"Stiegler coins the term “hypersynchronization” for something that is close to what Sampson’s online somnabulism describes: the process of how digital algorithms synchronize the attention and memory of millions of individual to themselves, forcing them to consume the same media and follow the same trends. If this is already true for the Western systems and FAANG and adjacent platforms that Stiegler is discussing, then it is even more true for the Walled Garden model and the duopoly of Kakao and Naver. Their domination of the Korean internet exacerbates a hypersynchronization which maps onto the survivalism as described by Kim.
However, the duopoly of Kakao and Naver also shows a crucial difference with the hypersynchronized as it is described by Stiegler. Stiegler notes that hypersynchronization works by way of destroying the social systems, the destruction of intergenerational passing on of knowledge and a way of being and a collective will that binds these generations, through this making humans mindless slaves for algorithmic control where there is no more “epoch” but only the “absence of an epoch”, that is the absence of a collective will and of the time necessary to reflect on a shared past by way of technology and to project into the future by way of technology.
But in Korea this did not happen. The entire story of survivalism is the story of an epoch that remains. From the Park era onwards, the collective will is that the nation must remain, must survive, must become more and more advanced. While Stiegler argues that with the onset of digitalization the threshold is crossed into the absence of epoch, and with that into nihilism, Korea’s survivalism is a clear story, a persisting epoch from the Park era. Precisely as we argued against Sampson, history matters. The onset of fear after the IMF crisis, coinciding precisely with the ICT boom, was not the destruction of this epoch and the social systems or the social ideal of the human being laid out in the Park era, but rather its crystallization and the simultaneous falling away of the collective as something to fall back on."
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