Resistance to a Posthuman and Retrograde Oughtopia: Exploring the Narrative of South Korea’s Sci-Fi Animation,Wonder Kiddy

Introduction

While the media environment is being transformed by digitalization, the conflict between human and artificial intelligence is becoming more and more pronounced. Digital recording and storage devices have changed people’s lifestyles and ways of tackling problems. In this environment, giving up digital technology for a more independent life could cause considerable difficulties. Even when handling mundane business, cybernetics is becoming an indispensable tool. The Austrian robotic engineer Hans Moravec made an interesting prediction in 1988 regarding the human spirit (Moravec, 1988: 109–110). He believed that by the end of the 21st century, all of one’s memories could be stored in a computer chip, allowing the transplantation of a mind from one body to another and ushering in an age of immortal humans. Although this concept seems a rather pessimistic prophecy, it has come to reflect our present. With the spread of information and virtual reality technologies, ideas regarding the human body’s dematerialization, mind-datafication and information deobjectification have also been introduced. In reality, the border between body and mind is being eliminated, while the conditions necessary for body materialization are developing, blurring the line between machines and humans. With science, technology and medicine advancing at similar rates, there is a need for devices to control specific functions at times when the body and mind are disconnected, while also expanding the human body’s natural capabilities.

Since technology first became closely entangled with the organization of the human body, debates regarding cybernetics have consistently been on the media agenda. Technological advances have made the concept of posthuman a reality in progress; some day, there will be an actual embodiment of the concept now discussed in the fields of modern philosophy and ethics. A considerable number of the futuristic mechanical devices depicted in science fiction have found analogies in modern society. In addition, numerous movies have exploited the paradoxical idea of ‘artificial life’ (androids or cyborgs) to demonstrate the clash between acceptance and moral resistance among people living in a posthuman society. As mentioned above, although no one would say that cyborgs and humans are interchangeable, it is, from some perspectives, clear that a cyborg has human qualities. For this reason, the notion that people and androids might coexist in the same society has raised a number of unexpected ethical questions.

The subject of the present study is South Korea’s first animated science fiction TV series, 2020 Space Wonder Kiddy (hereafter referred to as Wonder Kiddy), which explored the topic of posthumans and various related issues. The program has 13 episodes; the original and various spin-offs have been warmly received both at home and abroad. ¹ The story takes place in space, 30 years in the future. Modern technologies have taken over Earth, making it impossible for people to return to the world they knew. Instead, they discover and then inhabit new planets where humans, aliens (elves) and robots of all kinds, possessing intellectual power, coexist as one social organism. Dealing with the conflicts that arise in this portrayed reality, Wonder Kiddy introduces a way in which future generations, living in an age of technological civilization, could and should function. In particular, it explores a posthuman society in which controversy over ‘humanoid non-humans’ and ‘inhuman humans’ has taken on negative overtones. This study carries out a textual analysis of Wonder Kiddy, seeking to demonstrate that its imaginary posthuman society could plausibly become a reality, in which the characters’ perception of the world would prevail. This study visualizes a so-called ‘oughtopia’ ² model, proposing a possible way to organize the society of the future.

The paradox of ‘technological outcasts’ and oughtopia

It is possible that in the future the status of humans will remain unchanged. This question has been an important starting point for science fiction, in which many storylines incorporate different perspectives on world organization. Some create scenarios in which humans and humanoid machines coexist in a mainly human society until the robots take control and establish dominance and a new system of rule over the rest of the population. In this context, robots that have learned how to copy human body parts can generally be referred to as ‘humanoid non-humans’ or ‘inhuman humans’ and have replaced so many of their body parts with mechanical structures that they can no longer be called humans. Very simple examples are cyborgs and androids. A plot that involves ethical resistance to the rise of artificial but humanoid beings is characteristic of many science fiction narratives. Such resistance comes from the inertia that characterizes the effort to sustain human communities and also from the fact that humans have not yet developed new philosophical, moral or social values capable of changing our perception of technology. For these reasons, science fiction closely analyzes the distinguishing features of technophobia, a mass syndrome among humans in a world of humanoid robots.

However, technophobia in this sense is derived from the mythification of human sanctity. In these myths, unlike all other beings, as in objects and creatures, humans are not regarded as tools or methods (Sorgner, 2010: 251–264). Regardless of whether one is Christian or Kantian, behind the idea of a differentiated human status with a rational spirit and nonmaterial self-awareness, there are very few humans that bestow a morally equal status with what is ‘non-human’ or ‘a lifeless blob’. The challenge for those who believe in speculative realism, including Ray Brassier, is the exclusive attitude toward such objects or the tradition that bans the discussion of moral equivalency between humans and objects (Brassier, 2009: 56). Speculative realists may challenge attempts to objectify such technological outcasts from humanity by focusing on their interactions with humans in science fiction literature that discusses futuristic societies. Furthermore, researchers in the Object-Oriented Philosophy school of thought such as Graham Harman may even reject the attitude of finding meaning by reducing individual beings to their interrelationships (Harman, 2011: 171).

