. In other words, because the online dynamic is itself shaped by Confucianism and broader Korean history, it is insufficient to merely understand current Korean dynamics in terms of it being a hypermodern digital society where digitality comes to influence the world, the expectation and the shaping of the self. While all that is true, its specific form of digitality is itself entangled with deeper Korean structural history.
The history of Korea laid out in chapter 1 showed that, within Compressed Modernity, the figure of the idol was already an existent figure during the Park era. It was just that, at that moment in time, the human made into machine was not a popstar but rather was the factory worker who endlessly labored, positively and without complaint, for the good of the nation. Building on Chang’s Compressed Modernity, Hong Jung Kim analyzes Chang’s macro-framework from a micro perspective, asking what actually happens to the Korean people and their collective mindset in Korea’s compressed modern period.
Like Chang, Kim begins with an overview of Korean history. He argues that Park created a specific type of worker, which he names the “sublime survivalist”: an industrious, hyper-productive, cheerful and aggressively optimistic worker. This worker was a symbol for what the nation could do and what the nation could become. Kim mentions that Park called for “a survivalist who lives out the values of ‘economics foremost, construction above all, [and] labor supreme’”, and that “this ideal form of the sublime survivalist was envisioned as a being who identifies oneself in the grand narrative of the epoch, and assimilates oneself to its logic; a desperate optimist who does not dwell on darkness, contradiction, or negativity but rather aggressively carries out the demands of development, production”.
Post 1997, this worker moved from the factory to the idol system. Similar to Park’s ideal worker, the idol is hyper-efficient, cheerful and optimistic and stands as a symbol for the heights that can be reached during a digital age. These same elements are what makes the idol a symbol of Tardean love and capable of spreading these values throughout the nation. As perfect and always cheerful symbols, they are loved and adored because of their engineered cheerfulness and beauty, always remaining optimistic regardless of the grueling schedules they face, never allowed to show sadness or negativity.
Interestingly, the persistence of the sublime survivalist mindset and its demand for a cheerful optimistic worker in the post-Park era is itself a product of the structural anxiety that got entrenched in the Korean psyche because of its difficult history, shaped by the Japanese occupation followed by the Korean war and, last but not least, the IMF crisis. We already saw in chapter 1 that Compressed Modernity comes about because of a specific desire to overcome the occupier and prove to the rest of the world, and especially to the former colonial overlords, that they can overcome their predicament.
Kim furthers this thesis by arguing that these moments in time created what he calls “a regime of the heart”, defined by survivalism. He posits that because of this dire history, Korean society has come to be defined by competitiveness out of a deep-seated collective anxiety, rather than due to a belief in progress. It is the anxiety that one can at any time be destroyed by an outside force, and that because of this, one must continue to grow in power to ward off one’s own self-destruction. Any amount of growth is then anxious growth, one that is ultimately in light of the fear of destruction.
As per our dual theory of mimicry, the Confucian substrate allows for survival to become a national norm, while Capitalism allows for the relentless productive drive and competition that continuously re-defines what the baseline of survival is. However what Kim’s framework adds is that what this combination does is not at all about becoming more powerful. Power is merely a tool; it is about the anxiety of being destroyed. Here the tension between collectivism and individualism in contemporary Korean society shows its face most clearly.
If the collective’s non-destruction is predicated upon an increase in power, then any deviation from that power is a personal failure. The individual is told it owes everything to the nation and that it must be better because the nation must survive. If you do not live up to that standard you become a national risk. Park’s sublime survivalist becomes simply what a Korean has to become, and so its current instantiation - the idol - simply becomes what the contemporary Korean has to become.
As the Park era demanded of its subjects exactly such a mindset where they suspended the self in favor of national growth to ward off destruction, it ingrained this idea deep into the Korean psyche. However, throughout the Park era, the idea of such a survival was still, largely, survival of and for the nation. One ought to grow in order for the country to grow and one ought to be a good worker in order for the country to prosper. In this sense, Koreans maintained a sense of “jeong”, a collective spirit where individuals were willing to sacrifice for the good of the whole. The extreme form of Survivalism that Hong Jung Kim describes would come to exist in the aftermath of the IMF crisis in 1997.
What is interesting is that at the beginning of the IMF crisis, the response by Koreans was extremely collective. One of the most famous anecdotes from the period to show the collective spirit at this time is how citizens started a grassroot initiative that grew out into a nationwide phenomenon to donate their gold, jewelry and personal heirlooms, donating a staggering 227 metric tons of personal jewelry, valued at over $2 billion. Millions of Koreans stood outside in the cold for hours to hand over their possessions.
