David Tizzard is a professor at Seoul Women’s University, holds a PhD in Korean Studies, and hosts the Korea Deconstructed podcast. He has lived and worked in Seoul for more than two decades. Reach him at datizzard@swu.ac.kr.
The Korean Dystopia is a Western Coping Mechanism
Courtesy of Hello Photho
By David A. Tizzard
Journalists love to get Korea wrong. Some are paid to share explosive takes that feed into the subsconscoius orientalist views of the wider world; others just do it for the social media clout. And you only realize how wrong they are when you get off the internet and spend an afternoon in Sokcho, Daegu, or Chuncheon. For anyone that does this, something becomes immediately apparent. Korea isn’t actually that bad. (Or great). The people get along. The kids go to school. The young people date. And everyone drinks ice americano.
There is a weird sensation that comes from watching someone deliver a sociological autopsy of a nation in a 14-minute YouTube video essay. Perhaps it’s just the new era where the average internet user is operating under the delusion that a Netflix subscription is functionally equivalent to a PhD. However it arises, the narrative they’ve constructed is a sort of paint-by-numbers cyberpunk dystopia. The chaebol function as overlords, capitalism has been cranked up to some terminal level of suffering, and joy is lowkey against the law. Every Korean male is a toxic subterranean incel, while every Korean female is simultaneously a militant, radicalized femcel and a helpless, lookism-obsessed victim of the cosmetic surgery industrial complex. I mean, have these people been to Samgakji recently?
What’s perhaps most peculiar is the mainstreaming of a culturally permissible brand of xenophobia. If you were to apply this exact same level of sweeping, essentialist degradation to virtually any other nation in the Global South, the online collective would quite rightly descend upon you with the fury of a thousand righteous HR departments. But Korea is currently occupying this weird hyper-visible cultural sweet spot where it is simultaneously a global entertainment superpower and, at the same time, a distant canvas for Western anxieties. Thus it has become bizarrely fashionable to treat its entire population not as complicated human beings, but as symbols in some trend-driven game of clickbait farming.
To be honest I’m not sure I’m capable of unpeeling the collective geopolitical unconscious, but it seems to be more than just random internet noise. Something closer to a narrative pathology. Western legacy media generally frames South Korea as a hyper-compressed moral fable. Look at what happens if your pop music is too succesful or if you develop too quickly. “This is what you will become,” they warn in the pages of the Guardian and the Washington Times, “if you ever think about trying to restructure your country in a modern way.” The narrative is similar in effect if not form to the sepia-toned racist filter that is applied in video to all the footage of Mexico. They will often use a grey one when showing you Beijing or Pyongyang as well --- because of course, whatever else might be said about those places, the sun rarely shines there like it does in London. The roundness of Korea, like these other places, is flattened out, put on a screen, and shoved in your face where you make an immediate reaction: “Oh!” “Really?” “Well, that’s not very good, is it?” And if you trace the origins of this particular rhetoric, it seems to lead directly to a long-standing coping mechanism regarding East Asia. For the sake of a weekend column, I’ll generalize a bit, but it goes something like this.
When the East Asian economies began pulling off these rapid leaps from postwar devastation to global tech-dominance, it shook the West hard. None predicted it. Few wanted it. For a region that had long operated under the unexamined assumption that it possessed a monopoly on modern human flourishing, the tigers/dragons led to cognitive dissonance. The resulting intellectual workaround was as brilliant as it was defensive: “Sure, they can build the semiconductors and the hyper-efficient public transit, but look at the human cost.”
Thus, the "Western Society is Still Better" preservation project was born. To keep that conclusion comfortably intact, the very real and very standard structural hiccups of Korean modernization such as labor stresses, demographic challenges, and urban isolation must be aggressively upscaled, distorted, and marinated in an oddly Victorian tone that you almost never see applied to, say, the rust belt of Ohio or the banlieues of Paris.
Historically, this Western "dystopian" template was first aimed at Japan. Back in the late 80s and 90s, when the American imagination was absolutely terrified of Tokyo buying up Manhattan, Japan was the original blade-runner-esque, soul-crushing corporate hive-mind. But as Japan's economic engine cooled into comfortable stagnation, the narrative got shipped across the sea and reassembled over Seoul. It will go somewhere else soon but at the moment every other YouTube video and Instagram reel loves blowing up Korean society hard.
And it has support. Because while the West needs East Asia to be structurally defective to validate its own Enlightenment-era exceptionalism, Southeast Asian online spaces are also using it because it is an incredibly effective stick with which to beat a regional heavyweight. It allows for a kind of reputational leveling: "You may have the global cultural exports and the towering GDP that we don’t have yet, but beneath the K-pop, you are broken in a way that we aren’t. We didn’t sell out yet. And therefore you are no better than us." This too feels like a defense mechanism masquerading as critique. A way to process the suffocating shadow cast by Korea's cultural gravity by insisting that the shadow is cast by a monster.
Yet while the internet busies itself constructing this bizarre version of Korea, the actual country carries on being relentlessly, almost boringly, normal. The trains arrive when they are supposed to. And they are clean. Free from troubling people or worrying stains. Grandmothers power past you on mountain trails with lungs seemingly forged from titanium and powered by vegetables and vitamins. Children still walk to school and go off to hagwons in those weird yellow buses. Office workers grumble about their bosses. Couples argue over dinner. Tens of millions of people get on with the complicated business of living lives that refuse to fit into somebody else's narrative, irrespective of the virality it achieves.
Korea is neither a dystopian warning nor a futuristic theme park. It is simply a modern country adapting, sometimes elegantly, sometimes awkwardly, often with mistakes, but doing so at extraordinary speed. It isn't hiding from anyone either. It's there in the subway, the apartments, the mountains, and the convenience store. But you'll never find it if you keep searching for it inside an algorithm. There’re only monsters there.