The Korea Times
Little in K-pop feels organic anymore. Everyone involved seems to know this at some level. We all know the numbers are fake. The fans, the media, the labels all know. And yet most participate in an elaborate, mutually sustained fiction that the numbers mean what numbers used to mean. This helps explain the exhaustion. An ambient fatigue reacting to the K-pop world. The YouTube view in K-pop is more a unit of work than cultural influence. It’s thousands (tens of thousands?) of highly coordinated individuals carrying out a gamified task loop that begins to resemble something closer to the autistic behavior patterns you see on Geometry Dash than actual music appreciation. And what emerges is a peculiar inversion: the metrics that are supposed to measure enthusiasm instead become the object of enthusiasm. The music (which was once ostensibly the point) recedes into the background, functioning almost as a pretext for the real activity, which is accumulation. Gamification. Fans will of course loudly proclaim their streaming totals while simultaneously exchanging instructions (“don’t us
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