Scribblings of the Metropolitician

He Goes to Work!

Source: NYT

The New York Times reports "Obama Orders Secret Prisons and Detention Camps Closed" today in 3 executive orders. The man goes right to work -- and so I am reminded of the classic song with that very theme:

Obama also "gets paid to rock the nation" -- how apropos.

Our First Photo Book!

As they say, if it ain't getting done right, do it yourself. And we took that to heart, in making the photo book about Korean lifestyle, the street, and fashion that I always wanted to make but couldn't get a Korean publisher to make. So we're within 2-3 weeks of having our own photo book hit the shelves. Here's the working design for our HUGE 35x26 cm, landscape-oriented photo book. I've teamed up with Denise, another photographer for Feetmanseoul.com, and she just happens to be a book designer by trade. Synergy, baby.

This is what happens when two motivated people put their heads, cameras, and skills together -- synergy, baby -- more and bigger and better than just the sum of two peeps. Then, when you ask other talented folks around you to pitch in their talent and time on things like styling and makeup, modeling, and logistical concerns, just a few people can do the work of many.

This is what I've been working on for the past few months, and it's about to pay off. Look for preview PDF's of the content, online pre-ordering, and a several kickoff events very, very soon.

Ya'll gonna buy our book, right?

The Beginning of All Change Is With the Dream

No, I'm not going to the expected Martin Luther King, Jr. thing, because ya'll already know. I'm going to go with my favorite piece of pop culture as the segue into what I want to say:

The major hat tip for this post goes to FanBoy.com's post "How Star Trek Culturally Prototyped the 21st Century." Yeah, people always talked about the show have been "ahead of its time" to the point that to describe the show this way has become almost cliche. And I've already talked about Star Trek a lot on this blog as well.

But as the inauguration passes me, and I do my occasional re-watches of old Trek, I am continuously reminded of how far we've come. And to insist on putting an ostensibly Russian character on the bridge in the middle of the Cold War, a black woman, and an Asian American on TV screens back then, along with a "devil-eared" alien -- talk about visualizing WAY past anything anyone would have ever thought possible at the time.

[Source: Fanboy.com]

No wonder Martin Luther King, Jr., when hearing from Nichelle Nichols that she was planning to hear the show, asked her to stay on because Star Trek was the only show he let his own children watch on TV. And that speaks volumes.

Hail to da Chief!

I'm gonna be very happy in the next 24 hours, as I get ready for the inauguration of the first black POTUS, a.k.a. the grandaddy-est HNIC the world has hitherto-fore seen.

Reminds me of one of my favorite lines from a Ludacris song:

"We all in together now, birds of a feather now, jus' bought a plane so we changin' the weather now!"

Woop-woop!

The Metropolitician on 101.3 TBS eFM

For those who've been tuning in on Mondays at 11AM for the past several weeks, you'll know I've been a recurring guest on the Soul of Asia show, with Sara Kim.

Well, we're settling into a regular format now, so I'll be a regular guest talking social commentary and criticism on the air. We should have lots of fun topics -- so be sure to catch me on Mondays at 11 with Sara.

And it's live, so always wish me luck!

Platon -- Kickass Photographer and Someone You Wanna Know

We're in the midst of the photo book that we hope will rock the Korean photo and fashion scene to the core, and in keeping up with my favorite photographer, I came across this awesome audio interview he did for the Eddie Adams workshop.

Wait -- you don't know Platon? You kinda do, I think -- you just don't know you do.

And for the real fun? You wanna hear some hilarious narration behind the stories of many of his pictures? I encourage you to listen to the link to the audio while viewing his portraits from his site as he talks about them. Photographer or not, this will be one of the most entertaining and funny 30-minute stretches of time you'll ever spend in front of the computer.

Umm, besides when you first downloaded naked people through your computer for the first time back in 1995. Hehe.

Now, That's Creative

"Delete 10 Facebook friends, get a free Whopper."

You install an app on Facebook and "sacrifice" 10 friends for a Whopper. And the funny thing is, it shows up in your feed as "Michael sacrificed X for a free Whopper."

This is gonna hurt me more than it will you, fair-weather Facebook friends!

Hahaha. That's a good campaign, BK.

"Pimpin' Ain't Easy, but Somebody Gotta Do It"

Source: Jean Chung for the NYT

OK -- maybe not the most tasteful lead-in for this post, but I have to chuckle bitterly and shake my head. Even as I am glad to see the dots being connected in public this way.

