[The World on the Page] The 'Risk Society' Shaped by Science and Technology

Last weekend, a fire at a data center caused a complete shutdown of all Kakao services, turning a digital disaster once imagined into reality. KakaoTalk, used by 47.5 million people, is the core network connecting our entire society. When this service stopped functioning normally, people were plunged into a fear as if their daily lives were collapsing and the flow of life was being cut off.

This incident revealed how deeply our lives have become dependent on a single company. As of the end of August, the number of Kakao affiliates reached a staggering 133. Using KakaoTalk’s dominance, it extended its reach into all aspects of life including finance, transportation, shopping, and entertainment. There were so many people working in connection with Kakao, including government agencies that entrusted Kakao with personal authentication, vaccine reservations, and bill deliveries. When KakaoTalk was paralyzed, a gate to hell opened where daily life stopped instantly.

In Risk Society (published by Saemulgyul), German sociologist Ulrich Beck focuses on the two faces of modern science and technology society. Since modern times, accidental mistakes or minor errors by an individual or company have caused disasters that plunge entire societies into crisis. Science and technology are sources of convenience and abundance in life, but they have also become generators of anxiety by creating everyday uncertainties and crises. Examples of crises brought by science and technology include mass destruction caused by gunpowder and dynamite, climate disasters caused by fossil fuels, ecological destruction from chemicals, nuclear power plant accidents and nuclear war threats from nuclear energy use, digital network collapses caused by cyberterrorism, and repeated bubble bursts and panics caused by economies that encourage speculation and overconsumption.

Beck called a society where the intensity of crises increases and safety and survival are threatened due to science and technology developed for human prosperity a “risk society.” In such a society, risk?not wealth or religion?takes center stage. Overly dense and interconnected network societies are even more dangerous because they turn the crisis of one company into a crisis for the entire society and spread small disasters faster and farther. The Kakao incident clearly proved this to us.

According to Beck, excessive faith in the market, fanatic obsession with profit, and bureaucratic insensitivity to risk deepen the dangers. In such a world, risk is reproduced and expanded in the name of development, growth, and success, so over time society as a whole loses the ability to manage, regulate, and control risk. In capitalist societies, “the production of wealth inevitably accompanies the systematic production of greater risk.” The contradiction and absurdity that anxiety and risk increase as abundance is enjoyed become the basic operating principles of society.

Villainous companies that privatize profits while trying to socialize risks by neglecting social responsibilities cause and worsen risks for the entire society. It is hard to see Kakao’s digital disaster as mere coincidence given the company’s notorious ethical corruption among its management.

Until now, Kakao has acted like the leader of bad companies. It repeatedly enriched major shareholders through corporate splits while ruining small shareholders, frequently caused controversies by infringing on local businesses using its monopoly status, and still maintains a brutal system that drives web novel and webtoon authors to illness and death despite criticism. The company, obsessed only with profit and indifferent to the community as a whole, has been left to control our entire lives.

Disasters always exceed predictions. Humans, drunk on arrogance, inevitably fall into the abyss of destruction. For platform companies that affect the lives of the entire nation, it is always better to have more than enough preparation rather than less. Yet, surprisingly, Kakao did not even follow the basic rule of internet services called “distributed processing.” Excuses like “there was a crisis response scenario, but the fire was an unforeseen scenario” or “it is an exceptional situation for the entire data center to be affected” clearly show Kakao’s arrogance. We heard similar nonsense during the Fukushima nuclear accident.

For platform companies, a data center fire is not exceptional but a basic, predictable event. This is evident from how Naver, SK Broadband, and others sharing the same data center overcame service disruptions within hours. Kakao’s fire preparedness was insufficient.

Kakao seemed to chase only profitable businesses outward, neglecting the basics that require investment. When blinded by immediate money, one tends to overestimate their abilities and underestimate risks that may come unexpectedly. The result of arrogance is a record-breaking accident and a disaster for society as a whole. According to Beck, most risks we face today are not natural disasters like earthquakes or floods (danger), but risks produced by human mistakes and errors. The Kakao incident clearly falls into the latter category.

The risk society turns safety into a public good like water or electricity. As the Kakao incident shows, in a world where disasters can happen anytime and anywhere and everyone can become a victim, safety rather than wealth forms the basic foundation of society. Beck argues that to prevent the mad rush of capitalism focused solely on profit and the indiscriminate spread of science and technology focused only on functional rationality, what is needed above all is “reflexive modernity.” This means not leaving the management of risks pervasive throughout society to a few bureaucrats or experts, but building a society where all citizens unite to produce, share, reflect on, and criticize knowledge related to risks directly.

According to Professor Kim Hong-jung of Seoul National University, in a risk society, our social life is reorganized according to the command “do no harm to your neighbors.” Politics that prioritize growth over safety neglect risks, and courts that spare the “social contributions” of the strong rather than the deaths of the weak become risk states that grant impunity to risks. Thus, “empathy for victims, anger at perpetrators, and the will to be harmless govern life.”

The desire for safety always leads ordinary citizens threatened by risks to unite with victims of risks and fight those who do not understand our anxieties. The “harmless solidarity” born from the yearning for safety is the starting point of a new social contract. I want to ask: Is the risky company Kakao harmless enough to entrust with our entire daily lives without any regulation, or is it a harmful entity that must be placed under the reflexive control of civil society in some way?

Jang Eun-su, Literary Critic

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.