From this perspective, Steven Shaviro, a speculative realist of some influence, has discussed the attributes of consciousness and reason by which humans are differentiated. He utilizes the term ‘sense’ in questioning those attributes that have been considered the unique identifiers of being humans for a long time. He does not consider the sapience of humans and the seemingly simple actions of animals to be different enough to tell them apart. He contends that the thought processes of dogs and humans cannot be strictly distinguished in an evolutionary standpoint. As a result, he believes the two should be compared by the extent to which they exist and not an arbitrary measurement of sense. Furthermore, he believes that the sense of anything, including any other living organisms and even artificial beings, is a question of ‘discognition’ (Shaviro, 2016: 8–20). This is a point of discussion that is overlooked by much of the science fiction literature that has characterized the technological outcasts made by, for and like humans.

Donna Haraway, well known for her Cyborg Manifesto, has also reduced the mythical belief that within human sanctity exists a superior level of difference compared to others by utilizing multiple methods. In particular, she has suggested various methods of confusing the images that cross the boundaries between an organism and a machine and, furthermore, the dualism that has been born from the modern structure of Western values. To introduce interesting objects or organisms that Haraway refers to as family or of the same species, these include the OncoMouse™ (organism/product), the female human© (female/product), Mixotricha Paradoxa (one/many), vampires (Western white people/other races) and DNA (life/object). To discuss the OncoMouse™ as an example, this is, in essence, a rat; however, in the sense that it has been implanted with cancerous cells to cure cancer in humans, it could be regarded as a pseudomouse or pseudohuman (Haraway, 1997: 8). The important thing is that OncoMouse™ is sold at what are considered rational prices for being custom manufactured according to research needs. From this perspective, the OncoMouse™ can be regarded as an object that has lost its self-identity between a living being and an object and between the product of technology and a commercial product within the modern technological civilization. Haraway raises the issue that humans remain in a position to abuse technobiopower (p. 9) in a unilateral manner, justifying their violent tendencies and the execution of such tendencies towards non-human objects.

The pioneering researcher Katherine Hayles divides humans and posthumans as follows. In the second half of the 1990s, she began a debate on posthumanism, which has continued ever since:

I understand human and posthuman to be historically specific constructions that emerge from different configurations of embodiment, technology and culture. My reference point for the human is the tradition of liberal humanism: the posthuman appears when computation rather than possessive individualism is taken as the ground of being, a move that allows the posthuman to be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. (Hayles, 1999: 33–34)

Hayles describes somewhat radical concepts embedded in the posthumanist discourse. At the same time, perceiving and accepting them has certain significant implications. Hayles argues that a posthuman would have a mechanical body and a ‘dataficationed’ mind. On the other hand, if transhumans can be seen as humans who have overcome their intellectual and physical weaknesses and expanded on specific abilities and as a stepping-stone to becoming posthuman, we notice an attitude that accepts transhumans. Posthumans, born of the merging of the latest technologies in genetic engineering, psychophysiology, robotics, nanotechnology and computer technology, are not seen as the output of ‘technological alienation’; rather, there are attempts to view their being as ‘technological subjectification’.

Hayles’s point of view has not only taken hold in academia or in certain science fiction literature; there have been many cases where people have, in reality, actively engaged in autonomous, self-led evolution into the transhuman or posthuman. Cyborgs are not just fictional. From a broader perspective, we can say that, in May 2002 in California, the world’s first cyborg family was born. All three members of the family of Jeff Jacobs implanted verichips in their bodies (Jacobs, 2002). A verichip is a type of computer chip that contains silicon memory and allows wireless transmission and reception. Its function is to decode information recorded on a scanner and send it to an outside source. It is designed to provide basic personal information (including state of health and location) in real time. Another example, which received more attention, involved Kevin Warwick, Professor of Cybernetics at Reading University, UK, who conducted an experiment on himself. In 1998, he was implanted with a silicon chip that transmitted signals about his location to a computer. In 2002, a 100-electrode array was surgically implanted into the median nerve fibers of his left arm (Warwick, 2004: 207–216). Through this experiment, he was able to visualize a world in which the human nervous system and computers could work together. His wife, Irena, also participated; in the future, a version of this experiment might allow us to communicate through thought (p. 283).

Warwick believed that intelligent machines with easy access to a network could open a new era in which they would gain control over humankind. He therefore suggested using modern technologies to upgrade the human brain, which has a limited capacity by nature (pp. 61–62). Instead of falling into a state of being controlled, humankind should create a new social environment equal to the level of cyborg evolution. Warwick predicted that by 2050 the Earth would be inhabited and ruled by multifunctional machines or robots. What is interesting is that within Warwick’s process of ‘self-evolution’, technophobia and technophilia coexist. Warwick’s outlook for the future is reflected in most science fiction narratives, which tend to share a common storyline. Machines acquire super powers and overthrow human control, creating a cyborg-run society. The prospect of cyborgs and multifunctional machines harmoniously coexisting in the same world is somewhat thrilling (pp. 298–299), but it raises the issue of how to maintain the balance between humanity and humanoids.

