Author: Josh Philip Ross

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Strategic Angles

Screens in the Samsung cafeteria are showing the Trump and Kim Show and Rutger Hauer in Bladerunner. I’m not sure which dystopian vision of Pacific Rim globalization is weirder. Maybe it’s best to focus on the pocketless billiards on the screen in between? Oh, wait, a person in a giant cat head is cleaning the billiards table now. Never mind.

It’s an odd day, lacking the solemnity and gravitas of Kim’s first meeting with South Korean President Moon Jae-in because nothing Trump does has solemnity or gravitas. The results, after all the pageantry and tears, were more or less what I expected: a vaguely worded agreement reaffirming commitment to peace and denuclearization, with plans for more negotiation down the line.

Peace games

Trump followed up the summit by declaring that the US would stop its war games on the Korean Peninsula, which has led some commentators to claim that the US gave up something while getting nothing. In the most literal terms, that’s true, if you focus only on the summit and not on what led to it or how it was reported in North Korea.

Taking a slightly wider view, North Korea prepared for the summit by dismantling some nuclear facilities to demonstrate its readiness for real denuclearization. How valuable the facilities really were is debatable, but these are at least irreversible steps, unlike Trump’s decision to suspend the war games. And ending the expensive, provocative war games is probably something the US should have done long ago, but the US felt constrained because it felt like a gift to North Korea, and there was never an occasion for giving them a gift until now. I’m not concerned that the joint US-ROK military command will forget how to invade North Korea for lack of practice.  Meanwhile, the economic sanctions are still in place, and so are America’s troops in South Korea.

The view from the north

North Korean reporting on the summit also matters.

When I first lived in South Korea, in the era of the Sunshine Policy, the english-language Arirang network had a show called Peninsulascope that did soft news about North Korea, looking for areas of commonality and progress. They would end each episode with a North Korean cartoon. I remember there was one about a family of squirrels who live near a fox. When a flood comes, the fox offers to save them; the squirrels hesitate, afraid of the fox, but at last they accept the offer, and the fox does indeed rescue them — only to eat them later. The moral of the story is that you can never trust your enemies because they will never, ever change.

The fox is America. This is how North Koreans are taught to see us: as devious and bestial in our very natures. And now Kim Jong-un has sat down with the king of the foxes and cut some kind of a deal.

I think of that cartoon whenever I hear someone saying this summit is boosting Kim’s legitimacy. In some hypothetical, domino theoryish way, the summit’s acknowledgement that Kim is the leader of a nuclear North Korea — which is true, by the way — may be giving some other dictator ideas. Domestically, though, it’s not that simple.

Kim has been preparing his people for a shift. Showing Kim talking to the enemy, and showing Kim admiring Singapore’s shiny prosperity, is something new. It’s something of a gamble, even if Kim’s position is for now secure. What might have been seen as capitulation or even treason — seen that way not just by the people, who don’t matter, but by the generals and politburo members, who do — has to be seen instead as a bold path forward. Kim needs to make it clear to his domestic audience that he’s not surrendering. I’m not sure how easy that is.

In taking these risks, Kim seems to be demonstrating his desire for something genuinely new. And really, for all that Trump and Moon can set timetables and fiddle with the requirements, it’s up to Kim whether he wants to denuclearize and cut a new path.

We shall see.

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Opening Closed Doors

f(x)’s androgynous rapper/singer Amber Liu has a new mixtape, and it’s a doozy.

The mixtape starts with Get Over It, a jab at the music industry that’s also a plea for freedom of expression, to the point that Amber whips a paper bag off her head. Closed Doors is the first of four love songs, all ungendered (pronouns are “you,” “me,” “we”), and the refrain is “Nobody has to know what’s behind these closed doors.” On Right Now, Amber duets with a male singer (her vocal coach), and an actress plays his love interest, rather than Amber herself. Lifeline features a moving pas de deux featuring two men. For the Three Million Years video, Amber wears a rainbow peace sign pin in the video.
In a Billboard interview about the mixtape, Jeff Benjamin does all he can to get Amber to bite on the obvious question. He asks what “Closed Doors” is about, and Amber says it’s about respecting her privacy. He asks if there were any rumors that got to her, and she deflects it by saying she didn’t like it when the press reported her family was rich. He asks a couple of questions about her love life, and she gives meticulously ungendered answers. He even implies that one lovesong might be about her and a bandmate. She talks a lot about LGBTQ representation and is very supportive throughout the interview. Some of her best friends are gay.
Now, Amber Liu’s orientation, and her public discussion of it, are her business. I have no idea whether she’s actually queer or not. Maybe she’s straight but feels that’s not anyone’s business either. Who knows? But it sure feels like Amber is pounding on the closet doors from the inside.
It would be a huge deal to have a kpop star as big as Amber come out as gay or bi. For now, though, enjoy the music, the ambiguity, and Amber’s strong statements in support of the LGBTQ community.
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Everybody Plays Games

