Tech and Korea part 2 of 3: the internet and computers

TLDR: This meandering installment has me crawl further out on a limb by talking about two subjects that I don’t know much about, economics and Windows. Enjoy.

The previous installment had me trying to make the argument that because of the timing of Korea’s rise, it [fortunately] missed out on some features we would normally associate with developed countries and I see Korea as having one foot in the developed economy camp and one in the developing camp. That timing also may explain other things and I think that timing explains a lot about internet/wi-fi in Korea. In the first scene of Parasite, the Kim family is trying to get on a nearby wi-fi network, any network.

A dank semi-basement apartment. KI-WOO, 24, runs from corner to corner searching desperately for a Wi-Fi signal. Various networks pop up, but they’re all password-protected.
KI-WOO: No! Not you too “iptime.” [iptime is the most popular router in Korea] Ki-Jung! Upstairs neighbor finally locked up his Wi-Fi.
KI-JUNG: Try ‘123456789.’ Then try it backwards.
KI-WOO: No luck.
[…]
CHUNG-SOOK: Our phones have been suspended for weeks, and now the neighbors have shut us out. What’s your plan?
[…]
KI-TEK: Son, if one seeks Wi-Fi–One must reach into the heavens. Up.
KI-WOO: Yes, Father.

Ki-Woo raises the phone high as he heads into the —
BATHROOM The bathroom is long and narrow and has a raised ‘altar’ at the far end where the toilet sits. The odd placement is necessitated by the semi-basement’s lower position in relation to the septic tank. Ki-Woo walks in and climbs onto the toilet seat. He continues to fish for a signal when —
KI-WOO: BOOYAH!
KI-JUNG: You got it?
KI-WOO: You see it? “coffeenara_2G”. I guess it’s a new coffee joint. Must be nearby.

It’s a bit better than than. Most coffee shops and restaurants have a password that is posted inside the shop. Or you get a password on the bottom of your receipt. Fort Knox, look out!

If my understanding of the timing is correct, Korea’s taking up of the internet corresponded to the mad rush of the Asian Tiger economies, which was then derailed by the Asian financial crisis in 1997 and the IMF intervention in Korea’s economy. It might be interesting to throw a few links here, this one arguing for it from the time and this a discussion of what it wrought

In making his first budget proposal as South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, the current president, recalled the dark days that, in his words, “upended the lives of all Koreans”, and he pledged to address the rise of inequality in the wake of that event.

Although South Korea has long since recovered from the crisis, Moon argues that effects are still felt today: “The socio-economic structure that was transformed by the foreign exchange crisis has damaged the fabric of people’s everyday lives.”

The terms of the IMF bailout, accepted by South Korea, stipulated tight fiscal policy to manage government debt, opening the economy to foreign investment and ownership, and perhaps most significantly, labour market reforms making it easier for firms to hire and fire workers.

The wikipedia article gives the basics.

South Korea actually had a gold _donation_ campaign to help pay off that debt.

The crazy thing is, this wasn’t the first time it happened. In 1907, Korea was hit with a reparations bill from Japan and men stopped smoking while women sold heirlooms to pay it off. (This is one of the things that Koreans remember, but Japanese forget) The only thing I can think that is similar is Indians donating their gold when they went to war with China in 1962.

While this is an interesting window into aspects of the Korean psyche, the more important point is that the IMF restructuring extended to all aspects of society. One of my colleagues who studied at Seoul National University at the time (one of the three universities making up the SKY acronym, the other two are Korea University and Yonsei University) remembers the library pulling the bulbs from every second light fixture in order to reduce electricity costs. It shouldn’t be a surprise that it impacted how the internet and computers operated in Korean society. This article is a great description of that time along with some things about gendered society that I hope to use in the next installment.