In such a heterogeneous environment, if humankind were to lose control over artificial intelligence, the ideal balance would be lost, a pessimistic scenario frequently depicted in science fiction. Another popular plot structure involves humanoid robots attacking humans, the so-called ‘rise of the machines’. Such dystopian apocalypses require introspective reflection to assess their real life applicability. Here, the problem of human ambivalence toward technological development and the conflict of paradox are interrelated. As an extreme example, it is reasonable for humans to want to transcend imposed intellectual and physical limitations through advanced technology. A human can demonstrate persistence in facing the uncertainty that accompanies technological progress; seeking immortality thus becomes a primary concern. However, in the history of various Japanese ‘animes’, the results of such desires were shunned. In Galaxy Express 999, which heavily influenced Japanese baby boomers, the desire for ‘machinized humans’ of a future generation was rejected. In the hugely popular End of Evangelion, both SEELE’s human innovation scenario and the scenario built on the private desires of Ikari Gendo failed to achieve their purposes.

As such, the desire for a posthuman society wherein humans and technological outcasts are ‘balanced’ in society has been frustrated in its swing between technophobia and technophilia. This is the sort of potential situation that causes increasing anxiety among those who have substantive concerns about our world’s progression toward posthumanism. The recently established Future of Life Institute exists to explore the issues surrounding artificial intelligence. Its faculty members comprise 150 of the world’s leading scientists, including Steven Hawking. ³ Although the study of artificial intelligence holds enormous potential, it should be treated with extreme caution, as discoveries yet to be made could be dangerous. To counteract the risks, specialists in various fields, including economics, law, philosophy and computer security, should unite to conduct interdisciplinary research on the secure development of artificial intelligence. In order to maximize the benefits for society from artificial intelligence, one must recognize the potential threats that accompany such studies.

The reasons why cyborgs and androids transgress between protagonists and antagonists are representative of such uncertainties and tensions. To be confined in cyborg form, as a natural being, requires a humanistic attitude, although it undermines liberal humanism; in some way, it fulfills our long-standing desires. To put it concretely, in fusing cybernetic devices and biological organisms, the cyborg violates the human/machine distinction. By replacing cognition with neural feedback, it challenges the human/animal difference; by explaining the behavior of people through theories of hierarchical structure and control, it erases the animate/inanimate distinction. As such, cyborgs have led to erotic imaginings but are always subject to wary glances (Hayles, 1999: 84–85). Androids deviate from the centripetal force of modern society, while living under the banner of humanism; they thus take on the ambiguous identity of technological creatures. At the risk of over simplification, we can say that cyborgs are extremely capable, intellectually, even though they will never be able to replicate the human brain. The android, on the other hand, as a perfect machine meant to resemble a human, is a technological phenomenon that demonstrates possibilities free from the limitations (Lee, 2007: 162) exhibited by robots.

Wonder Kiddy features technological beings of different kinds, each carrying out a specific narrative purpose by delivering various messages. Through these creatures, Wonder Kiddy provides an insight into a broad pattern of ‘humanoid non-humans/inhuman humans’, who supplement the physical structure of the human body, go beyond it or imitate it. Among them, we see cyborgs, androids, intelligent robots and even aliens (elves). Apart from aliens, most of the ‘technologically born’ beings have a subtle hierarchy based on their functions, skills and capacity for self-control. One thing worth noting is that Wonder Kiddy suggests a certain oughtopia model while imagining this posthuman society. The concept of oughtopia, spearheaded by Yŏng-sik Cho, comes from the merging of ‘ought to be/ought to do’ and ‘utopia’, meaning a model global cooperative community with a fixed set of values, which humanity should create during the natural historical process.

This concept differs from the concept of utopia in the West in three ways. First, oughtopia is not a concept that is built on the negation and rejection of reality. The first part of Thomas More’s 1516 publication, On the Best State of a Republic and on the New Island of Utopia, raises real problems that need to be addressed. Second, the concept of oughtopia does not cease in striving for a transcended horizon. In contrast, the Arcadian utopia imagined in the West or the Millennium of Christianity can be regarded as classic mythical/supernatural models of utopia. The third way is linked to the second and asserts that utopia is based on the autonomous agreements of humanity to formulate an achievable political structure and cultural landscape. While there are differences in the extent of their achievability, both from philosophical and social perspectives and sometimes related to constructive forecasts, the process of forming autonomous agreements by humanity to create an ideal society have been unclear in their design, from Plato’s The Republic in ancient times, Bacon’s The New Atlantis in the 17th century, Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, Wells’s A Modern Utopia in the 20th century, to Walden Two by Skinner.

More specifically, Cho believes that oughtopia must begin with striving for ‘reciprocal peace’ by the community who discusses ‘us’ and ‘tomorrow’, not from the world as a group of individuals focusing on ‘I’ and the ‘present’ (Cho, 1979: 221). In this regard, he has advanced discussions on the Regional Cooperation Society that transcends the nation-state, the Regional Integrated Society and the Global Cooperation Society (cited in Oh, 2006: 6). The points he referenced at the end of the 1970s can be said to share certain similarities with today’s multi-branched global citizenship. Considering that the discourse on global citizenship began to spread after the nation-state with its unified identity and total oneness came under fire from globalization, his oughtopianism can be seen as a theory that was advanced for its time. In particular, the objective set forth by Anthony Giddens in jointly seeking global and regional citizenship or global nationalism as an eclectic methodology seems to be directly related to Cho’s oughtopianism. The idea behind the democratic initiatives on global citizenship discussed by Christoph Menke and Arnd Pollman is also relevant to oughtopianism. True democracy considered by Cho can also be summarized as transcending the limiting horizons of individual nations behaving in accordance with their internalized values and ideals, and must have the power to make all humans equal members of the community.

