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Grandma's Koreapunk

Grandma's Koreapunk

Essay.

Grandma's Koreapunk

3DEF3A

My grandmother's house is such a mysterious place. I call it Koreapunk.

Walk in and you get a mix of Korean folk religion and Buddhism. Things for worshipping Jowangshin (조왕신, the Kitchen God) sit in one corner, and a little space for Buddha takes up another.

Jangseung (장승, totem poles) keep watch over the house. My family's history runs deep in these beliefs.

But what really makes the house different is how naturally the tech sits next to all of this.

My grandfather was a businessperson who luckily had regular chances to fly to Japan (circa 1970, when Korean GDP was about 1/6 of Japan's).

So from the 1970s on, he naturally got into collecting electronics. The house has everything from the classic Walkman series to the latest smart TVs and phones.

My grandfather has passed away, but my grandmother is still great with tech, in her eighties!

You should see her breeze through her smart TV and smartphone, all hooked up through Google. She wears her AirPods as casually as a traditional Korean accessory.

But what really blows me away is how well she gets software. I'm the family's IT guy, so I get called in to fix all kinds of devices.

Unlike a lot of people her age, she looks at these problems carefully and thinks them through.

She explains what she wants more clearly than plenty of younger users, and I'm amazed at how quickly she picks things up and how much she wants to learn.

Some of today's actual requests:

"I haven't logged into YouTube on the living room smart TV yet. YouTube Premium isn't working and keeps asking me to log in. If I log in, will it only play on one TV or both simultaneously? If both, I'll log in."

"I turned on the iPad after a long time and it said I have to log in to Google and YouTube again. Do that for me."

"I want to remove this app icon from the smart TV and move this one, how do I do that?"

"You know the ad blocker you installed on the browser last time? Now I don't see ads in the browser, but I still see them in articles I click on in the Google app newsfeed. Is it possible to remove ads there too?"

Gen Z may think these questions aren't that complicated. Again, my grandmother is over eighty.

And any dev who handles bug reports or feature requests will know it's really, really rare for someone to pinpoint their needs and demands this clearly and ask this lucidly.

When I think about my grandmother's house, it looks a lot like the Korean culture I want to build.

A place where healthy Korean folk beliefs are celebrated, and money and tech reinterpret tradition in a refined, positive, cyberpunk way.

Maybe the I want so badly is just me trying to rebuild my grandmother's house.

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