By Deauwand Myers
“It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place... The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself — anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide…to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.” — from George Orwell’s magnum opus, “1984.”
South Korea, in many ways, is a kind of quasi-modern-day Israel in one way. For much of its existence, not unlike Poland and Afghanistan, Korea, both a whole Korea and now the bifurcated North and South Korea, has been rolled over by wars, rumors of wars, annexations, conquering, cultural genocide, or made a vassal state, from nations like ancient China. (Korea, or Joseon as it was known at that time, was a tributary state of the Manchus, and thereafter the Qing Empire circa 1636 until 1876. Before this, the Korean government had paid tribute intermittently to the Yuan and Ming dynasties).
Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union via China aiding North Korea during the Korean War, and of course North Korea itself, ironically self-named the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), have all presented existential threats to Korea’s self-determination and national identity, not unlike what Arab states did to Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967. Israel won against three nations, primarily Syria, Egypt and Jordan.
I quote Orwell here because Korea’s planned launch of a sophisticated spy satellite later this month presents both an opportunity and some challenges to Korea as a democratic society. It is, in some ways, too late to ruminate on the status of most nations and the surveillance state that has arisen, particularly after 9/11.
America’s intelligence apparatus, in mere funding, is larger and more sophisticated than any other on the planet, albeit China’s sheer surveillance scope is broader, if for no other reason than its size and population (1.4 billion) and its unabashed autocracy, one in which promises of privacy, personal freedom and, heaven forbid, political dissent, are forbidden; the punishment being imprisonment, torture or worse.
Korea has all the trappings of a wealthy democracy with a vast security apparatus of its own: cameras are everywhere, and the security of its banking system alone is annoyingly strict. At least with my bank, there are three layers of passwords and such just to check my balance on a personal computer.
Surveillance and security after Osama bin Laden has made all the world a security state in ways we haven’t fully comprehended. But even if there were no 9/11, the rise of social media made a Faustian bargain with most of humanity: the world, and all the information and convenience therein, free of charge, for your identity, your data, your very life.
With the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) you will notice that a few clicks to a shopping site, travel site or book search will lead to ads uniquely tailored to your interests; even now, such algorithms can accurately predict one’s age, political affiliations, even one’s sexuality and favorite ethic cuisines. And for some reason, myself included, we, or at least billions of us, have given over all of this information — freely.
Such power has never been accrued and deployed before at this breadth and scope in all of human history; not even Stalin, Hitler, Putin and Mao had such tools, nor the means to use them.
Moreover, some of the richest, most powerful people on Earth are basically data collectors and deployers: Google’s founders, Stanford grads Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos (the richest man on Earth), the Walton family (the wealthiest family in the world, from the Walmart fortune), Oracle’s Larry Ellis, the Lee family of Samsung, and Facebook’s (now under the Meta group) Mark Zuckerberg basically trade on data (Walmart, Samsung, and Amazon indirectly collect data through retail and online sales).
But I really don’t see a better option for the Korean government than to take this action. If we perish for the lack of knowledge, the whole civilized world is at great peril when it comes to North Korea and its exceedingly opaque dictatorship. Infamously, Korea, Japan and the U.S. still know painfully little about the Kim family, and even less about the machinations of the North's nascent and increasingly sophisticated nuclear weapons regime.
Korea is one of only 10 nations to deploy satellites, and with its technological prowess, it’s a wonder why more Korean spy satellites haven’t been launched sooner (and with no media knowledge therein). We are already in a kind of Orwellian dystopia. The age of information is here. Korea might as well take advantage of it to enhance its national security interests.
Deauwand Myers (deauwand@hotmail.com) holds a master’s degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside of Seoul.
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