In particular, Cho believes that the form of democracy that the community of global citizens should have is akin to the idea of ecological democracy. This is because one of the major discussion points of the key methodology behind Cho’s oughtopianism, ‘the theory of transmission’, is based on seeking social order and rules from nature and the order of the existence of natural things. He believes that we can achieve the most ideal ethical considerations and political execution when we understand the relationships between all aspects of the natural world, including ourselves. Within discussions following this logic, the critical consideration is the power and politicization in the hyphen of the ‘human–nature’ relationship (Jeong, 2012: 134–135). Worthy of further discussion, Cho’s 1979 publication Oughtopia criticizes the post-modern posthuman society created from the advanced introduction of ‘technological outcasts’ from the perspective of free-willed humanism:

On the day when all humans shun natural birth and when artificial humans are manufactured in factories, nay, when the genetically-engineered artificial humans are healthier, void of defects, and far superior to babies from wombs, just as we question whether the primitive virus is a living organism or not, then we will be able to discuss whether then-humans are humans, products, or living machines. (Cho, 1979: 225)

In other words, Cho’s oughtopianism, which embraces the important discussion points of global citizenship and ecological democracy, can be regarded as having been born in accepting potential libertarian humanistic subjectivism and autonomously seeking to protect human sanctity. In this regard, Cho’s oughtopianism can be explained as a modified discussion on the human-centrism born of modern design in opposition to posthuman discourses, such as speculative realism and objective-oriented philosophy. As such, today’s literature, the successor to the discourse on oughtopia, has seen attempts to modify and reinterpret Cho’s point of view on technological civilization. To achieve true ecological democracy or practical methodological global citizenship, there remain points that require theoretical explanation within oughtopianism.

In the next section, we will investigate the storytelling of Wonder Kiddy through such issues and will conduct a critical analysis of the Wonder Kiddy narrative in order to understand the concerns of South Korean society in 1989 regarding a future inhabited by posthumans. In addition, we will attempt to explain the imaginary oughtopia model in relation to the conscious and unconscious limitations of modern society.

Technophobia and the visualization of retrogression

Will it ever be possible to create a machine or device that can replace the human brain? This idea has been explored in studies of the mechanisms responsible for activating the human brain and has led to the creation of technologies that imitate human brain activity. However, the human brain is not a simple control system. In addition, the human nervous system cannot be adequately replicated using logic gates. Consequently, despite the fact that artificial intelligence is an indispensable part of our daily lives, there are many questions still waiting for a definite answer. The opening storyline in Wonder Kiddy is based on an image of future artificial intelligence. As is the case in many animated TV series, Wonder Kiddy’s plot revolves around a conflict that took place prior to the sequence of events in the narrative.

The early 2000s saw the rise of advanced technologies, while at the same time people were facing a population explosion, the exhaustion of natural resources, pollution and numerous other problems. In search of a solution, people turned to space to find new suitable places to live. In 2020, the Earth’s Space Development Headquarters imagined a time when discovering a new star could foreshadow the future of humankind. ⁴

The crisis emerging on Earth created a worldwide awareness of the problems humankind faced in the era of industrialization. In particular, Korean society of the 1980s was ultimately in a period of deindustrialization in which both technophobia and technophilia, the characteristics of the information age, collided. First, to confirm the air of technophilia in Korean society, it is necessary to confirm the economic status of Korea at that time as well as the future strategies of technology-focused conglomerates. It is well known that Korea was a nation of extreme poverty due to Japanese colonization for 35 years after 1910. With the added burden of the Korean War for three years after 1950, Korea was in a state where it received donations of excess agricultural and consumer goods from the US as well as foreign aid and had to rebuild the country from the ground up. However, under the state-administered economic development plans beginning in the 1960s, high-powered growth began. In the 1980s, technology-focused industries such as semiconductors, automobiles and industrial electronics were strategically nurtured, and Gross Domestic Product (GDP), as confirmed by export growth, rose to the level of a very strong developing country. In particular, the export growth in the late 1980s increased from 3.5 percent in 1985 to 36.2 percent in 1987, with Gross National Product (GNP) growth at 12.4 percent in 1988. Thus, Korea was experiencing the greatest age of prosperity that the nation had ever seen in its history (Kim, 2013: 397–399) and by 1989, it had transformed from a borrower nation into a lender nation.

Amongst these societal trends, conglomerates spearheading the technology-focused industries forecast development into a high-technology and information society and flooded the nation with positive forecasts of Korean development. For example, the now-global firm LG (then, named ‘Gold Star’), repeatedly released corporate public relations (PR) advertisements with ‘technopia’ as its slogan and ‘the utopia led by high technology’ as its theme. A 1981 Gold Star TV commercial declared, ‘The human dream. Gold Star leads the world of technopia. A highly advanced information age where people can share information anywhere, anytime to anyone – this is the utopia led by Gold Star’s high technologies, the world of technopia.’ Samsung also competitively filmed and released a corporate PR TV commercial with the slogan ‘human-tech’. The 1983 Samsung PR narration ran ‘Technology for humans, Samsung’s cutting-edge technology is laden with humanism. For the convenience, safety and health of humans – technology that breathes along with humans. This is the human-tech of Samsung.’