“Everybody plays games.” That’s what Trump had to say after his sudden cancelation of his summit with Kim Jong-un, and then his intimations a day later that maybe the summit will go ahead after all.

This is not how diplomacy is usually done. Diplomacy is statecraft and it’s stately, building from the ground up, with lots of lower-level officials hammering out agreements over time. That kind of diplomacy can be effective, and it has the advantage of bringing thought and expertise to complex processes. But it hasn’t ever really worked with North Korea.

Instead, Trump is playing games. As a mode of running a presidency, it’s terrible. Playing games with immigration has been a disaster on too many levels to mention. Playing games with Iran — a country capable of the usual sort of patient, step-by-step diplomacy — also seems pretty dumb. Playing games with China on trade is like trying to play badminton with a grizzly bear. Playing games with Amazon and the Post Office is just batshit.

But with North Korea? Maybe games are where it’s at.

Games countries play

North Korea has a style unlike any other country’s. Negotiations even with very difficult counterparts like Cuba or Iraq never veered quite so schizophrenically from protestations of eternal friendship to foaming rants full of schoolyard insults. North Korea’s version of good cop-bad cop is Andy Taylor and Stacey Koon. In this case, after some admittedly unhelpful and possibly stupid and threatening comments from Vice President Mike Pence, North Korea failed to show up for a planning meeting and called the vice president stupid, along with some other amped up rhetoric.

The usual response, when North Korea throws one of these tantrums, is to backpedal, play it down, and coax North Korea back to the negotiating table like parents trying to keep their two-year-old from embarrassing them at a fancy restaurant. Trump tried something different. Before the tantrum even reached full crazy, he threw his own little narcissistic tantrum, backing out of the summit with a weirdly personal letter full of regret and disappointment.

Not only that, but Trump backed out after North Korea blew up its own nuclear test facility. You can argue that the facility was in bad shape anyway, but still, the timing was striking and devious. If this is where the diplomatic train stops, then the US got the destruction of North Korea’s only nuclear test facility, and North Korea got nothing. No cash, no lifted sanctions, no security guarantees, no future cancelation of US-ROK joint military exercises. Nothing.

Crazytown diplomacy

The Trump cancelation sent everyone scrambling. Moon Jae-in and Shinzo Abe were embarrassed and confused. China was probably both confused and relieved, if concerned that we’re going back to nuclear brinksmanship on their border. North Korea probably looked around and remembered that China is their only reliable ally.

If this were normal diplomacy, all of that would be very, very bad. But this is not normal diplomacy. This is Trump crazytown diplomacy. With Trump, everything is always contingent and always personal. North Korea made a conciliatory statement — a sign that Trump’s tantrum-for-tantrum approach might actually be an effective way of talking to North Korea — and now Trump is talking about reinstating the summit. So who knows?

The thing is, crazytown diplomacy might be the right tool for North Korea. Trump isn’t good at being president, or even at running a real business, but he’s good at sucking people into his orbit and using his B-list charisma to create buddies and sycophants. One of the only things we actually know about Kim Jong-un personally is that he has a taste for B-list charisma. It’s bizarre to consider that Trump’s Rodmanesque qualities just might win the day here.

Of course, any actual agreement will require the more ordinary diplomatic processes of working out details, resolving ongoing dispute, managing inspection schedules, and all that messy stuff that bores Trump. And at any point, North Korea could go back to the tantrum tactics. But they may be learning that Trump will tantrum right back. Mafia-style emotional overreaction might actually be a useful way of disciplining North Korea.

Can Trump do anything good?