See, people who've read the literature and seen the footage and taught the issue, as I have, in a class I teach every year called "Korean Social Issues" maintain the clear line that the Korean government is every bit as morally complicit in the exploitation of Korean women for the sake of the development state as the Japanese government had been before it.

In a post I wrote back at the beginning of 2007, called "Sins of the Fathers", I basically point out that the Korean government has a vested interest in not getting too deep into the fight over apologies and recriminations about moral responsibility for sex work and other related wrongdoings, because many very recently revealed documents show just how much the government sold not only the so-called "comfort women," but women under the Pak regime completely down the river.

In my own class, I've shown the documentary "The Women Outside," in which I value the actual footage of a rally put on by apparently low-level, local government officials praising camptown prostitutes for "gathering capital for the nation." It's shocking, but given the moral/ethical laxity of the "anything goes" mentality of the time, it's completely logical. I do find it disturbing, though, that few Koreans believe that to be true until I show them the footage.

What also disturbs me is how little attention is given to contemporary history in school here -- but given what you'd find if you look closely, one can't blame the curriculum's being designed to essentially stop when the Japanese occupation of Korea happens. After WWII and the US intervention in the Korean War, the story gets so sad, complex, and morally disturbing that it's difficult to rally around the flag and foster simplistic nationalism around the history of the 1960's.

The problem is, the lack of any deep historical knowledge of Korea's recent development period among the youth is matched by an equally strong moral indignation against a black-hatted and evil Japan, or a hatred of the "great powers" run by a few men in suits who sat smoking cigars in a dark room as they actively worked to divide the peninsula. Yet, there is very, very little historical/moral introspection inwards, to ask the question of "What are we reaping, and what in God's name did we sow?" If you look at the dark spectres of Vietnam and camptown prostitution as a kneejerk nationalist, it's a hard thing to swallow.

The general answer for the former dark question is that the US twisted Pak Chung Hee's arm into sending troops to Vietnam for cash and developmental support; but given the historical evidence, that's reaching. What I see is an activist president/dictator who was very good at manipulating Korean/US interests, while being very capable of ignoring US demands/desires when it wasn't beneficial to the nation.

And now, the deepest, darkest secret -- camptown prosititution and economic development. The evidence has been there, but few in South Korea wanted to put it together, sit it in a museum display, and then study its meaning for the world to see. Now, thanks to the New York Times, the final and key historical issue that I see beneficial to have fleshed out in public discourse in Korea is about to be opened up, put under a lamp, and slowly dissected.

I expect a firestorm of "How dare you?" and many recriminations from those who've never loooked far beyond the official nationalist historical discourse found in Korean textbook or on television. But I hope that the moral ironies of government-supported sex work under South Korean dictatorial regimes and the issue of forced sexual labor under the Japanese can be fleshed out, especially since the former actively worked to suppress compensation to the comfort women who had worked as sex slaves under the latter. In that sense (and likely more), the issues of responsibility for both the South Korean and Japanese governments is intertwined and morally twisted. And I'd expect that responsible historians who continue to take a close look at this period can use this as the final hard point to smash apart the rigidness of petty nationalism and finally get to the historical core of some of these issues that can lead to real healing and reconciliation, instead of continuing denial and recrimination.

Do Foreigners Really "Pose a Threat" to the Korean Populace?

Or is this unfounded, racist reactionism?

And as for the requirement to screen for HIV for working in a classroom, this just furthers the already discriminatory attitude towards HIV-infected members of Korean society, who are forced to move out of their homes, fired from their jobs, and reduced to absolutely pariah-status. HIV is not SARS, and this is already a human rights violation, before even extending this to non-Koreans trying to work in a hagwon.

Here's the press release, which I just received from the Association for Teachers of English in Korea:

January 5, 2008 – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Amendment to Immigration Control Act Proposed to Korean National Assembly
LEAD: On December 30, 2008, a bill was introduced to the Korean National Assembly proposing an amendment of the Immigration Control Act. The Association for Teachers of English in Korea responds.

On December 30, 2008, a bill was introduced to the Korean National Assembly proposing an amendment of the Immigration Control Act. The bill seeks to establish the "legal basis to require foreigners applying for an employment visa to submit a criminal background check and health certificate" [1].