However, in the background of these utopian forecasts led by such technologies, or techno-utopianism, technophobia was spearheaded. In particular, from the workers’ perspective, although they were working the longest work-hours in the world, the gap between the rich and poor continued to increase. Large cities with state-led industries suffered under senseless development. Industrial zones seemed to be a closed environment with low land usage rates and high building-to-land ratios, leading to large-scale apartment complexes and disappearing sub-agriculture zones. Green spaces were never considered in urban planning. Therefore, after export strategies had been modified to center around technologically-focused industries, the Korean society that had developed explosively, began to, paradoxically, face the fears of a technological civilization.

The ‘mysterious incident’ in the opening sequence narration of the first episode of Wonder Kiddy and the secret of the alien planet Upio can be seen as a reflection of this paradoxical fear. The key to the narrative is a series of incidents that, in the end, reveal the mysterious truth about the Upio planetary system; they involve two ‘disappearances’ and an ‘odd incident’ in space. The first incident relates to the disappearance of Sir Henry, the most established scientist in the field of artificial intelligence and high-precision electronics in the Earth Federation. The third episode reveals that despite his dedication to the study of artificial intelligence, he lost all his research materials in a fire and disappeared after that without a trace. According to Sir Henry’s granddaughter Lisa, Henry felt very depressed after bringing his family to Upio and aspired to create some sort of technological civilization that would save the Earth from a death crisis. The second incident involves the disappearance of a Hadron cell, stored in the space development headquarters and carried on the spaceship ‘Star 201’. Hadron is a new source of energy, more powerful than any of the natural resources on Earth or existing alternative resources. This energy source disappeared before being put to use and half of it fell into the hands of the Twin Devil Robots who took control of Upio. Hadron is essential for monitoring and managing the artificial technical civilization of Upio and is an instrument for controlling its artificially intelligent robots.

After moving to planet Upio, Sir Henry began to dream of shaping a new civilization where society powered itself through hadron and artificial intelligence microchips. Putting this idea into practice would require the participation of native Upio inhabitants and the creation of artificially intelligent robots. He hoped that all humankind could leave the Earth before it became uninhabitable, something that was likely to happen soon. However, the artificially intelligent robots that Sir Henry created killed him, and used his knowledge to lay the foundation for a new world order. Here, a dreadful prospect suddenly surrounds the hypothetical answer to the question asked at the beginning of the present chapter: whether it will ever be possible to create a machine or device to replace the human brain. The dreadful possibility that humans could be enslaved by machines with simulated human brains stops being a mere concern and becomes real.

The underlying rationale for why the story of Wonder Kiddy has such dramatic tension leads to the techno-utopia or technophobia in the background of the human-tech illusion established by LG and Samsung. Reflecting this thought, highly developed machines go out of control and cause a disaster of unimaginable scale. One of the most important narrative aspects of Wonder Kiddy is the anxiety visualized in a wide variety of forms; it is important to analyze these forms of anxiety in detail.

The first is a fear that intelligent machines could start living according to their own rules of self-evolution, imitating the governing principles typical of human society. This concern reflects Professor Kevin Warwick’s fear about the future of cyborgs. The Devil Mara, who has acquired an artificial brain and become the most extreme technological being on Upio, is very similar to an android. His body has a self-regulation system, as does a human body; this proves that homeostasis is possible in the closed planetary system of Upio with its cybernetic environment.

A full-scale development of artificial intelligence on Earth nowadays leads us to magic-like results; we can see the whole universe from the perspective of a small star! … The circuit is designed in such a way that it is linked directly to the sender’s brainwaves and thus it will act according to sender’s thoughts … Look at this monster’s eyes, look! Does this eye function as a camera lens? Everything it sees goes through a transmission circuit that would send signals to the recipient’s brain. ⁵

This quotation is delivered by Doctor Ro (a member of the search party) to explain the artificial intelligence technologies of the Upio planetary system. Of course, this ‘perfection’ is a characteristic feature of technological totalitarianism (Ahn, 2014: 64–68). In the Upio planetary system, it expresses itself through the system, which puts biological organisms into more servile roles than even lower level robots. This demonstrates the most radical catastrophe that human-tech, originally designed for techno-utopia, can lead to.

To better understand the fears that surround the technological advancement of the Upio civilization, it is necessary to look at the web of personal relationships that connect Wonder Kiddy’s characters (see Figure 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

A diagram showing the characters, status, personality, and relationships to one another.

As can be seen in Figure 1, biological beings in Wonder Kiddy, including humans and aliens, serve as antidotes to robots who strive to achieve their own interests. Controlling the robots is the Devil Mara (the Devil), who is so advanced that he has been able to create and rule a strictly hierarchical society. At the peak of his power, the Devil has subjugated Earthlings and local aliens to his rule. The Devil Twins demonstrate the ability to create more highly developed robots by taking over mechanical devices from Earth’s aircrafts. Thus, the dominant–subordinate relationships between robots on the planet Upio are defined by whether or not they are capable of repeating technological evolution through their intellectual abilities. It is for this reason that robots such as the dinosaur robot and the King Kong robot are placed in somewhat subjugated positions. Meanwhile, looking closely at relations between the Devil Twins and humans, as well as among aliens, brings us back to the anxiety mentioned above. This society of machines, possessing human-level knowledge and information, is self-evolving at an alarming rate because people have revealed their own fears about the limited intellectual capacity of humans. The entire population of the planets Upio and Adona, together with enslaved humans, is held prisoner by the Devil Mara.