Before you dismiss all this as my naivete (or, worse, before you decide I think Trump is wonderful and have finally come around to understanding his genius), take a moment to remember that bad people do good things. Nixon expanded the Vietnam War and engaged in petty theft against his political enemies, but he also restored relations with China. Stalin was a horrific murderer who led the Soviet Union in destroying Hitler’s armies. Keanu Reeves was actually pretty convincing in River’s Edge.

It’s also worth remembering how bad the previous Republican presidency was. Trump’s style is horrifying, and he has done much harm by appointing incompetent, corrupt people at every level of the federal government, as well as by doing outright bad things. But by this far into the Bush administration, we’d suffered the worst terrorist attack in American history, instituted torture and kidnapping as national policy, lost track of Osama Bin Laden, started a disastrous war in the wrong country (we’re still feeling the effects of that failure), and even took time to destroy the career or CIA agent Valerie Plame.

Trump needs to be understood in this context. His fuckups are real and serious, but don’t let the style make them seem worse than they are — or, rather, don’t let the style make you forget what we endured from our bobblehead president. The outrage of the moment — and Trump is good at producing outrage — can make the present seem worse, and the past seem better, than they actually are.

All of which is to say that before you denounce the pullout from the summit as yet another example of Trump’s dangerous fecklessness (which it also is), check to see whether you’re just denouncing it because it’s Trump and it’s crazy and he’s awful. Because in this one case, Trump’s crazy awfulness might work.

Or not. Who knows? Crazy is crazy. But on North Korea at least, a little crazy might be called for.

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Saving a Millennium or Two

Today I gave a presentation to senior management about ways we can streamline and improve the text on Samsung phones. I can’t and shouldn’t go into detail, but there are specific things we can do to make our phones more intuitive, limit interruptions, and reduce confusion and uncertainty.

Samsung sells something close to 80 million phones every quarter. Estimating that the average lifespan of each phone is about two years (there are statistics that suggest this is conservative), that means that there should be more than 600 million Samsung phones in circulation at any given time.

Now, imagine that the work we’re doing manages to save each Samsung user, on average, ten seconds during the entire two-year lifespan of the phone. That’s not much — just one or two moments of uncertainty wiped away as you poke around settings or try to open an app for the first time. That comes out to 6 billion seconds, or about 190 years. And if the changes we make manage to shave off, say, 100 seconds over the two-year life of the phone, that’s 1900 years of user time we save.

A couple of millennia. That’s an astonishing thought.

And sure, maybe it’s just 1900 extra years people will spend on Instagram and Snapchat, but it’s still something. When you’re working at scale, small improvements matter.

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To Do Great Work, A Man Must Be Very Idle

I am now halfway through my Year of No Particular Ambition. I’m not sure how well I’m doing at it.

For one thing, I got a promotion last week. I swear it was an accident, but there it is. I’m now at the level of suseok, or principal, which comes after senior and before vice president. Before you get too impressed, I’ll note that one of my Korean textbooks has a joke about a guy who’s boasting about becoming VP, so his wife tells him it’s no big deal, there’s even a VP of prunes down at the grocery, and when the husband calls the grocery to see if she’s for real, the grocer says, “Sure, do you want the VP of packaged prunes or the VP of loose prunes?”

February

I did manage, in my first week of principality, to go down to headquarters in Suwon, attempt to give a presentation to a room full of VPs (not sure if loose prunes was there), and have the whole thing go down in flames in an argument over Pokemon syndrome (don’t ask). It was a surprisingly quick and effective lesson in why it is that so many suseoks are just kind of goofy middle-aged guys who don’t do all that much. Not all of them are like that, but suseok seems to be the level where you can just coast if you want, or if you’ve had the ambition bludgeoned out of you by too many years of corporate politics.

But the thing is, I don’t and I haven’t. For all that this is supposed to be my year of no particular ambition, I’ve been trying to do things at work. I would like to think of them as fundamentally lazy — trying to solve big problems so I can stop spending all damn day solving the same small problems over and over — but I suppose trying to solve big problems is ambitious. But at least I don’t have any clear ambitions of moving up or moving on.

