Rambling about China's digital currency
The writer is
I'm an ordinary.. ah.. actually, a single person with below-statistical-average income and assets, who tries looks things up, studies, and stays interested in the sake of being ordinary. I've started becoming interested in statistics and probability, math, psychology, and sociology — subjects I used to shudder at. Just like rereading The Little Prince where the emotion and senses and recognition feel entirely new, the things I encounter these days feel quite different from before. I'm no expert and no intellectual, but through about twenty years of work life and thirty years of being a general consumer, I seem to be naturally understanding more and more.
Background of some group thinking
Elitism rampant in Korea. And behind the set-in-stone prejudices, likes/dislikes, and objects of admiration among elites is pre-learning. I wonder whether the errors from the learning patterns, perception patterns, and action patterns of elites trained by pre-learning are starting to show up, one by one, in society. Pre-learning statistically increases the probability of prejudice or misunderstanding. And it becomes dependent on validated, learned, or trend*-driven ways of problem-solving, rather than creative ones. The problem: the trend* is dependent on the group one belongs to. This triggers conflict between groups**. And here the issue spins off once more — unlike in the past, an individual's groups are now highly fragmented and overlapping. As a result, social conflict has a more tangled web of interests.
This may seem unrelated, but let me jot down some impressions after reading some most* media articles on digital currency. I don't think the cause of "most*" is each media outlet's own stance. The reason is that each media outlet — digital media, that is — doesn't really know or manage its own articles. In other words, the source of any given article is unclear.
The reason my preamble to discussing digital currency keeps going on with seemingly low-context ramblings is that so many interests are tangled together, causes and effects are mixed up. Defining the problem has gotten too complex.
The cause is that media entered not voluntarily but reluctantly, forced-march style. Media entered for survival and they're sprinting, but their influence is shaking society as a whole — which is truly a problem***. Unlike print news, digital news' volume of information is governed by time. So the volume a single media reporter has to produce is enormous. A day's work is probably already buried by the time spent on copy/paste and editing, not by verification or reporting. Every minute or second an article can be buried under another, so expecting journalism from today's digital media is hard.
The reason I said "truly a problem***" matters. Because this is where individual cognitive dissonance arises. It's where one's own common sense and the organization's common sense diverge. But survival — more precisely, family survival — is on the line, so it gets rationalized too easily. They're not chopping trees, kidnapping people, or dumping wastewater like in the cognitive-dissonance situations of organizations past. Their survival domain is not physical but intangible. As a result, the final decision on their dissonance, the organizational spread of that decision, and the hardening of the organization's actions into society-wide common sense take very little time.
Digital currency is not a rights issue between government and individuals; it's a governance fight between governments and for-profit companies. And a company's reason for existing is profit for its shareholders; a government's reason for existing is keeping its citizens and country safe and stable. This is not an issue you approach the same way you approach the 1987 democracy-and-freedom movement.
Digital democracy may not be a country-vs-individual issue but an issue between individuals and IT companies — let me jot that down without too much order.
Today's dictatorship and power aren't about politics or ideology.
They seem to depend on finance and service-governance structures.
If you think Naver, Kakao, Baidu, AliExpress, Google, or Facebook are on the individual's side, that's a pitifully serious misunderstanding.
Unlike the state or the government.. what nobles, aristocrats, and big corporations chase first is the family's spreading influence, worker attachment, shareholder benefit, and profit.
It's such a sad reality.
Just as in politics there are many poor people who support policies that favor the rich.. in digital, there are far too many individuals who support the very companies that steal and use their personal data and don't even properly disclose where that data goes.
