The Alpha Human versus the Korean: Figuring the Human through Technoscientific Networks

Abstract

What does the human look like in South Korea? This article identifies two different figurations of the human in contemporary South Korea: the alpha human and the Korean. The alpha human is a human imagined, shaped, and circulated on the network of technosciences and media; it is embraced by technoscientific researchers, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and journalists. The alpha human’s defining characteristic is the extended longevity, or even immortality, made possible by the developments in biomedicine, artificial intelligence, and robotics. On the other hand, the figure of the Korean is imagined to be going through a crisis of survival, as it is excluded or displaced from technoscientific as well as socioeconomic networks. It is represented by the indexes of fertility, inequality, and suicide, as well as reports of lived experiences of Koreans across generations. What does it mean to craft such a futuristic figure, or even a fantasy, of the immortally networked alpha human when the Korean is figured as experiencing dispossession and disparity? This article suggests that the alpha human is a decontextualized figure that can propose only technofuturistic escape but no vision for collective action.

• alpha human
• Korean
• figuration
• imagination
• network
• technofuturistic escape

Acknowledgment

This article started as a short presentation at the workshop Homo Sapiens, Mortality, and the Internet in Contemporary Asia, held at the National University of Singapore in March 2016. As organizers of the workshop or editors for this special issue, Connor Graham, Alfred Montoya, Eric Kerr, Shekhar Krishnan, and Gregory Clancey have been extremely helpful for shaping initial ideas, turning them into an essay, and then revising it. I am especially indebted to Dr. Graham for his encouragement and care throughout the process. I am also grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments for revision and to Heewon Kim for her research assistance.

Notes

¹ I use the term the human as an idea or a category and distinguish it from human beings that refers to embodied and mortal persons. The distinction is not an absolute one, and the two may constitute each other, but using these two different terms, where necessary, can help articulate my perspective in this article. I am grateful to the guest editors, who suggested this distinction. See Graham and Montoya (2018).

² The Korean word used here for “person” is inmul (인물, 人物). The word is gender-neutral and is often used to refer to a person in terms of his or her appearance, character, or capability. In ordinary usage, the word is almost never used for nonhuman entities. It does not have a legal connotation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chihyung Jeon

Chihyung Jeon teaches STS at the Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea. His research interests include the relationship between humans and technologies, the entanglement of politics and engineering, and the cultures of artificial intelligence, robotics, and simulation. He is a founding member of Epi, a quarterly magazine of science, culture, and politics published in Korean since 2017.