A complete translation of the reasons (제안이유) for the bill's introduction is as follows: "Nowadays, the number of foreigners working in Korea is increasing, but a good many [Korean: 상당수] have previous convictions for drug and sexual crimes or carry infectious diseases. As we require measures to deal with the threat they pose to our society's public order and our people's health, we herein prepare the legal basis to require that foreigners applying for an employment visa submit a criminal background check and a health certificate." [1]
E-2 visa holders are already required by the Korea Immigration Service to submit to drug checks, medical checks including an HIV test, and criminal background checks, however, the proposed bill states the revision would apply to "foreigners applying for an employment visa". This is a markedly larger group of foreigners than just E-2 visa holders. Further, by becoming an Act of the National Assembly, it becomes much more difficult to challenge.

An identical bill was introduced to the National Assembly on October 24, 2007 (5 days after the arrest of Christopher Paul Neil on October 19, 2007), but consideration was delayed due to the BBK controversy, and it expired with the adjournment of the 17th session of the National Assembly.

The October 2007 bill was introduced by twelve Members of the National Assembly. The December 2008 bill was introduced by 18 Members and is said to represent a broad political consensus. It is scheduled for vote within the next two months. The bill (in Korean) is available in PDF from the Association for Teachers of English in Korea (ATEK). See below for contact information.

The Association for Teachers of English in Korea (ATEK) calls on the author(s) of this bill to provide their evidence that "a good many" (상당수) foreigners working in Korea have previous convictions for drug and sexual crimes or carry infectious diseases. Obviously, with the stringent checks being done on E-2 visa holders, they are not part of the "good many" foreigners mentioned. How many E-1, E-6, E-7, and/or C-4 visa holders have been discovered to have criminal convictions or infectious diseases? This evidence cannot be produced because it does not exist.

Names of the 18 Members introducing the December 2008 bill:
신학용 - 박기춘 - 구본철 - 송영선 - 안민석 - 김희철 - 박종희 - 김우남 - 양정례
김종률 - 강성종 - 김충환 - 심재철 - 박상돈 - 진성호 - 원혜영 - 김성곤 - 강창일

Names of the 12 Members introducing the October 2007 bill:
신학용 - 강창일 - 박상돈 - 김태년 - 김영주 - 정봉주 - 이계안 - 한광원 - 송영길 - 김교흥 - 김부겸 - 홍미영

About the Association for Teachers of English in Korea
The Association for Teachers of English in Korea (ATEK) is a newly forming group representing teachers of English in Korea. Media inquiries are handled by Communications Director Tony Hellmann, at [email protected] or 010-3993-2484.
[1] Based on a translation of the original Korean document.

As anyone who has lived in Korea for a long time knows, the politics of shame and bad PR work wonders here. Spread the word about increasing racial scapegoating of foreigners for what are really very domestic problems.

PERCEPTION: Foreigners are AIDS-carrying, child molesting threats to youth.
REALITY: There are almost no documented cases of child molestation from foreigner teachers, even though half-baked (or even made up) cases make it to the papers, with no retractions after BS is called. In fact, the cases of sexual violence and abuse carried out in normal KOREAN schools shocks as they make the news daily, but no one's calling it a pattern.

PERCEPTION: Foreigners are bringing in drugs and even selling it in large numbers in the country, and foreigner crime is increasing.
REALITY: The overall crime rate amongst foreigners is up, but only in relation to rising numbers of foreigners overall. In terms of proportional numbers, the crime rate for foreigners across the board is far, far lower than for the Korean population, as a few responsible venues (namely, the Chosun Ilbo) have pointed out.

The context of all this is the creation of a racist whipping boy for all problems, foreign and domestic.

Some More Thoughts On the Korean Internet and Cultural Barriers to Content Production

It seems that predictions I've made are coming true. Seems arrogant to say, but I make certain predictions, some people say I'm a blowhard, then when they come true, everyone forgets that I was...ahem...right.

If you read what I said in "Web 2.0 and Korean Media" in December 2006, the summer after they rolled out "UCC" (YouTube-style "user-created content" in the form of embeddable videos) a couple years after YouTube had hit it big, you'd remember I said:

Enter the Korean concept of "User Created Content." Sure, it's probably a term picked up in the communications field somewhere, but it's a Korean concept, deployed in a Korean way. The big companies here are pushing "UCC" to the people as ways they can "get in on the action" and create content (THAT WE'LL USE) with the implied promise of perhaps being able to become as famous as all those YouTube people you hear about in the news, like that guitar kid everyone is talking about and who got on Korean TV because of it.

