A little backstory to Korea's political scene: left leaning political power has come to power , similar to UK's Starmer, and have started implementing draconian surveillance laws.
There's almost no real opposition to stop these type of insane laws that violate individual freedoms. Expect more weirdness out of Korea
Sure buddy, just omit the fact that the last president tried to do a coup and is now serving a long prison sentence. It's all the fault of the left leaning guy, there was no censorship or state surveillance in Korea before that.
He's a twonk and Britain is essentially a police state at this point. The American Revolutionary War was fought over far less than what is going on right now.
British people won’t like to hear it, but I have long suspected that a generic traits of bravery and courage were drastically reduced from men in Europe in WWII to an extend that we’re just seeing effects of now.
UK, France, Germany etc were mortally wounded in WWII.
Traditional labels are becoming useless anyway, liberal can mean anything from libertarian free market enjoyer to radical progressive depending on who you are talking to. And I am talking about self-identified labels!
You also have many right wingers (internationally) moving towards things like industrial policy, subsidies, and a populist labor focus (coupled with anti-immigration rhetoric of course). In some cases, even nationalization is under discussion. It’s a wild time to try and label things.
Starmer is a freaking Fabian. Saying he is not a leftist or socialist is just an outright lie. At best it is intended to make out destructionist leftism to be "normal" or "centrist".
No traditional media talk about this as much as it should be. No one seems to care but the always-angry, chronically online. I had no high hopes for free internet in this country but it's getting worse than I've ever imagined.
Korea is backwards in technology in every possible way.
- For the longest time, you needed a windows computer to access any sort of government or banking service, and it's still the case for most services
- Because of the reliance on crappy windows laptops, you see everyone who uses a laptop carries an external mouse around to places like coffee shops (bc their trackpads suck)
- the de-facto document format are crappy hancom formats
- watching korean news is farcical - every time they cut to public footage, literally 80% of the frame is blurred. I see no point in even watching the news.
- APIs and API documentation for stuff is sooooo poorly designed/written. Like, it's a f-ing joke.
- External map providers were iced out of hte market until this past year
- You need a phone number to sign up for literally anything.
There are so many more examples but these are just the ones off the top of my head.
Koreas issues arent political. This is what happens in pure oligopolies. People on twitter love to fantasize about Korea being so technofuturistic but the truth is that the startup culture is terrible, there's no venture capital scene, and the big companies write all the rules
Minority Report wasn't supposed to be an instruction manual ffs.
Also, will the AI curtail artistic activity? Things it doesn't recognize? We had watchdogs on personal expression before, one of the outcomes was "degenerate art" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_art]
There's almost no real opposition to stop these type of insane laws that violate individual freedoms. Expect more weirdness out of Korea
cf. https://www.politicalcompass.org/uk2024
Even if you consider that page biased in whatever way - it's still useful for comparisons on the same scale. E.g. https://www.politicalcompass.org/norway2025
UK, France, Germany etc were mortally wounded in WWII.
You also have many right wingers (internationally) moving towards things like industrial policy, subsidies, and a populist labor focus (coupled with anti-immigration rhetoric of course). In some cases, even nationalization is under discussion. It’s a wild time to try and label things.
A “I vouch for this person” system?
- For the longest time, you needed a windows computer to access any sort of government or banking service, and it's still the case for most services
- Because of the reliance on crappy windows laptops, you see everyone who uses a laptop carries an external mouse around to places like coffee shops (bc their trackpads suck)
- the de-facto document format are crappy hancom formats
- watching korean news is farcical - every time they cut to public footage, literally 80% of the frame is blurred. I see no point in even watching the news.
- APIs and API documentation for stuff is sooooo poorly designed/written. Like, it's a f-ing joke.
- External map providers were iced out of hte market until this past year
- You need a phone number to sign up for literally anything.
There are so many more examples but these are just the ones off the top of my head.
Koreas issues arent political. This is what happens in pure oligopolies. People on twitter love to fantasize about Korea being so technofuturistic but the truth is that the startup culture is terrible, there's no venture capital scene, and the big companies write all the rules
Also, will the AI curtail artistic activity? Things it doesn't recognize? We had watchdogs on personal expression before, one of the outcomes was "degenerate art" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_art]