 

The promotion had the salutary effect of knocking me back into the present, following a period of existential crisis that I like to call “February.” Every year, I wonder why the hell I’m working so hard to live somewhere so cold and miserable. The somewhere used to be New York, but same-same. This February I went to America and visited my brother and sister and their spouses and babies and wondered whether I’d made a terrible mistake by not having a spouse and babies. Then I came back to Korea and went to the Olympics and watched people with more (and stupider) ambition than I will ever have do insane things like flipping 60 feet in the air and crashing face-first on ice, or skiing 50 kilometers in two hours and not immediately dying. I wondered if my lack of ambition meant maybe my life was already over, and I spent too much time doing financial math and looking at Thai real estate listings. The promotion reminded me that things are actually pretty good right here and now.

Keeping busy

Recently I saw a woman in the subway wearing a coat that said, “TO DO GREAT WORK A MAN MUST BE VERY IDLE.” I have no ambition to do great work — not this year, anyway — so I suppose I ought to keep busy, if a random article of Korean clothing is to be believed. That’s the whole point of this year of no particular ambition, isn’t it? To be engaged with the here and now. To do stuff without it having to mean something or go somewhere.

Now that the weather is turning, I can start going out again, walking over mountains or what have you. I went to a Purim party. I’m taking a gayageum class, which might sound ambitious, but I have absolutely no intention of ever being very good at it. I’m getting my social life moving again now that stepping outside doesn’t make my face hurt. I’m trying to do a hundred squats a day for a whole month. It’d be nice to find someone to date. And in another six months, I suppose I’ll still be right here, working at Samsung and living in Seoul and maybe noodling around on a gayageum. No big changes, no grand ambitions.

It might not be easy, but if I believe in myself and stay focused, I can achieve nothing in particular. Wish me luck!

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Conquering Umyeon Mountain

Between my home and my workplace is a mountain. I can see it from my balcony, looming up out of the density of apartment buildings. It’s there each day as we take our post-lunch constitutional around the odd little neighborhood of single-family homes that backs up against the Samsung R&D Campus. If you look at it on Kakao Map, you’ll see that there are trails running along it, but none that link Umyeon-dong, where I work, with Seocho-dong, where I live.

Still, the gap between the last marked road and the first marked trail looked to be no more than 500 meters. How hard could it be? I’ll admit that I’ve been feeling a burst of confidence since I got a surprise promotion on Wednesday. Success in one domain doesn’t necessarily translate to success in another, but what the hell? It was clear and cool and I had a couple of hours until sundown.

I was aided in the first stretch by Korea’s relentless improvements. A new ecological park is being put in, and though there are great roles of jute carpeting still to be laid, the trails are in, and the railings and signposts too. After a while, though, the trail began to loop back down. I could see on my GPS the trail that would take me home, no more than four or five hundred meters away. And up.

Between me and the trail was a steep slope, covered in gray-brown leaves. It looked slippery, and I wasn’t in the best shoes for it. Do it anyway. Once I’d gone up a ways, there could be no turning back — no sliding down those slippery leaves in the encroaching dusk. So I kept going, picking out here and there what seemed like rough bits of trail. Crows laughed at me overhead. At 5:30, an electronic Last Post wafted in from a military post on a nearby ridge.

At last I came to a windowed pillbox: a sign of civilization. Soon I found the trail, and people too: hikers, some of them elderly, making their way up. If they were still ascending, I figured I was OK to follow the sign for Somang-Tap (tap means pagoda) just 150 meters on, rather than heading directly down toward home. I passed an elevation marker at 326 meters (1069 feet), then ascended a bit more and found the pagoda: a rock pile with commanding views of Seoul to the north.

Somang-Tap.
Look closely and you can see my apartment.

I now realize I could have followed an earlier trail fork up to the pagoda, without the scrabble through the leaves. If I ever do this again, I’ll know better. But that’s part of the fun: heading up into a mountain whose contours are uncertain and knowing you’ll just have to figure it out.

I grew up doing that on the ridges around Lucas Valley, in Marin County, California, and I learned then that you can never get too lost: just head down, and eventually you’ll find your way out. The same holds true for Seoul’s mountains, though they’re more formidable than Marin’s gentle swells. Still, back then I didn’t have a phone with a GPS and an emergency dialer.

From the peak, it was a long descent on mostly well-groomed trails, often with stairs, past the usual sorts of Korean mountainside exercise parks, until I stepped out of the woods and into the bright lights of Gangnam.

