This is the draft sixth chapter of my book, Infinite Content: AI, The Next Great Disruption of Media, and How to Navigate What’s Coming, due to be published by The MIT Press in 2026. The introductory chapter is available for free here. Subsequent draft chapters will be serialized for paid subscribers to The Mediator and can be found here.
A friend of mine grew up in South Korea in the 1980s. He was weaned on a lot of foreign culture, especially U.S. TV and film: reruns of Dallas and Dynasty and movies like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Die Hard, and E.T. In fact, all the top 10 films in South Korea throughout the ‘80s were from the U.S. As recently as 1993, Korean films accounted for just 16% of domestic admissions.
In 2012, a controversial Korean rapper named Psy released the song “Gangnam Style,” which became a global hit and—much to the consternation of parents watching their pre-teens do Psy’s signature horse-riding move ad nauseum around the kitchen—dance sensation. It was the first music video to exceed 1 billion views on YouTube. (As of this writing, it has over 5 billion views, making it one of the top 10 most-viewed YouTube videos of all time.) It seemed like a novelty at first, but in hindsight it was one of the most visible markers of the so-called “Korean Wave,” the astounding rise of South Korean culture globally over the last two decades.
In 2020, K-pop supergroup BTS released its album Map of the Soul:7, the best-selling album of the year globally. One of the singles, “Dynamite,” was the first Korean song to debut #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 (albeit sung in English). That year, BTS was named IFPI Global Artist of the Year. BLACKPINK, a K-pop girl group, holds all sorts of records—including highest-grossing concert tour by a female group and the Guinness World Record for most subscribed music group on YouTube, with almost 100 million subscribers.
The influence of Korean film and TV (“K-dramas”) has been growing globally at the same time. In 2020, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and swept the Academy Awards, including Best Picture—a first for a non-English language film. When Netflix debuted Squid Games in 2021, 142 million households tuned in within the first four weeks, its most-watched launch ever, on its way to becoming its most watched series ever. Netflix is now supposedly developing a U.S. version. Last year, Han Kang, author of The Vegetarian, became the first Korean to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
On the heels of that success, Korean media companies are increasingly seeking to expand globally, including into the U.S. In 2022, CJ ENM, a Korean media conglomerate with operations spanning K-pop, TV and film production, and performing arts (including musicals on Broadway and the West End), acquired a majority stake in production studio Endeavor Content from WME. The studio, since rebranded as Fifth Season, produces dozens of film and TV shows for theatrical distribution and U.S. streamers each year, including Severance on Apple TV+ and Nine Perfect Strangers for Hulu. In 2021, HYBE, the music label behind BTS, purchased Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings (including the Big Machine label and SB Projects, which manages U.S. based stars like Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber) to form HYBE America.
All of this raises the question: how did it happen? How did South Korea go from a net importer to exporter of culture in just a few decades? Partly, it was due to a concerted and sustained effort by the South Korean government to support local culture since the late 1990s. But it couldn’t have happened without the shift I outlined in Chapter 3: the internet changed the architecture of media from local to global.
Before the internet, cultural exports were shaped by scarcity of local distribution resources, like screens, airtime, or shelf space. Local gatekeepers (TV programmers, cinema chains, radio stations, video and record store buyers, etc.) favored content that was the most likely to generate the largest return on a limited number of slots—and that usually meant U.S. produced content. Only U.S. studios and record labels had the capital to consistently produce and market high-budget, high production value content. It traveled well, not necessarily because it was better or more relevant, but because it was more polished, packaged for export, and aggressively marketed overseas. U.S. content offered local distributors less risk—especially stuff that had already succeeded in the U.S.—and global audiences consumed what was available.
The internet changed that equation. As we discussed in Chapter 3, it made it possible to deliver media anywhere the network reached—which is to say, anywhere in the world—at a very low cost. As a result, it broke local distribution bottlenecks, reducing the influence of local gatekeepers. The subsequent rise of social media also introduced the concept of virality, namely that positive feedback loops on the network can result in very rapid and widespread dissemination of information through vast, loosely linked virtual networks, also unconstrained by geography. (We’ll go into much more depth about these feedback loops in the next chapter.) Global digital distribution platforms, like YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify, Apple Music, and Steam also helped, through recommendation algorithms that promote content without regard to national origin and, in some cases, their investments in local content.
In this chapter, we’ll explore this globalization: the rise of K-pop, Latin trap, reggaeton, and Afrobeats; globally popular TV series, like Squid Game, Money Heist, and Fauda; games, like Black Myth: Wukong; and globally prominent creators, like MrBeast and Khaby Lame.
More than ever, hits can (and do) come from anywhere. Whether that’s good or bad for global culture is up for debate. Underrepresented voices are more likely to be heard. But whether global culture becomes richer and more diverse or more homogenized, as everyone vies to create content geared for global appeal, remains to be seen. The clear loser is the U.S. (and U.S.-centric media conglomerates). Long the largest exporter of content globally, it is now experiencing growing imports and waning exports. In the process, it is losing soft power. GenAI will undoubtedly exacerbate these trends.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Mediator to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.