Problem is, I think it's doomed to failure. The overall trends are going in exactly the opposite direction, and savvy Korean netizens are going to be demanding their real user power, and will resent being crippled by ugly Daum and Naver blog templates, and creating content for portal sites, which is essentially what they are doing.

The biggest sponsors of the UCC drives are, not surprisingly, big Korean media companies. I call this system the jaebeol media model, and it is particularly and uniquely Korean. Make video content and we will let you put it on our site, for the company's commercial benefit. It's pretty much using the content – with limitations, set templates, and rigid feature sets – for the benefit of the company...

...Maybe it's a peculiarly Korean way of doing things, but I don't think it can be sustained for very long, especially since the rest of the world is offering all kinds of free space, open-source freedom, and the ability for the market to grow and expand without control from the top. The Korean model offers – not surprisingly, given this country's style of business and governance – top-down, centralized control, limitations, and lack of a user-centric experience.

I remember people back then laughing at Google's increased vigor in making headway in the Korean market, since Naver will NEVER lose its dominance, right? People laughed and said Google overly-American dedication to simplicity would NEVER go over in Korea, and its little attempts at coloring up the Google Korea site with cute little animations was something akin to pitiful. People also laughed when YouTube Korea rolled out, swearing up and down that they'd be crushed by the better resolution of the domestic sites. Those techheads missed the point.

I've been saying, since that post, as well as in "The Mis-execution of Korean UCC" in April 2007, when I continued criticizing the utter lack of content on Korean UCC, that the Korean Internet is woefully devoid of ideas, and pitifully cordoned off from the rest of the world. Like the Korean economy, this is not just a side-effect, but totally intentional and a key part of how it succeeds.

In the 2006 post, I called the Korean Internet a "jaebeol" system, which I very much think it is. Inherent in the system isn't a core of intensely creative people and ideas that find expression in a myriad different ways, that come together and combine in unpredictable ways.

For instance, who knew how the synergy between blogging, embeddable video, other social media such as Twitter, social bookmarking, and other things would come together? It's led to new forms of media, business models, and ways of disseminating information itself. It's changed pop culture, politics, and so many other fields in a real -- not gimmicky -- way.

The Korean Internet? With broadband that leaves the US in the dust, no real problem of a "digital divide", computers everywhere, a high degree of technical skill with all kinds of programs and electronic devices, and a youth culture that is deeply socially invested in the Internet -- where's the beef? Meaning -- where's the content?

Where are the new ideas? Why didn't Koreans invent YouTube, Digg, or Twitter, or even the concepts of blogging, podcasting, or social bookmarking? Where are the funky new business ideas, new revenue models, or even (and especially) THE CONTENT?

That's the main problem you have with the Korean Internet. It's insular and doesn't think ahead. Take my piece on the stupidity of Pandora TV in "Pandora.TV Suck Rizzocks" in which I point out how ludicrously stupid it was to require ActiveX controls to watch a stinking video, and how dumb it was to require watching a 15-second commercial before EACH video.

Why can a non-specialist see how fucking braindead this was? Isn't the point of being a video portal to have as wide a database as possible? So what was with the labyrinthine registration process, ActiveX downloads, and watching commercials all damn day. I predicted that Pandora would drop that ActiveX shit like it's hot, but that's not even a good prediction; it's just common sense. The point of streaming video ISN'T to go to your stupid website and watch it THERE: YouTube's success was partially enabled by it being able to easily embed video ANYWHERE and EVERYWHERE ELSE, fools. Argh. Of course, Pandora.TV switched over to Flash-based video only a couple months after my rant. Could have saved a year of wasted time by just doing what YouTube had already been doing for years -- duh! If you're gonna copy, at least get the IMPORTANT part right, right? And in the fall of 2007, Pandora announced they were switching to Flash-based viewing as if they'd figured out some really cool shit for the very first time. Duh.

Or there's MNCast, which I'd always liked, and was always Flash-based and always easy to embed. The resolution was killer. It was kinda better than YouTube, minus the Korea-only database of content. But still.