But that leads us to a strange scenario. While Park’s sublime survivalist and the spirit of anxiety and production seems to embody many of the elements of the confucian pressure, its capitalism was ultimately framed around the collective, about making sure the nation would “not die”. So if the IMF crisis is the deciding point here and it was marked by the mass selling of personal possessions just to save the nation, how can we, 30 years later, speak of an individualism and how did Survivalism become more extreme?
The explanation for this lies in the demands that the IMF made of the nation, which were mainly about deregulation and liberalization. Where before Koreans could expect to work for an entire lifetime for a company, the IMF demanded corporate restructuring and labor market flexibility. Suddenly, employment became precarious and something that had to be fought over continuously. Simultaneously, the IMF required mass layoffs and saw the mass closing of industry and companies. With the reforming of the Korean government structure and its further liberalization, the state and the chaebol, which had been the “we” that the gold was donated to, stopped guaranteeing anything in return, while Koreans were now expected to compete for jobs.
It is in this context that the individualist competition that we highlighted in our discussions of competition comes to arise, as the sublime survivalist becomes not something one strives for for the nation, but for the self and ones micro-surroundings. Yet this did not mean that the collective demand disappeared, rather the demand moved into social expectation. While not using these concepts, Hong Jung Kim explains this in a way that structurally describes our mimetic dichotomy. Through the survivalist mentality, Koreans start to embody an obsession with competitiveness, accumulation, and meritocracy because they have been conditioned to believe that falling behind means literal or social death and, as everyone starts to try to shape themselves into the sublime survivalist, so do they redefine what exactly the baseline is, as the highest that one can reach is always simply just “not dying”, and thus anything but the highest is deemed insufficient. Thus the expectation still is collective. But, on the other hand, as it is about ones individual and personal survival, the collective owes nothing to the individual, for survival is the bare minimum. Thus you remain on your own.
Hong Jung Kim describes that after the 1997 crisis, the people’s ingrained death-apprehension became a reason for them to always aim at the maximization of their own power. Far from being purely individualist, the maximization of one’s own power here is simply seen as what everyone should do, which is obviously impossible. As this creates a social layout where an individual’s worth is entirely tied to their visible accomplishments, accumulation of power and material output, those that draw the short end of the stick are simply deemed insufficiently powerful; it is their own fault that they fell behind and, not only that, they have betrayed the collective by being a failure.
Simultaneously, this also means that your victory is never enough and, equally, never just for yourself. If you are a great worker at a chaebol, you can be a greater worker because there is always a greater worker somewhere else. The idea of furthering the nation then spreads to micro-collectives such as companies, schools and others. Your success is for the collective and your failure is a problem for the collective. As Hong Jung Kim notes, the group dynamic’s main purpose became tracking status, ranking individuals, and enforcing an “obsession with accomplishment.” This leads to human relations becoming a zero-sum game where the losers of the game become socially suspect. According to Kim, Korean society becomes deeply socially Darwinist, a survival of the fittest where the strong prey on the weak, where you must actively outpace those around you and where your own failure is a problem for the group’s survival, even though others in that group are actively outpacing you.
This social Darwinist climate creates what some Koreans view as a hellscape. In the 2010s Korean youth coined the now infamous (and by now out-of-use) term “Hell Joseon” to describe the country. Commenting on the term, Koo Se Woong says that the term embodied the despair of young people in the country who came to believe that “being born in South Korea is tantamount to entering hell, where one is immediately enslaved by a highly regulated system that dictates an entire course of life” and that there was simply no way to change the system.
The collective demand to survive makes it so that the elderly do not want to give up their positions and that, for young people, there are no positions. Simultaneously, society keeps making demands and social media keeps selling a dream that seems increasingly unreachable. This makes it so that many Koreans have lost hope in any sort of future, with Koo naming this as at least one important factor behind both the high suicide rate and the low birth rate, which of course all just exacerbate the problem as the population continues to age.
Most youngsters take less drastic measures and try to escape in other ways. In another book, Hong Jung Kim coins the term 은둔기계 (the hermit machine). Writing a number of poems during the Covid era, in one particular piece titled the hermit (은둔), he compares the ever-now of pre-Covid Korea, where there was never time for the self, to the Covid era, where people are forced to spend time apart from society’s demands. Kim argues that this seclusion can itself become a strategy in a hypercapitalist society like South Korea. While Kim admits that some flee into SNS, he argues that others choose to spend time on themselves, to truly disconnect.
