문학과 지성사

Open Exit examines the narratives of dislocation/escape and settlement/restraint using the methodologies of social science.

Open Exit is a book about “getting out.” At the same time, it is about the mechanisms that hamper such an escape, namely loyalty and compliance. The book calls these mechanisms “social cage”—in other words, social cage is the psychological, systemic, and environmental barricade that discourages or obstructs an individual from leaving a certain social relation, group, or organization.
If we are to look back from the year 2055, what will we be able to pinpoint as the central pillars of the inequitable structure of Korean society over the past thirty years? The author nominates these three: artificial intelligence, birth decline/aging populations, and immigration.
We cannot adjust to these three structural shifts with the rules and customs of the existing cage. Struck by the restructuring that would ensue from such drastic shifts, what plans can individuals and corporations come up with to mitigate the shock? What strategic reactions should the state take? How will civil society protect the community and society at large? Does Korean politics have the capacity to register and resolve this problem? Will we be able to find new hope in this future of inequity?
Open Exit discusses what the social cage is, how it has been formed on the Korean peninsula as well as East Asia at large, and which direction it will take to transform itself. Previously, the author illuminated the structure of inequality between and within generations by analyzing the generational network established by the popularly named “386” generation of South Korea in The Generation of Inequality. Also, in Rice, Disaster, and State, Lee traced the origin of Korea’s structural inequality through the lens of the rice-farming system. Harboring the completion of Lee’s inequality trilogy, Open Exit examines the social cages of East Asia, namely the structural shifts engendered by artificial intelligence, the aging and shrinking population, and immigration, as well as the new structural inequalities to emerge as a result of the collision amid such shifts, and introduces the concept of exit option, which encompasses alternative action plans for individuals and collectives.