I’d suggest that the massive upheaval is why the installed userbase for government and business computers is not very up to date, consisting of Windows 7 and Windows XP. Both came out after the crisis, but they are relatively easy to pirate, so if an office reduced their budget by reducing the number of legal copies and then conveniently installing pirate copies, that is one way around it. There is no Mac audience in Korea to speak of (due, I think, to the fact that indigenous companies can assemble computers). As Windows 7 reaches its demise as a supported operating system, the Korean government is scrambling. But at private schools, I’ve heard lots of stories about teachers being asked to avoid things that are going to give them a run-in with the Microsoft license servers.

I’m assuming here that the programming for earlier windows and the internet was quite different that what it is now. I’m not sure, maybe it is all incremental, but I felt like using the internet on a desktop in Korea was like taking a time machine and I wonder if this is the reason why.

Koreans do have access to up to date computers and software, but they aren’t at home, they are at PC ban, where people play games. In Parasite, the younger Kim goes to a PC ban to forge the documents showing he graduated from Yonsei University (one of the SKY unis, translated in the movie as ‘Oxford’). This is a Conan O’Brian segment about him going into a PC ban in Seoul. Note the English ability of the guy who helps him and his typing skills.

And here is another window into those PC ban.

And because that home userbase is still predominant for things like banking and personal information, designing internet applications for a PC has people still using that framework rather than more up to date systems. When I entered attendance and grades into the university portal, I found I couldn’t do it from my mac, but had to use Windows Explorer. When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, and my impression is that almost all the interfaces were using these older frameworks. Furthermore, you can see the idea of hammer and nails with a lot of the ways the university used to process students. I was supposed to keep attendance and the program was set up so that if a student missed a specific number of classes, you could only give them an F. Also, larger classes only allow you to give a limited number of higher grades to enforce the curve thru the portal. I felt like there were these sorts of ‘solutions’ to lots of problems in Korea.

In addition most people use Samsung smartphones, which means they use Android smartphone apps with little or no concern for cross compatibility. I think this explains the lack of security consciousness as well as the layering of multiple confirmation screens to substitute for actual security. One way to think of this is that Korea is like a baseball team with a great pitcher, but no real bullpen, by which I mean you’ll get some incredible apps that make life easier, but they are surrounded by half-assed implementations that break or don’t work in the first place, or work for a portion of the users, so rather than fix that implementation, they will make an alternative one. XP support stopped in 2014 and there were task forces to try and figure out what to do, but no solution was found, and enough copies of Windows 7 were passed around to paper that over, but a reckoning is probably coming as noted above. To me, it is amazing to have 5G everywhere, and to go to my computer and get a warning when I access government or school portals that I’m not using Windows XP. For some things, I can just ignore it, for other things, I’d have to go to my office and fire up the school computer, or just do without. I think we can see that in banking most clearly.

In any developed society, banks tend to be the most conservative elements (think Mary Poppins, right?) and that is no different in Korea. While there are lots of small steps, ATMs, cash cards, etc, the banks are still clinging to their traditional models.

In 2017, Kakao bank, an internet only bank, came online trying to ‘disrupt’ the industry. Kakao Talk is the most used messaging app in Korea (LINE, which is run by Naver, a Korean company, is a distant second in Korea but the most popular by far in Japan) and had gotten significant traction. This article points to some of the ideas that were used and built in to the company’s plans.

On the other hand, the conservatism of the brick and mortar banks, coupled with the internet landscape, had them respond to the advent of Kakao bank by jumping into online interfaces and going with downloadable apps for banking. But because of the situation, they ended up needing to make multiple apps both to manage security and to deal with the wide range of conditions one gets with various Android OS. (yes, I know, it seems like an accident waiting to happen, but both here and in Japan, it’s more security by confusion) One article that I can’t locate gave a number like 12 or 15 apps that a bank would have for dealing with the same tasks.

This article talks about the single app focus of Kakao, which to me seems like a no-brainer, but is placed front and center.

and this article has more on how Kakao bank is different.

I was looking forward to trying it, I thought it would be great to leave behind desktop banking (which is still rather clunky in Japan) and try app based banking, especially since I, as a foreigner, I was not permitted to use Kakao bank. That moves us to the National Identity Card.

