Untact
Description
Sam Kriss:
“In South Korea, it’s now official government policy to strip away all forms of human interaction and make everything ‘untact’—an Englishoid neologism, the opposite of ‘contact,’ to describe the frictionless and the distanced. Robot baristas; self-service kiosks; government services through the metaverse. (The English-speaking world doesn’t have a name for this, but it’s happening here too—all those Amazon stores where you can just walk out with your groceries, so convenient, away from the stench of human beings.) Untactness is meant to reduce the burden of emotional labor on service workers; it’s a strike against the culture of gapjil, the routine petty tyranny that permeates Korean consumer culture. A kind of freedom, absconding from the indignity of social life. You can be whoever you want, as long as it’s alone. Resisting the pressures of society has become one of the projects of the state. And at the center of the government’s new untact empire is a 30 billion won remote digital platform to treat depression. Is this the red pill or the blue pill? The map can’t help us. The territory has changed.”