Suddenly there was this huge doll in the middle of a park in South Korea's capital Seoul.
She was a likeness of the character who recorded people in the South Korean Netflix series "Squid Game" who were about to be shot.
But that didn't stop people in Seoul from approaching the doll, photographing it and taking selfies with it.
They fit so seamlessly into the permanent recycling cycle of South Korean pop culture.
The perfect world of K-Pop stars works in exactly the same way, providing their fans with songs, videos and reality shows around the clock.
In South Korea pop products are no longer created, but entire universes.
And those in K-Pop are all about the concerns of the audience.
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It is about the silent or open suffering of the individual in and in society.
In Korea there is a merciless educational competition and the young people are under a lot of pressure, «says Katharina Peters, SPIEGEL correspondent in Seoul in this podcast episode.
“If there is someone who accepts this suffering and gives them hope, then it just goes down well.
Apparently that catches on with fans all over the world «.
South Korea's cultural industry is more than a perfectly programmed consumption machine.
The export of films, series, music and games has been part of the state strategy for decades.
And now an important geopolitical factor.
“As early as the late 1990s, $ 290 billion was pumped into the cultural sector within two years.
And since then, every South Korean president has expanded the country's soft power with the help of Korean cultural products, "says Katharina Peters," and when people see the stars in these films, for example, that also means that Korean cosmetics have a large market because then people might want to look like this «.
Why South Korea's pop culture reflects and at the same time transfigures society, where the similarities between K-Pop and Schlager lie and what the winged word »Ppalli-Ppalli« has to do with the rise of the country, you will find out in »Eight Billion«.
You can hear the current episode here: