People light candles in memory of the victims of Nepal’s devastating floods at Kathmandu Durbar Square in Kathmandu on Sept. 7, which was designated a national day of mourning, 13 days after the disaster.YONHAP
Chun Woon-young
The author is a novelist.
Sometimes I wonder whether my smartphone is listening in on my conversations to figure out what interests me. Say I take a trip. I set a destination by voice, follow the navigation instructions and find a hidden restaurant in an unfamiliar town. On the way home, we talk about running, my new hobby, sharing experiences and information about gear.
Once home, I open my social media feed and see ads for running belts, vests and socks, though I never searched for them. I suspect the voice-enabled navigation system. Still, I buy the knee brace I need. Then come ads for supplements supposedly good for knees. They almost make me feel as if my knees will hurt unless I buy them.
Recently, my attention turned to Nepal’s catastrophic floods, stark evidence that Earth’s climate is reaching a tipping point. Except for the scale of casualties, the scenes resembled disasters we saw 10 or 20 years ago. Whether described as a glacial lake outburst flood or an avalanche of collapsing glacier ice and ice cliffs, there seems little disagreement that global warming is the underlying factor.
For a while, videos of the Nepal disaster filled platforms around the world: the terrifying force, border checkpoints and villages devastated within minutes, glaciers breaking apart and walls of ice collapsing.
Then strange videos began appearing. Some were from somewhere other than Nepal, some showed disasters from the past and others were AI-generated fakes. They were so realistic and sophisticated they seemed more real than reality itself.
This is the algorithm of a world that consumes disaster and profits from it, where fear becomes money. Attention creates popularity, popularity generates advertising revenue and revenue encourages fabrications designed to ride that popularity. Manufactured popularity then captures more attention. What more tempting material could there be than a disaster of such magnitude?
What associations did the images trigger in people’s minds? Some recalled Himalayan trekking or trips to Nepal, the beauty of glacial lakes beneath snowy peaks or the names of Sherpas they had met. They prayed for people’s safety. Some donated to relief groups or took small steps demanding action on climate change.
What did my own mind retrieve? A helicopter tour over Alaska’s Juneau glaciers. I saw firsthand that a glacier is flowing ice before landing on one and walking across it. That was a tourist’s glacier. I recalled hearing that researchers at Antarctic stations chipped pieces from drifting ice to put in drinks and did the same. That was romantic ice.
I also remembered the wonder of a melting glacier: air bubbles trapped inside burst with pop-pop-pop sounds like a xylophone. That was a glacier wrapped in poetry.
There was danger, too. While I was doing research around Terra Nova Bay near Korea’s Jang Bogo Station, an undersea volcano erupted near Tonga in the South Pacific. A tsunami traveled from that distant place, breaking the sea ice in front of the station and opening the water. It happened at night, so no one was hurt. Judging from where drifting ice was pushed ashore, however, anyone working outside during the day could have been swept away. We had not prepared for it, but were relieved to have escaped harm.
It did not end with one tsunami. With the sea ice broken and the water exposed, glaciers deprived of their protective barrier began collapsing. Thunderous crashes echoed repeatedly. The noise was frightening, but the station was safe. We stayed inside for a while, waiting for conditions to improve. Only later did I realize that the seals had also lost places to rest. At the time, I was simply a human being safely removed from the disaster.
After searching for Alaska glaciers, I now see advertisements for cosmetics containing Alaskan glacial water. Unless I buy something, turn my attention elsewhere or latch onto another trend, those ads will probably remain.
Tomorrow may be different, but today I am safe, living with beautiful, wondrous memories. How cowardly and paltry the algorithm inside my own head can be.
This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
