South Korea's national economy is overwhelmingly dominated by massive family-run conglomerates known as chaebols, with Samsung alone historically accounting for roughly twenty…

A closer look

South Korea's national economy is overwhelmingly dominated by massive family-run conglomerates known as chaebols, with Samsung alone historically accounting for roughly twenty percent of the entire country's gross domestic product. While Western consumers mostly know Samsung for manufacturing decent televisions and explosive smartphones, the company actually operates in almost every conceivable sector of the Korean economy, including life insurance, amusement parks, heavy shipbuilding, and military defense contracting. You can theoretically be born in a Samsung hospital, live in a Samsung-built apartment complex, study at a Samsung university, and eventually be buried by a Samsung funeral parlor without ever leaving the corporate ecosystem. It is a staggering level of monopolistic control that turns a supposedly free-market democracy into what is essentially a sovereign corporate state, proving that cyberpunk dystopian fiction was actually just a mild economic forecast