While the writing and hope Kim displays has a lot of positive elements that we cannot get into in this article, reality has worked out to be different. Seclusion, both in Korea and in the West and much of the rest of the world, has led people to be more and more online. In Korea itself, the term “healing”, deviced as a way to put more emphasis on self-care, became itself a trend, packaged and sold, and a thing one had to show on social media. In a copy of the Japanese hikkikomori phenomenon, seclusion is for most people structurally coupled to stepping into an online world, and the online world is just another place where the companies reside. Once one goes online, the companies will make sure that you are met with the face of the idol and the demands it makes.
As the idol is intertwined and entangled with companies and Korean society more broadly and as the successor of Park’s sublime survivalist, it becomes the face of a survivalist culture, where people engage in intense rivalries and battles for the sake of climbing up to the baseline of being merely enough. As we have seen, to climb up the socio-economic ladder, you should be intelligent AND talented AND beautiful. It is then no surprise that the K-beauty industry and its plastic surgery industry are so pervasive.
The demand to be it all to survive also connects to that concept of Gooyong Kim’s that we named in the beginning of this chapter: governmentality. It is this same concept that Hong-Jung Kim links to survivalism through his analysis of the influence of the Park era and its continuation in the post-1997 world, where governmentality was now managed from the bottom-up and through media influence while citizens could no longer expect the same government to provide them with the means to a stable life.
In the beginning of this chapter we saw that Hye Kyung Lee and Xiyu Zhang argue that the combination between Neoliberalism and Confucianism, filtered through the industrial ethics of the Park era, spreads through K-Pop (and Hallyu more broadly), which they say shape how the younger generation thinks of and values themselves. As an example, they take a particular case study of one of the aptly named K-Pop “survival shows”, Produce 101, where 101 trainees competed for the chance to debut in a K-Pop group. They point out that the trainees are constantly pressured to be all-rounders and self-improve, likening this to the Korean job-market, where young professionals are pressured to constantly acquire new skills to “survive” in the finding of a job.
The trainees that survive are expected to remain extremely humble. For any such success, they must deeply thank the audience who they must claim are the people who were the cause of this victory, and for whom they must work harder. Simultaneously, the trainees who do not “survive” internalizing failure. When a contestant drops in rank or performs poorly, they never blame the grueling schedule, the format, or the intense pressure. Instead, they blame their “own insufficiencies”. The scholars cite a moment where a group of lower ranked trainees were told by trainers: “If it was me, if I didn’t get a choice to choose, I would practice even if I die. Isn’t this a chance to prove yourself?”. Either you survive and win, or you must die trying.
The end of the survival show is painted as a victory for the nation as much as it is painted as a victory for the winners. Those who voted on the surviving members are made to feel that they raised the trainees from musical infancy to maturity, often using this to claim a type of ownership. The above shows, once again, that the Confucian norms are something you bow to and respect when you survive, but should not expect to carry you when you don’t.
The winning debutants become part of the idols who are the face of success, and whose faces might be plastered all over cyberspace and the physical world in a few years (Produce 101 would lead to the debut of I.O.I in 2016). They become the face of a threshold you can never meet, manufactured deep within the entertainment companies to both set the new standards in beauty and comfort the mass of Koreans who cannot reach that standard. Working together with the chaebols, the digital companies and even with the government through Hallyu, the human who is made into product comes to stand at the centre of a social Darwinist system that eats people up.
Stiegler coins the term “hypersynchronization” for something that is close to what Sampson’s online somnabulism describes: the process of how digital algorithms synchronize the attention and memory of millions of individual to themselves, forcing them to consume the same media and follow the same trends. If this is already true for the Western systems and FAANG and adjacent platforms that Stiegler is discussing, then it is even more true for the Walled Garden model and the duopoly of Kakao and Naver. Their domination of the Korean internet exacerbates a hypersynchronization which maps onto the survivalism as described by Kim.
However, the duopoly of Kakao and Naver also shows a crucial difference with the hypersynchronized as it is described by Stiegler. Stiegler notes that hypersynchronization works by way of destroying the social systems, the destruction of intergenerational passing on of knowledge and a way of being and a collective will that binds these generations, through this making humans mindless slaves for algorithmic control where there is no more “epoch” but only the “absence of an epoch”, that is the absence of a collective will and of the time necessary to reflect on a shared past by way of technology and to project into the future by way of technology.
But in Korea this did not happen. The entire story of survivalism is the story of an epoch that remains. From the Park era onwards, the collective will is that the nation must remain, must survive, must become more and more advanced. While Stiegler argues that with the onset of digitalization the threshold is crossed into the absence of epoch, and with that into nihilism, Korea’s survivalism is a clear story, a persisting epoch from the Park era. Precisely as we argued against Sampson, history matters. The onset of fear after the IMF crisis, coinciding precisely with the ICT boom, was not the destruction of this epoch and the social systems or the social ideal of the human being laid out in the Park era, but rather its crystallization and the simultaneous falling away of the collective as something to fall back on.
