It’s a Wednesday night, and I’m on the phone with my mom when she hits me with: “Have you seen that KPop Demon Hunters movie”. Oh have I… I don’t tell her that I’ve listened to the soundtrack of 5 songs twice that day alone, once on my walk to work and once on my way home. My group chats are full of stickers of Rumi, the purple-haired lead, and other chibi versions of the movie’s cast. Two separate groups of friends are already planning Saja Boys costumes for Halloween. It’s one thing for me and my mid-twenties friends to be swept away by the latest trends, but why is my baby boomer mom, in her insular community of South Asian near-retirees in suburban Texas, asking me about KPop Demon Hunters?

This craze is a relatively new phenomenon, but not an untraceable one. In 1997 the Asian Financial Crisis deeply shook South East Asia and eventually crashed into South Korean markets. What started in Thailand, with the Baht collapsing under speculative pressure, rippled to Indonesia, Malaysia, and eventually to the uniquely and impressively sturdy South Korean economy. Post cold war and the US-overseen separation of North and South Korea, South Korea had forged itself a stable, albeit unconventional, pedestal to support their rapid industrialization. For decades, its growth had been astonishing: the so-called “Miracle on the Han River” transformed a war-torn country into a major industrial power within a single generation. But the miracle had a fragile foundation.

There’s a tension so tight it is threatening to break, and it is between the way we understand ourselves in digital and the way we understand ourselves in physical spaces. The fluidity of our personal identities is amplified online: we are many things to many people. The same is true for our lives in the physical world, but that fluidity is restricted by the laws of physics in a way that it is not true when we are online.

This mainstream global adoption (and often obsession) with Korean media is often dubbed the “Hallyu” wave. Hallyu has transformed South Korea into the cultural exporter that it is today.

“Additionally, this framework will help avoid sensations like apathy, irritation, or overwhelm, which tend to be tied to understimulation and overstimulation.”

The “Generative” part of “Generative AI” only deepens this division. One sees it in avatars, “profile pictures in the style of… [insert artist],” identity crises driven by long conversations with LLMs. We can be anyone or anything we want, but does that mean we lose all solidity of a sense of who we are? Or do established norms for certain online identities begin to backfire and cause us to be even more prescriptive about what is and is not an acceptable identity? Our perfectly curated avatars versus our decidedly imperfect lives?