I had done it. Granted this wasn’t exactly Amundsen at the pole, but I’d rendered known what before had been a blank space on my own little map of the world. I hadn’t been sure whether you could get from one side of that mountain to the other. It turns out you can.

And once you do, you can take yourself to Butter Finger Pancake and get yourself a burger with barbecue sauce and a strawberry milkshake. Which is exactly what I did.

 

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Unleashing Korean Productivity

Once again, Bloomberg has rated Korea as an innovation hub. And once again, Korea’s weakest statistic is productivity per worker, though a jump from 32nd place to 21st is impressive.

So what gives? After more than a year at Samsung, I see two main causes of Korea’s low worker productivity. The first, most obvious cause is long hours. Many Koreans (though, thankfully, not those in my division) feel like they have to get to work before their bosses and leave after, regardless of whether they have anything important to do. They put on a show of being at work for very long hours, but exhausted workers don’t actually produce very much. They’d be more effective if they just went home and slept.

This culture, thankfully, is changing. The president is pushing policies to limit excessively long hours, and companies like Samsung are making changes. In my division at Samsung, it’s now against the rules to work more than 52 hours in a week — still a lot of hours, but it means you can’t put in 12-hour days and then come in on the weekend without a notice getting sent to HR and the CEO. There are twice-a-month events called Smile Day, when you’re encouraged to go home early, and Wednesdays are Family Day, so people are also pushed out the door a little bit. And vacation days are mandatory: if you don’t take them by the end of the year, you’re actually not allowed to come in to work until they’re all gone. None of these reforms is a magic fix, but they’re helping to push the culture away from overwork and toward more efficient time management.

The second cause of low productivity is perhaps harder to pinpoint, and harder to reform, but I think it has much to do with the top-down, authoritarian culture that still rules many companies. Workers put in a lot of effort do get something done, only to be told to do it all again differently. I’ve worked on projects that carried on for months in a state of constant crisis, everything needing to be done immediately even though the release date was still far in the future. Instead of “measure twice, cut once,” it was more like “chop everything to pieces and glue it all back together,” and we did it over and over again. The final result was the sloppy hodge-podge you would expect.

This too is changing, though maybe not as visibly or as quickly. The leader of that project was edged out, and there’s a notable lack of panicked frenzy these days in my division. When workers are given the time and space to think and to do things right, they produce greater value. Just think what we could do if we added that latent worker productivity to the many factors already standing in Korea’s favor!

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The New Year of No Particular Ambition

Last year, after a tedious New Year’s Eve party, I nearly ended up in a fistfight over a taxi.

The year before that, I stood on a cold, rainy beach in Da Nang, enduring hours of Vietpop for what turned out to be one small firework. The highlight of the evening was hearing my Vietnamese girlfriend declare that “Vietnam has the most beautiful bitches in the world,” by which she meant beaches.

In past years, I’ve been to countless forgettable parties, paid too much for mediocre dinners, wasted a grim evening at Menahata Bulgarian Bar that was not at all like the video for Start Wearing Purple. I welcomed the millennium at my cousin’s house in Washington, DC, where she had forgotten to throw the party she’d invited me to because she’d just had a baby. About the only really fun thing I can ever remember doing for New Year’s Eve is going to concerts for bands I would’ve loved seeing any night of the year. Mostly Primus. Although it was after one of those concerts that my car caught on fire.

Refugees

Because New Year’s Eve is so artificial and forced, it’s pretty much the opposite of spontaneous or interesting fun. It’s fitting that the most famous New Year’s Eve celebration involves plastic celebrities in a fake place full of revelers who endure hours of frozen huddling without access to toilets. It’s like a North Korean performance of fun. If the Times Square revelers were refugees, Amnesty would complain about the conditions. And then Jenny McCarthy would try to stop Doctors Without Borders from vaccinating the children.

Because New Year’s Eve is so overhyped, everyone tries way too hard. Because so many people are trying so hard, there are too many events and parties, and the energy gets diffused. You end up at a bar or a party where the hosts are freaking out all night that not enough people have shown up, and everyone attending is worried that something way better is happening somewhere else without them, and the people working hate that they’re working on New Year’s Eve. If you’re with a date, there’s way too much pressure, and the people without dates are all setting the bar way too high. Then it’s midnight and nobody knows what to do, and then the party is over.