It is this that fully crystallizes the dual theory of mimicry in Korea, the move to simultaneously want to disappear into the crowd and to engage in competition so as to survive. It is what Chang has called “individualization without individualism”. Instead of valuing the self-directed, independent person, society still clings to traditional collectivist and state-centric values. People are physically alone or acting as standalone economic units, but they are still constrained by old societal rules, only leading to the further tightening and mutual acceleration of the Confucian-Capitalism we derived from Chang.
Stiegler argues that the disruption that comes from what he calls “Computational-Capitalism” (which is a capitalism that deploys psychotechnologies en masse leading to hypersynchronization) leads to Social Darwinism because it dissolves the law, destroys public power, eliminates social and intergenerational bonds and reduces everything to efficient cause. But as we have seen, the survivalism of Korea, which Hong Jung Kim argued is akin to a form of Social Darwinism, is the product of intact social systems.
While Stiegler’s Social Darwinism is anarchic chaos, Korean Social Darwinism is institutional and top-down. The 1997 IMF crisis provides the already existing social system with the tools to spread this competitive drive faster and to turn it into an individual competition. When the ICT boom coincided with the crisis and the removal of any collective saving mechanisms (leaving only collective demand), this attitude got further intensified by it becoming dispersed via a decentralized digital network funneled through a walled garden structure that meets Koreans in the comfort of their homes.
It is in this coinciding of a verticality long gone in the West and the futuristic accelerated tendencies of its society that Korea’s Compressed Modern uniqueness again comes to light. While Kyung Hyun Kim does not name Compressed Modernity, he argues that Samsung displays the same temporal strangeness and blurring between digital and physical as K-Pop, which, we saw in chapter 3, he designates specifically as maintaining something of a pre-hyperreal.
When it comes to its double temporality, Kim shows that Samsung displays a number of past-oriented practices. It is one of the few megaconglomerates in the world that still runs on principles of Fordist vertical integration; everything is produced in house, in part because of ties with the government. Similar to the nation of Korea in general and its early creation of internet platforms, Samsung would quickly begin to utilize American-brought CDMA networks to create a more connected and digital society and to launch their own devices in the digital age. Kim speaks of a “strange convergence between [its] neo-Confucian management system and the Internet of Things”, with Samsung building a bridge between its real-world presence and Confucian derived hierarchy and its global interconnectedness. Kim argues furthermore that Samsung’s Confucian values ironically allowed for “sustaining the speed and efficiency for rapid decision making processes more characteristic of start-up venue’s than a large conglomerate”.
With our exposé on the way in which the online dynamics shape Korean society, the vertical walled garden of its online world and the underlying dual mimicry, the same seems to hold true for much of the nation. Similar to Samsung, becomes a mirror of the digital world, where the speed of the internet is rivalled by and exacerbates the speed of society as a whole, furthering its “ppalli-ppalli” demand of the citizens that live within it if they want to survive. As the psychotechnology, the idol comes to stand at the centre of these dynamics, turning the two worlds into a single shared space, akin to Samsung itself.
And yet only the idol can be said to fully bridge the two worlds, as only the idol can be mimicked. While companies ultimately remain faceless institutions that can engineer and shape the idol, the idol itself is the only figure that manages to go beyond blurring the line by embodying both fully, thus allowing, in Kyung Hyun Kim’s words, for the re-humanization of the digital world. But the idol equally allows for the digitalization (and objectification) of those that exist in the physical world, who in mimicry of the idol come to treat themselves as technology to be optimized. It is in that sense the perfect psychotechnology, because it goes beyond a product one can buy, a trend one follows or a viral dance on TikTok, instead providing you the illusion that you can become the idol, a process that can never end.
We have up until now focussed primarily on the horror of this dynamic, and this is not without reason. As we are mapping the way the idol spreads, we will find in encountering that spread only latent potentials, hidden behind layers of actual poison. And we are not done yet. If chapter 3 mapped the spread within the fan economy, this chapter moved to an analysis of Korean cyberspace and entanglement with Korean competitive dynamics. Before we get to whether the latent human potential that we argued exists within the idol can ever come to turn to a cure, we have to continue our analysis of the spread. If the idol - and indeed Korea’s - blurring of time leads to its blurring of the digital world and the physical world, we will then move to an analysis of the country’s physical landscape where we shall come to see how, in similar fashion to the internet, the idol comes to be defined by, and in turn further defines Korean life, ultimately becoming the vector of survivalist spread. As we will find out, to understand the physical landscape of Korea is to understand Seoul.