DATELINE–Korea

Technology shareholders have taken a beating this month, as computer-related stocks lost between 10 and 30 percent of their value in recent weeks.

What invisible force is at work behind this reversal of fortune? Memory.

Not surprisingly, all U.S. memory is manufactured in Korea. Despite current political unrest and a recent history of famine and civil war, South Korean memory suppliers have somehow managed to boost the prices of DRAM by 20 percent. This dramatic increase in the cost of memory has had a dire effect on the price margins of American personal computer makers.

U.S. PC firms depend on the low valuation of memory to skim profits from each and every personal computer sold. Ironically, when memory is cheap, computers are big sellers – and highly profitable to boot. But when the value of memory rises, so rises the cost of computers, negatively impacting the fortunes of the technology industry.

Unfortunately, computer companies are not the only interests invested in keeping memory cheap. With every passing day, more and more American capital is voluntarily pumped out of local communities and funneled into multi-national corporate coffers via the stock market. White-under-the-collar hi-tech firms have been the primary beneficiaries of this new middle class foray into the form of gambling affectionately known as “investment.”

Why would hard-working American families deliberately drain local resources by investing in faraway and often fantastical high-technology ventures? Anthropologists studying the cult of multimedia point to a phenomena termed “Wall Street white flight.” In the 1960s and 1970s, the term “white flight” was used to describe the exodus of white children from public schools, recently integrated by court order, to lily-white private schools, most of them newly-founded by parents and clergy. In the same tradition, “Wall Street white flight” explains a blind, almost fanatical investment of family savings in newly founded, lily-white companies.

In turn, these “technology” companies provide high-paying jobs to the white middle class – recent college graduates, in particular. These kickbacks, known as “multimedia” jobs, are not primarily underwritten by company profits (which are often non-existent) but by a flurry of white, middle-class investment dollars.

As local communities brace themselves to ride out the horrendous wake of the Welfare Reform Act, technology-infatuated investors appear to have staked out the land of cyberspace as their amoral high ground. Until this March, that strategy seemed to be working. But in the valley of the shadow of DRAM price inflation, that “high” technology ground might just be Korean soil.

The price of DRAM may be higher than the cost of forgetting America’s ongoing involvement in “Oriental” affairs; particularly, the legacy of American military intervention in the Far East which has forced so many Asians – Vietnamese, Koreans, Laotians – to emigrate to the United States. Could it be that Korean memory makers are retaliating for recent (and not so recent) insults and injuries?

As Yellow Tide hysteria grips a White House cringing under allegations of illegal campaign contributions from Asian interests, the Democratic National Committee has begun cold-calling 1996 presidential campaign contributers who have Asian-sounding names. The DNC’s contribution cleansing effort requires Asian surnamed donors to prove they were fiscally fit to contribute; i.e., Asians deemed “too poor” to have given money to the Democratic party are refunded their monies. In sum: “You’re money is no good here.”

Surprisingly, their memory still is.