The shrimp and the algorithm
There are always these little Korean things that both delight and mildly terrify me, the kind of quotidian oddities that make you feel like you’re living inside a simulation that’s been coded by someone who is definitely on the spectrum. Of course on paper the country looks familiar enough: there’s the pop music, subways, hamburgers, coffee chains, partisan politics, nightclubs, and an alarming number of teenagers pounding cans of Monster. But then there are the things that make it wonderfully weird. The people walking up the hill behind the apartment decked out as if they’re climbing Everest. The fact that shops and stores leave expensive goods outside unattended as if theft were just an outdated Western superstition. Cars parked across each other with the handbrakes off so strangers have to move them around in an urban ballet of inconvenience. And then there’s the almost erotic national fascination with AI. Not just among students trying to get through boring assignments or journalists and artists outsourcing their integrity to meet deadlines and pay rent, but at the instit