WHY NOT MAKE IT AN INTERNATIONAL MEDIA SITE, with menus in English? Keep the Korean ones, too. It's the INTERNET. It doesn't matter where people are. When Metacafe and Revver were trying to do the same thing, MNCast could've been a player. But they weren't. Because it apparently never occured to them to market themselves as a general-purpose media site. After I'd had that ever-so-shockingly-revolutionary thought, MNCast later added some lame-ass English menu for whomever they thought international users were, or to make themselves seem more global...to themselves. Who cares? Too little, too late.

THE PROBLEM
The Korean Internet is completely controlled by conglomerates, called "jaebeol" in Korean. The traditional jaebeol were and are Samsung, Hyundai, Daewoo, peeps like that. On the Korean Internet, they're called Naver, Daum, Cyworld, and other names. But the point is still the same: they control the production of nearly all the content on the Korean internet, their blogs, cafe bulletin boards, and other forms of content are proprietary and territorial. One has to login to Naver to even VIEW certain items for sale on one bulletin board, or open pages of a cafe or blog. Getting listed in Naver's search engine? Unless you paid money or are a Naver blog or other product, you're essentially not going to show up at all. Unless you pay the piper directly. Which is how Naver makes its money.

There is no room for real innovation, no incentive for it. Even the possible incentive would be to make an internet idea good enough for Naver to just buy it. Good, say you? Sure, that's the goal of many a startup. But the reason Korea will never invent a Facebook -- the most highly traveled site in the world -- is because if someone had that particular idea, it would just be bundled into the functions of the existing portal site, be in Korean only, require a Korean citizen ID number, and not at all be open-sourced for other parties to freely make applications for.

You'd just get Cyworld, which is a dying idea, akin to Friendster. Done Korean-style, you don't get a new PLATFORM that is compatible with other Web 2.0 company -- Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, anything can be integrated into Facebook. In Korea, you just get macro-sized monstrosities that simply suck in resources to themselves as Naver-Godzilla prepares for continued battle with King Kong-Daum.

Where's the room for the little guy? The startups? The good ideas that suddenly pop up from a college kid into one of the biggest sites on the Internet?

They get crushed by the jaebeol-monsters, of course.

And that's without having gotten to the cultural environment in which both the actual and virtual jaebeol exist within, but have also helped sustain -- the complacent, consumptive nature of social/Internet participation.

Now, I'm getting into territory that I can't "prove" or quantify materially. You either will or will not feel me on this issue, but I believe in what I'm saying here: there are too many cultural barriers here that prevent the production of "UCC" or the promulgation of innovative ideas. That's on top of the fact that there's a huge, gaping absence of business/capital infrastructure to support such ideas even if they DID exist.

Without getting into totally separate conversations, Korea is now facing a slow, core meltdown that is far different, more challenging to fix, and fundamental than most people tend to consider it. The ongoing failure of the Korean Internet to innovate is just another sign of the problem. It's possilby the best sign, too.

Simply put, Korean Internet infrastructure ROCKS. Korea's a small country with a centralized government that can wire everywhere on the peninsula with fiber-optic, supersonic, pro-bionic, high-ionic, gin-and-tonic Internet supercable in the blink of an eye. It doesn't cripple upload speeds to a fraction of download. Computers are everywhere, as are bootleg copies of Photoshop, Premiere, and Illustrator that are thought to be as automatically present as Clock or Calculator on a given Windoze XP install. The Internet is everywhere you wanna be in Korean society.

Except that every media form or function on the Korean internet was originally invented somewhere else (usually the American Internet) that was researched, reheated, and rolled into a "new" function on one of the Korean portal-jaebeols.

That's the key, and what Koreans are used to. Down even to the style of consumption, as when you leave your Samsung-constructed apartment building in your Samsung-built car and use your Samsung phone to tell your best friend doing laundry in a Samsung washing-drying machine to meet you at the Samsung Plaza to shop for clothes made by a Samsung designer. Isn't that scary?

No. For a long time, that's been very REASSURING to the average Korean consumer. And it's no different from Naver. Although things are fraying a bit a the edges, most people LIKE the fact that Naver is like a proto-god figure here, magically dispensing information with authority, hosting your blog, hobbyist cafe, filtering your news, and doing just about anything you can imagine. In fact, right now, Naver's social/psychological/cultural power simply can't be conveyed in terms that say, Americans, can understand. Because the WAY people relate to Naver ain't nothing but a Korean THANG, baby. Unless you use Naver every day like we over here do, you just can't understand.