Secondly, Wonder Kiddy reflects the fear of the collapse of modern humanity and the death of the human race, followed by a shift to a posthuman society. This corresponds with the fear that in a technological cybernetics environment, humans will no longer be able to function as the dominant species. In an empire of cyborgs and androids who have developed into pseudo-humans that resemble humans themselves, the spirit that formed the basis of the autonomous self as well as its identity can no longer enjoy the value and authority that it did in the past. If cybernetics is used as a means to control human communication, the mythology itself surrounding the subject of liberal humanism is threatened (Hayles, 1999: 87). In fact, research on post-humanist topics incorporates the same contradiction and irony.

Overall, Wonder Kiddy offers an extreme metaphor for the end of the modern subject. Ican and Lisa, members of the search crew from Earth, both have encounters with their fathers. However, what Ican and Lisa actually see is their fathers’ brains being remodeled at the recycling plant of the Devil Mara. The Devil extracts knowledge from their fathers’ brains and uses the information to create machines that possess artificial intelligence. In the course of that process, their fathers are treated merely as inferior cyborgs, obedient to the simplest commands. The two fathers were ‘brainwashed’ by a ‘brainwashing device’. This image clearly captures concerns about whether the autonomous and independent modern subject can be completely preserved as part of an information system in a highly developed cybernetics environment.

Thirdly, Wonder Kiddy presents concerns about how mythological value, an essential component of spiritual richness, could collapse if a technological civilization’s speed and sense of direction get out of hand. The narrative in Wonder Kiddy takes place in 2020, when objects representing spiritual richness are either on the verge of extinction, or have already been lost. As demonstrated by the example of Ican and Yena, it also touches on the themes of ‘father/mother loss’, ‘family loss’ and ‘home/motherland loss’. As mentioned above, Ican finds his father, who has been manipulated by technology to the point where he is almost non-human and cannot recognize his own son. This distorted image of a father is a metaphor for the inhumanity of the artificial technological civilization that has taken control of the Earth. Once again, the message Wonder Kiddy attempts to convey is not just that technology could destroy the natural environment of our planet, but that it could also bring about the extinction of the cultural values that have given humanity its spiritual richness. It is for this reason that Ican tries to bring his father back to life and save the Earth from crisis at the same time. In other words, Wonder Kiddy gives the ‘lost father’ plot arc an additional dimension by drawing an analogy between the father and Earth themes.

Finally, the anxiety present in this animated narrative arises from a worn-out belief about the historical progress of the human race. This evokes the concept of linear time, supposedly a guarantee of progress. As Alvin Toffler (1980: 121) said of the linear time concept that came into existence alongside technology:

It is worth noting, however, that linear time was a precondition for indust-real views of evolution and progress. Linear time made evolution and progress plausible. For if time were circular instead of linelike, if events doubled back on themselves instead of moving in a single direction, it would mean that history repeated itself and that evolution and progress were no more than illusions – shadows on the wall of time.

If time is assumed to be circular rather than linear, then things do not follow a single path but can go backward as well as forward in time. In this case, history repeats itself, and evolution as well as progress is nothing but an illusion – a mere shadow on the wall of time. Wonder Kiddy portrays the planetary system of Upio as a hideous kingdom of machines, while suggesting that the same evolutionary scenario could also happen on Earth. Sometimes the ground and hills take the form of callous machines so that it is hard to imagine a living organism surviving there. Such images do not promote notions of ‘evolution’ or ‘progress’ if viewed from a human-centered perspective. Robots of the Upio planetary system present an image of reverse evolution. For example, most of the monster robots that attacked the rescue mission from Earth resemble dinosaurs from the Mesozoic period. This dreadful vision shows that our own civilization could end up in a place of horror, ruled by the laws of the jungle, if we do not pay attention to the warning signs and rescue our heavily exploited Earth.

Wonder Kiddy presents dependence on technology as an aspect of technophobia. In post-modern times, we lose our faith in the guidance of liberal humanism and the concept of linear time, which is based on the idea of progress. This indicates that Korean society of the mid to late 1980s had a positive outlook on the potential of the human-tech that would enable a techno-utopia while being unable to turn a blind eye to the increasing fear of high technology. In the next section, we will attempt to grasp the meaning assigned to the space environment of Wonder Kiddy, the quintessential epic adventure. This will help us identify the frames of oughtopia present in Wonder Kiddy while identifying the particular thematic consciousness of this animated work.

