Journalism, Capital, and Blockchain-Era Tools for Civic Rule

Like American journalism, Korean journalism was formed and developed in close connection with the advance of industrial capitalism. In Korea too, news circulated as a commodity and was governed by normative models — but the specific process differs from the West. Korean news did not undergo spontaneous commodification as in the West. It imported already-commodified news forms from the West.

Why the commercialization of YouTube, Instagram, and social media feels so natural; why civic consciousness and nationalism can persist despite fake news. Fake news does not rise to a level that causes conflict-of-interest chaos because political authenticity and factuality are self-policed and — beyond that — a readers' own maturity is presupposed. Their own rules, which do not cross the invisible line of common sense, are in place.

Unlike its strong drive for democracy, Korea's normative model has neglected the effort to protect social equality from the power of capital. That's because Korea's normative model wasn't born in the process of achieving independence from capital.

Korean press has been political from the start. In Joseon, it was a "bang" (notice) passing along royal orders; in the colonial era, it was Tongnip Sinmun for independence and the Japanese-colonial press for colonization; after that, civic journalism for democracy. Journalism that achieved independence and democracy now unexpectedly finds itself colonized by capital without noticing. You can tell by looking at major dailies and flagship press articles that are no different from tabloid sensationalism and fake news.

As the normative model of journalism (a model that expresses journalism's ideal and regulates its practice) was established, journalism and democracy became symbiotic. From this point on, the notion that democracy is hard to sustain without journalism, and that journalism cannot exist without democracy, took root.

Past revolutions required much time and cost because they presupposed standards of mass awareness and common sense. Even with internal consensus, outside forces often caused them to collapse. But through blockchain, conditions (tools) to overcome this have emerged. It's similar to how you can now sell goods on Amazon without English — without the core competence, using tools the platform provides, you can achieve what you want.

Startups like Ascribe, founded to protect intellectual property in the digital era, are building blockchain-based tools to manage copyrights, permissions, and payments around digital media consumption. A secure distributed ledger system makes it easier to prove the original author of a piece of content and to track who has accessed it.

Electronic voting is undoubtedly far more efficient than paper voting, but concerns about e-voting security and tampering are also high. Storing voting records on a blockchain can strengthen the authenticity and reliability of electronic voting procedures. Blockchain tech can be applied not only to elections of politicians but also to votes such as corporate board elections.

Judicial authorities have not yet adopted blockchain-based voting, but startup Votem has developed technology to vote securely on mobile devices by storing voting records on a blockchain ledger.

Using one-way functions like blockchain and hash functions, we can maintain voter anonymity for the vote content while achieving verification of participation and transparent tallying. Flux, an Australian political party, issued voting-right tokens to its members using blockchain. Voting rights were also transferable — people uninterested in or uninformed about politics could transfer their tokens to someone they trusted, enabling proxy voting.

snowdeer's Code Holic

AKASHA Reloaded

▲ AKASHA — an Ethereum blockchain-based decentralized blog. When posts gain popularity, you can receive coins. Because records remain on the network even if blog posts are censored or deleted, it's a social media designed to neutralize censorship.

Long-term Apartment Rentals on Rentberry

▲ Rentberry — a transparent and secure rental platform connecting tenants and landlords. It provides services like detail-checking, contracting, and maintenance, and increases transparency in the rental process and helps save on rental deposits.