Abstract
Abstract
Recent industry analyses have positioned South Korea as the global epicenter of AI slop, with eleven Korea-based YouTube channels accumulating 8.45 billion views, the highest national volume of AI-generated content stripped of semiotic intent. Why South Korea, neither the largest nor a peripheral market, has become the principal site for this phenomenon is the question this study takes up. Drawing on critical political economy and platform capitalism theory, the article proposes algorithmic hustle as an analytical concept naming the labor mode in which platform incentive structures systematically evacuate semiotic value while maximizing engagement metrics. Two subordinate concepts capture its Korean inflection. Anonymous hustle designates the strategic emptying of identity that becomes structurally rational under conditions of precarious labor and the stigma attached to side employment, and combative leisure designates the dissolution of the boundary between rest and production within platform capitalism’s incentive logic. The argument unfolds across three mutually constituting conditions, the material conditions of digital compressed modernity that provide the infrastructural ceiling, the labor-economic conditions of the N-jobber economy that supply the rational motivation, and the cultural-psychological conditions of state technologism and conformist pressure that furnish the legitimating frame. Through their intersection, AI slop emerges not as technological failure or individual cynicism but as the rational product of an incentive structure that platform governance can redraw but cannot dismantle. The Korean case thus operates as an analytical limit case for how the structural logic of platform capitalism is amplified at the intersection of compressed modernization, precarity, and algorithmic incentive design.