Traditional environmentalism and the regressive nature of ‘oughtopia’

When the evolutionary biologist Thomas S Ray attended the Fourth Conference on Artificial Life in 1994, he made two different proposals. He first announced an idea to preserve the biodiversity of the rainforests in Costa Rica. The other was a proposal to allow his program, Tierra, to be released into the internet so that it may create diverse species. According to Ray, although these two proposals seemed to have little to do with one another, he contended that his lines of code would eventually become life forms, despite being artificial (Hayles, 1999: 223–224). Such a statement paints a possible posthuman future in rather radical colors. As cybernetics has entered a fundamentally new stage of development, we should carefully consider the fate of the human race and decide what is best for us. Examined from that point of view, the storyline of Wonder Kiddy offers a message, which holds true for both Ray and his opponents. Along with warnings about society’s technology dependence, concerns about protecting biological society, both human-oriented and human-dominated, have become increasingly relevant. From the perspective of the modern subject, Wonder Kiddy extends our mythological understanding of humanistic values, which are indispensable to humans’ dominant position in society. As such, Wonder Kiddy indirectly depicts a society of ecological democracy expanded to the planets in outer space. However, the ecological democracy, which excludes the majority of technological outcasts capable of autonomous thought, seems unable to implement the true image of oughtopia. This is because the galactic cooperative society model is suggested as a type of ecology from which the artificial civilization is strictly excluded and it constitutes a space where the perfect natural ecology is preserved as the most convenient environment for humans. Oughtopia pivots on the image of an environment in which the ecosystem is perfectly preserved, creating the most comfortable surroundings for humans. We can say that an ecosystem that permits no external intervention (or limits intervention to a minimum), is a preemptive condition for oughtopia because it is presented as a model of a global cooperative community.

Herbrechter states that, despite technology traditionally being either creating links or disconnects between nature and culture, such a statement is no longer necessary or even valid today. He believes that these two have become so intermingled that words such as ‘social animal’ would be more accurate if they were called ‘techno-social animals’ (Herbrechter, 2013: 21). As a result, the relationship between society and technology has undergone some changes. Hayles attributes these changes to the fact that the border dividing autonomous individuals and technological creatures is gradually fading (Hayles, 1999: 162). Leaving judgments on the Wonder Kiddy narrative behind, we will further develop the oughtopia theme below.

As previously discussed, the first thing that shocked Ican and his team upon their arrival in the Upio system was the control exercised over the whole planet by the android-like Devil Mara, seated in his Devil Castle. However, the second shock was far more startling. Devil Mara’s process of self-advancement depended on enslaving all living organisms, including aliens. All of this was part of an elaborate plan to create a cosmic civilization run by robots who would exploit the rest of the population. The resistance and repulsion felt by the second shock were caused by Upio’s peculiar environment as is illustrated in Figure 2. They witnessed a perfect paradise, which had, however, a strictly classified system. Figure 3 depicts the planet Adona, which managed to win its freedom while maintaining political ties with the Upio planetary system. This is the home planet of the alien girl, Yena, the only creature who has ever dared to face the Devil Mara.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

A landscape oil painting of Upio. Reproduced with permission by KBS.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

A landscape of the Adona Kingdom. This image depicts the ideal natural environment that is preserved for humans. Reproduced with permission by KBS.

Adona’s castle from Wonder Kiddy is a crucial element in the storyline. Yena’s story echoes that of Ican, who is searching for his long-lost father on Upio as Yena first finds her father and then her mother, taking them both to the Adona Kingdom. Likewise, their narratives share a similar trajectory and reinforce the concept of a place ‘to come back to by any means’.

As illustrated in Figure 5, the Devil Mara controls and occupies the entire Upio planetary system, including the Chroma Kingdom around his castle. The Bakson Kingdom near the Devil Mara’s territory is also occupied by the Devil Mara. This structure means that a technological civilization at the peak of its political power dominates and colonizes organic (alien) territory. This world reveals the dystopian relationship between the earth and intellectual machinery, gradually becoming more powerful on Earth. Then, the symbolic, undamaged Adona Kingdom becomes a model of a utopia; a precious place that organic beings have a duty to protect. In the story of Yena, it is where an unimpaired family community recovers and where a natural ecology is almost perfectly conserved, despite the invasion of various technologies. This gives the scene in which characters prepare for the final battle against the technological civilization of the Upio planet system a very important meaning. The protagonists must come up with ways to stop the technology invasion. As can be seen in Figure 4, the Adona landscape reminds Ican of Earth, which he left long before. In short, the Castle Kingdom represents the most important aspect of the oughtopia model, which Wonder Kiddy presents as an ideal paradise: the Earth before destruction or after recovery.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

A picture of when the main character’s life was the most complete. Reproduced with permission by KBS.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 5.

A chart that depicts the relationships of the factions within the show.

This sort of analysis echoes the unsophisticated arguments of human-centric, traditional environmentalism. Wonder Kiddy clearly shows the limitations of the branches of ecology that cannot be separated from modernistic planning. Because a negative consequence occurred, technological civilization remains responsible for the recovery from environmental pollution and destruction. The limitation of traditional environmentalism is that it focuses on simple ecology, worrying about nature from the vantage point of human rights and interests. While the oughtopianism asserted by Cho is concerned about modern technological civilization, considering that the attitude of accepting technological products as a human way of life already exists, it could be said that the main issue presented in Wonder Kiddy might belong in a more backwards or conservative ecology. Ecoetica (2013) by Imamichi Tomonobu provides an important viewpoint regarding limitations to the argument above. His theory of eco-ethics is based on a notion of the ethics of objects. Human beings should strive for ethical awakening in every aspect of the life-environment, including cultural and technological outcomes. Tomonobu (2013: 49–53) calls for abandoning the concept that humanity holds a special existential position on Earth and insists that people are responsible for the living environment. Judged from this angle, the oughtopia of Wonder Kiddy fails to provide a fundamental solution to the problem of inverse evolution, essential to a posthuman society. Overall, Wonder Kiddy ends on a rather idealistic and even unrealistic note.