But what one should understand is that this isn't thought of as a negative. In Korea, one doesn't use the Internet; ones uses NAVER. Of course, there are others, too. But you get the point.

You don't check the BBC for news. Or go to your favorite (and non-portal) social bookmarking site. Or update your blog at a non-portal, commercial blog service. Or even know what Wordpress is. Open-source? That's for Naver to use and base its private blogging service on -- not for YOU to do the same.

Partially because of the language barrier, partially out of habit, and partially because the portals keep people dependent on them and discourage weaning, the Korean internet is amazing insular. But that doesn't mean it doesn't get influenced from the outside, it just means that Korean Internet users don't often go outside the Korean Internet. Yet, it's those who parse, Koreanize, and implement outside ideas for the Korean Internet who make the big bucks.

Take Naver's recent makeover, for instance. I remember saying 4 years ago that Korean big media is losing touch with its base, and that Korean tastes have become far more varied, complex, and Americanized than Korean media realizes. I said this a lot in reaction to Koreans who often would categorically tell me that "Koreans only like variety shows" or "Koreans don't like American-style media." Then what's with the runaway success of pretty much every major American television show on Korean TV?

The same thing I said to those who would tell me "Koreans like complex things on Internet pages." Really? Or is that the assumption that leads to Korean internet pages always being complex and busy? I think that the Korean consumer -- especially on the Internet -- simply doesn't have many other options, and it's assumptions such as these that lead to a lack of new ideas, a willingness to take risks with any that are there, and help foster a deadly conservative Internet culture.

People laughed at YouTube when it opened here. They also scoffed at Google Korea trying to add a few doodads to its pages. Funny how the new Naver after the New Year has very much simplified and streamlined its notoriously busy front page in a way that I guess few would have imagined just a couple years ago. Because "Koreans like complex web pages."

Uh-huh.

Just like "Koreans don't eat cheese and pizza will never catch on" (80's) or "Koreans just don't use iPods." Uh-huh.

Let me make a 2009 prediction. I've seen the market share of iPods go from 2% in the brick-iPod days to 17% in the single year after the 1st-generation Nano was introduced. During Steve Jobs' speech, I rightly predicted that the market share would jump off the charts, simply because of 1) price, 2) form factor, and 3) aesthetics. iPods were simply too big, didn't have the megabyte-for-the-buck oomph, and simply weren't sexy enough. At that point, I knew they had the Korean market. And I was right.

I don't know what the present market share is, but anecdotally speaking, more than half of the MP3 players I see on public transportation and on the streets are iPods. Definitely at least half.

And there's a very high market awareness of the iPod Touch, and expectation about the iPhone, which should be able to make it to market this year in Korea.

I hereby predict that if the iPhone is released here, along with the opening of an iTunes Korea music store, podcasting will hit the critical mass it needs to take off here, mostly because of the pre-existing content out there, and not because so many Koreans will start producing their own podcasts. Even after the buzz has died down back in the West, I think podcasting is going to help drive iPod sales as more language and other programs recommend the hardware purchases, and as the platform of iPod users grows to the point that people start taking advantage of it.

In short, now's a good time to be podcasting, and I'm going to be restarting Korea's first podcast -- Metropoliticking in Seoul -- under a new name and format, and taking things a bit more slow and carefully. More on that later.

Ah -- this has been a truly Metropolitical rambling. The overall point was that the Korean Internet faces some huuuuge content-production problems, as does the overall "information economy." Korea's slowly coming up against a wall, and it's mostly determined by authoratative systems of control and education reinforced by top-down modes of social interaction and consumption, atop a social rigidity and risk-averseness seldom seen in other countries and cultures.

Korea, I think, is faced with more cultural/social rigidity that results in hardware being bereft of good software, to use that metaphor. The problem in the US seems to be just the opposite, as we let the "hardware" of our education system, science and math programs, and other aspects of the educational environment rot away; Americans are culturally/socially all about self-expression, high self-esteem, and a "look at me" culture in general -- that's not our problem. It's the hardware machine that's breaking down.

But if I were to pick between the two situations, I'd choose the latter. Hardware's easy to fix, especially if money and commitment can come; however, deeply-ingrained cultural/social patterns that refuse to budge even after infrastructure has seems to be a pretty nasty problem, especially when competing on a global level.

I hope all this gabbing and prognosticating has resulted in some ideas worth chewing on. I apologize for the length, but hey -- it's me!