 

No uniformed personnel

My family has had some terrible luck with New Year’s Eve. My grandfather had more than one New Year’s Eve heart attack that landed him in the emergency room. Once my mom got a nosebleed that wouldn’t stop, and the paramedic apologetically asked her if she’d been putting anything interesting up there (she hadn’t).

One year my brother got his car stuck in the mud. A cop saw the car and called my parents. When my parents asked if anyone was in the car, the cop said he didn’t know because he didn’t want to get his boots muddy checking the car. Turns out my brother was fine and had just decided to sleep there until morning, but since then my parents have considered it a good New Year’s Eve if they’ve avoided speaking with any uniformed personnel.

A quiet new year

This year — during my year of no particular ambition — I spent New Year’s Eve at home, by myself. I ordered in. I binge-watched Parks & Rec. I took a nap, and later I took another nap. I had a bath, listened to some jazz, and then I watched the ringing of the Bosingak bell on Korean TV. For a while at midnight I could see some fireworks in the distance from my balcony. My New Year’s Eve was quiet and relaxing, cost very little, and exceeded my expectations.

This morning I woke up, made myself a cup of coffee, and watched the first sunrise of 2018.

Happy new year.

 

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Beautiful Bombs

Go see 아륾다운밤 (Beautiful Bombs).

Go see this fun, gloriously dopey little indie band while they’re still fun and indie. Go see them while they’re still playing in no-cover Hongdae basements and about half the crowd is their moms and the other bands on the bill and their songs are still about being rock stars and how nice their grandmothers are (really).

I went to see Beautiful Bombs for the second time last night, where they were the opening act at their own single release party, inside a club smaller than the old Berkeley Square, for those who remember such things. Korea has what must be the politest punk scene in the world, so there was none of the skeeviness that hung around the old clubs I used to go to in my Bay Area youth — the Stone, the Omni — and of course clubs these days are smoke-free and have good  digital sound systems and I’m not stoned, so everything’s a lot less blurry than it was back then. But Beautiful Bombs brings some of that energy. They’ve got the tight bounce of a band that really, really likes playing together, and their lead guitarist is pretty amazing. He reminds me of Slash, which is an idiotic thing to say, but I’m saying it because I’m totally fanboy crushing over an indie club band. If I were 17 and in high school, I would put a Beautiful Bombs logo sticker on my binder, and if you mentioned it because you knew who they were, we would be friends.

There were other bands too. 아디오스오디오 (Adios Audio) is a guitar-keys-drums trio whose lead singer has a Busan twang, and they play what she called “emo-core,” which is less bad than it sounds. She has a clear, powerful voice and writes lovely melodies, and you can hear the Jaurim influence, which isn’t a bad thing. 레드닷 (Reddotts) was the rare Korean band that brought a little bit of rock-and-roll menace to the proceedings. They’ve got a dirty groove and a tiny little tatted-up bass player who’s only about as tall as her instrument, and they’re also pretty worth seeing. And ABTB, the most professional of the bunch, reminded me a lot of those late-nineties bands I never got into, like Filter and Tool and whatnot, and they were very loud, and we left after their first or second song.

But I’m all about Beautiful Bombs. Go see them while they’re still fresh and happy and playing music because they love it. Go see them before the guitarist gets poached by some older, richer, boringer band that pays better, or the singer faces reality and joins his dad’s company, or some Korean record exec convinces them to make one of those terrible OST ballads with the video that starts with a bunch of text to let you know it’ll be a terrible OST ballad. Go see them while their following is still so small that they’ll recognize you if you show up a couple times.

You’ll have fun. They’ll have fun. And what else is there, really?

 

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Korean Hit Parade

I’ve been listening my way through the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 for each year, going back to the early 1950s (when there was, blessedly, only a year-end top 30). I’m now up to 2000, and it’s been an interesting journey — something I should write about sometime.

Well, today I discovered that Korean streaming music service Melon has something similar: charts of top Korean hits by year going back all the way to 1964. (Before that, Koreans just listened to the sound of their own poverty, I guess.)

Should be an interesting musical journey to see how Korean popular music changed over the years.