The Problem with "Ppalli Ppalli"

Much has been made in recent years of how wired South Korea is, and how this is evidence that Koreans are on the leading edge of the internet age, promising to leave Western laggards like the United States in the dust. This sort of talk is particularly prone to issue from the mouths of agitators for some form of expensive government activism or other, but what such propagandists for more public spending never bother to note is that internet connectivity is hardly a solid measure of IT sophistication in general, and I can't think of a better way to illustrate the weakness of this link than the story currently on Slashdot about the Korean government warning its citizens against the adoption of Windows Vista - not because Vista is bad and/or dangerous, but because large numbers of important Korean businesses have been built on the braindead technology that is ActiveX, support for which is finally being constrained in Vista in order to tighten up security. Some measure of responsibility lies with Microsoft for introducing ActiveX to begin with, but the company is to be praised for finally relegating this gigantic security hazard to a less prominent position, while the lion's share of the blame must surely lie with all the Korean companies which chose to tie themselves completely to a single platform long known to be extremely insecure, all in the name of being on some imaginary leading edge leading to the abyss.

This kind of expensive cockup is precisely what one gets with "ppalli ppalli" ("hurry hurry!") thinking working within a highly conformist mindset - people rushing en masse down blind alleys and off precipices like characters in the videogame "Lemmings" - and it can only be made worse when governments are stirred up into embarking on expensive programs by nationalistic opinionators and pseudo-intellectuals obsessed with the metaphor of technological progress as a zero-sum competition with "winning" and "losing" countries: it's obvious the "digital divide" and "we are losing to Korea!!!" propagandists have learned nothing from Japan's analog HDTV program or its stillborn "fifth generation computing" initiative, both of which in their time also stirred up similar pressures for governments to hurry up and "do something" ...

PS: Foreign Policy provides a fine example of precisely the sort of inane "falling behind" rhetoric I'm talking about. Consider that Mr. Bleha is putting out such pap in an age when American firms like Intel, AMD, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Ebay and Yahoo are dominating the technology world as never before, while internet innovators like Youtube, Blogger, MySpace, Flickr and 90% of the Web 2.0 outfits anyone's ever heard of are all based in the United States ...

Comments

[Kenji]

You may find this interesting.

http://www.kanai.net/weblog/archive/2007/01/26/00h53m55s

[Abiola]

Gen nails the problem right on the head. What's astonishing is that, going by what he writes at least, Korean developers have learnt absolutely *nothing* from this episode. The problem was everybody tying themselves to the same proprietary, insecure platform in the first place, not just that they failed to rework their sites for IE 7 and Windows Vista. It's a joke to label such a collection of slow learners as "leaders" America's about to "fall behind."