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Small towns worldwide dream of growth or just revitalization, and they often invest the little money they have in their coffers to entice companies or families to resettle in their ghost town. Every mayor and city council of a sleepy hamlet would love to figure out the formula for urban resurrection, even if it's a risky, costly proposition. So what is Sokcho's secret? What did they do? How many millions did it cost?
It turns out: nothing. They did nothing. It cost nothing.
Back in South Korean, Sokcho has capitalized on the gold rush, as tour buses now carry Pokemon pilgrims several hours to Sokcho. They're not there for the beaches or the boating. They're there to play Pokemon Go.
Sokcho? Its boom is the result of a glitch — not a natural occurrence or the glacial movement of an entire industry — but perhaps a casual choice by a single person. Maybe a single programmer, late at night, miscalculated the grid needed to block out South Korea from Pokemon Go play. A boom town created not by "bubblin' crude" oil, or the film industry, or postwar reconstruction, but by an error in a fantasy landscape. Events in a virtual world having collateral consequences in our actual world (the one you're in right now).
What are the implications for future commerce? If you're a mayor of a dying city, do you invest $10 million building a promenade by the river? Or do you contact the augmented reality game du jour's developers, and spend a few grand to make your village a tourist destination?
A local bar owner hosting a Pokemon night only needs to make a few inexpensive in-app purchases to turn his pub into a hub of virtual creature activity. Or maybe your town just gets lucky, and gets the windfall benefit of an arbitrary glitch by an overworked developer, or even a nonhuman computer.
Science fiction movies always imagine some dystopic future where technology becomes "self-aware" and builds terminators or matrices to control us. It's usually fun because we don't really think it can happen. But the inaugural augmented reality game already is affecting real world human behavior.
Before, the most powerful force was nature: nothing else can change civilizations on the scale of earthquakes and floods. Only nature can bestow the gift of natural resources or other advantages upon a country. That's a lot of power in one place, but because nature is arbitrary, we don't really resent it; there's no one to complain to. In a manufactured virtual world, though, Mother Nature is replaced by a person, or a computer.
In the matrix, the power of the creator is absolute; and it's not arbitrary at all. The controller of an augmented reality landscape has that power to induce people to migrate, to spend money, to make economic decisions with real consequences. In the very near future, an app might have the same power as an industry, an elected official, and even Mother Nature herself.