One might be tempted to say it is just like a US Social Security card and think it started in Korea in 1962. However, it goes a lot further than that. As the wikipedia page points out, the card has antecedents from the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1897) After an assassination attempt by North Korean forces, the implementation was tightened up and now, the number functions as your National Health ID, your banking id, your number for dealing with any governmental issues. It amazed me that one could read off your birthdate and where you were born. This system also caused problems for defectors from North Korea.

It has been easy to identify defectors because of their resident registration number, which appears on ROK citizen identity cards. The second and the third of the last seven digits of the number indicate the place of registration. Up until June 2007, all defectors were registered in Ansŏng
City, home to the Hanawŏn resettlement centre, and so share the same two digits, which are known to the public. People with the Ansŏng City code, even those born there, find it difficult to obtain work and are routinely rejected for Chinese visas because the authorities in Beijing are concerned that they may be travelling there to meet family.

The number is used in many daily transactions, such as endorsing a check or opening a bank account, making defectors feel vulnerable to prejudice. Several groups, including the Association for North Korean Defectors and the Committee for North Korean Democratisation, pressed the government to issue registration numbers using the location where defectors first live after leaving the resettlement centre to make it impossible for them to be identified in
this way.

The first six digits of a national identification registration number begins with the person’s birth year, month and date,
followed by a hyphen and a seven digit number. The first digit indicates gender (one for male and two for female), followed
by a two-digit number that identifies the location of registration and then four random digits. The identification numbers for
those registered in Ansŏng City area are: ******- 125**** for males, and ******- 225**** for females, numbers based on initial residence after leaving Hanawŏn. The Association for North Korean Defectors has called for new identity card numbers for those already in the South. In 30 January 2009, the Act on the Protection and Settlement Support of Residents Escaped from North Korea was revised, and according to Article 19-3, a defector can
apply to change the registration number if it has been issued based on the Hanawŏn resettlement centre.

The National Identity Card is one of the keys to South Korea being able to implement a lot of the COVID-19 measures they have.

Also, because your NIC is tied into your bank accounts and your credit/debit cards, it is much easier to investigate tax fraud, which can be reported by citizens. This fascinating paper discusses the differences between Korean and Japanese tax evasion and says that Koreans are less tax compliant, so it may be possible that the stronger push for the identity card (as opposed to Japan, which does not have one) is because it makes it easier for the government to investigate cases like these.

While you can be a tourist, as a foreigner, it is virtually impossible to do anything non touristy if you don’t have an ARC (Alien Registration Card), which provides you with the equivalent of a National Identity Card. Until I got my card, I was unable to open a bank account, get a phone contract, rent an apartment. Once I got it, I only had to walk into the doctor’s office, write down my number and any treatments were administered at the National Health insurance rate. I didn’t have to do many of the other things but carrying out many of those things in Japan and hanging out with lots of foreigners working in Korea had me quiz them about these sorts of things.

In a sense, I was like a stubborn old person who wasn’t going to give up going to talk to someone at the bank, or fill out a paper to apply for something. So you should take my plaints about Korean internet with a grain of salt. One could argue that they have been leap frogging, and by having the Financial crisis put them in a state of suspended animation, they weaned the populace off of desktop computing and are poised to take advantage of the power of smartphones. On the other hand, jumping over these things could (though I’m not tech-y enough to identify them) create lacuna. To draw a parallel to my language learning, there were a number of things that were ‘just like Japanese’, so I was able to skip ahead. However, later, I’d often realize that skipping over those points might mean that I didn’t catch more subtle interactions or collocations and so my language skill ended up being hollow. But it’s not really realistic for me to go back and review those points, just like it wouldn’t be realistic to have Koreans recreate the computer trends that they missed. It ended up being how a friend described Korean society as something designed by a genius 15 year old who didn’t have enough lived life experience to foresee the deadends and potholes that people like him or her might run into.

There seems to be a bunch of people familiar with programming here, so I’m curious if what I have sketched out makes sense. I also said that this was three parts, but I’ve folded the National ID card into this, so suggestions are welcome. Also want to write Alcohol and Korea and Sexism and Korea. Hope it is of interest.