hankyoreh

Ahn Hee-kyung｜American Journalist

<On December 27, 2021, at a cafe in Gangnam, Seoul, I launched the vaccination history management app "COOV". I swiped my phone through the scanner, reassured that my U.S. vaccination records were on file with the public health department and that I no longer had to keep them on a handwritten list for everyone to see. The result is "cannot be scanned"!

<Two friends in their mid-50s were turned away at the Deoksugung National Museum of Contemporary Art when they stopped by to see an exhibition by Park Soo-geun. Contrary to the slogan of the exhibition guide site that it is possible to purchase at the site, only the Internet purchase was allowed at the site. To pay the 2,000 won (about $1.99) entrance fee, the two looked at their smartphone screens and moved their fingers while muttering whether they were talking to themselves or responding to sentences written on the site. However, I finally gave up and decided to take a walk around the Forbidden City. Heh hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee heeinged to obey the machine but he failed again and again, he probably didn't want to suffer any more frustration.

<My 84-year-old mother also took a bus to a major supermarket that strongly recommended making a card to cancel the Samsung card, but the card company's office had disappeared. I was told to cancel online. Is it because of the emptiness? My mother confessed that she was dazed for a while because the intersection she had passed for nearly 30 years looked like an unknown place. The world of running errands on foot, or at best on a community bus, is fading away.

<In the summer of 2019, a group of female workers stood on a toll booth on a toll road in Seoul. They resisted to reverse the collective dismissal of 1,500 people. In the winter of 2022, many people who pass through the high pass (automatic toll collection system for toll roads, equivalent to Japan's ETC) will be in the whirlwind of "digital capitalism" who can not even know who is the main actor in the fight. I'm in. Growth in the quaternary industry is being talked about, but the reality hits us with very concrete inequalities. This is a plundering destruction of consumer rights and public services, which, like a repeating symbol, leans towards the destruction of the labor market. It is an “unauthorized outsourcing of the government” and a sabotage of the government that pretends not to know about the depression of the people for the profit of the company.

//The Hankyoreh Newspaper

Ahn Hee Kyung｜Journalist in the United States (Contact japan@hani.co.kr)