One step ahead of Tomonobu, Jane Bennett (2010: xiv) emphasizes the potency of objectified items including the technological artifices under the concept of vital materiality. According to Bennett, an ecologically appropriate politics begins with understanding the world not through the central notion of the action-subjectivity of humans, accepting other types of action-subjectivity based on non-human influences, and realizing their contributions to the world. Moreover, she observes the communication between the human body and the activity of materials in an aesthetic manner, removing the duality between life/matter, human/animal, will/decision and organic/inorganic, and attempts to objectively view the world that is formed by non-human actors. These discussions give birth to the potential for a politically radical notion of ecology. She mentions the following in the preface to her book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things:

I invoke Spinoza’s idea of conative bodies that strive to enhance their power of activity by forming alliances with other bodies, and I share his faith that everything is made of the same substance. This same-stuff claim, this insinuation that deep down everything is connected and irreducible to a simple substrate, resonates with an ecological sensibility, and that too is important to me. But in contrast to some versions of deep ecology, my monism posits neither a smooth harmony of parts nor a diversity unified by a common spirit. (Bennett, 2010: x–xi)

Such an assertion raises a question regarding the backwards oughtopianism of Wonder Kiddy, which understands but excludes the technological outcasts on a different level by homogenizing them in order to support traditional environmentalism. If the nature of the storytelling was such that the ecological values were shared and cooperation on a planetary level with planets in different levels of technological civilizations were sought, it would have been better to base Wonder Kiddy on a more ethical political ecology. While this cannot be attributed to any one reason, it can be regarded as being linked to the technophobia that was born from the characteristic conditions of late 1980s Korean society.

Conclusion

Thus far, we have dissected the storytelling aspect of 2020 Space Wonder Kiddy (1989), the first Korean animated television series to venture into the science fiction/mecha genre. We have also analyzed its world view and way of imagining posthumanism. The Korean military dictatorship of the late 1980s hosted the 1986 Asian Games and the 1988 Seoul Olympics and devoted much of the country’s resources to generating various content that could be used to boost the level of Korean culture. Wonder Kiddy is one of the series that was directed, together with Run Hodori, The Wandering Magpie, The Little Dinosaur Dooli (1987 series) and Run Hanni (1988), to meet the policy needs of flaunting Korean culture. However, considering that the mainstream of animation was ‘anti-communist’ and state-led in nature, demonstrative of the Cold War ideologies following the first theatrical animation Hong Gildong in 1967, the animation film boom in the late 1980s was welcome. In particular, Wonder Kiddy was a meaningful achievement as most of the popular theatrical science fiction/mechanic genre films were wholly or partially a rip-off of Japanese films (Kim, 2006: 69–70). In terms of its content, it is also a meaningful achievement as it depicted scenes in which ‘technological outcasts’ and humans interacted and then moved on to depicting an appropriate model for a cooperative society or utopia.

However, this article has focused on discussing the problematic messages internalized in the storytelling of Wonder Kiddy. Specifically, at the time of its production, Wonder Kiddy demonstrated a technophobia relating to the limitations that were characteristic of Korean society at the time and targeted a backwards utopia. Taking a closer look at Wonder Kiddy reveals that its method of building dramatic tension involved exploiting the vague fear of technology present in Korean society in the late 1980s. For example, it shows how a self-evolving, sentient race of machines learns to dominate men and their society. Wonder Kiddy also illustrates the human fear that a full-fledged posthuman society might bring about the end of modern people and their societies. This plays on our instinctive anxiety about conceding any of our superior species privileges within a technological cybernetic environment that continues to expand and deepen. Third, Wonder Kiddy highlights a presumption that if we fail to control the speed and direction of ongoing technological advancement, the mythical virtues of a clear, sane mind could be compromised. Many humans and aliens in the series have lost their fathers, mothers, families, homelands or nations to the relentless, conquering robots. Lastly, the series has a subversive message: that a belief in the evolution of human civilization based on a linear concept of time is misguided and responsible for spreading anxiety among men.

Meanwhile, Wonder Kiddy’s conclusion also reveals the limits of traditional discussions about ecology, arguing that threats to human life (such as the destruction of nature and environmental pollution) will exacerbate as society advances toward a technological civilization that depends heavily on artifacts. The narrative presents the Adona Kingdom model as an ideal solution for preserving all ecological, natural and scenic values. This explains the cooperation of global citizens beyond the borders and differences between the planets, as shown in the oughtopia of Wonder Kiddy, and shows specific descriptions of ecological democracy; however, this is also proof that it was not produced as a model for political reality. From this perspective, Wonder Kiddy is a text that shows the existence of reactionary technophobia at a time when positive forecasts of techno-utopianism were flooding Korean society. This article carries significance in its analysis of the imagining of a posthuman society within a society of technological civilization in the context of reflection theory, using Korean science fiction animation that is less well-known in Western animation academia. Going forward, we will strive to expand academic interest in Korean animation by observing its special characteristics as well as through comparative studies of Japanese anime, with which Korea shares historical and cultural contexts.