Hongdae, which finds its physical and spiritual nexus in Hongik University, the country's largest art school, is the most self-consciously and aggressively hip neighborhood, a web of narrow streets with low-rise, rickety prewar wooden buildings that once held unpretentious eateries. Some of the surviving old-timers—an eel restaurant, a spicy noodle joint—coexist alongside boutiques and bars with names like Chez Robert Artist's Bar, their facades painted bright orange or aquamarine.

As I strolled the streets of Hongdae, I had to remind myself that the sense of freedom I always feel here is, much like the vibrant arts scene, a relatively recent development. For all its polish, South Korea began democratizing only in the late 1980s, right around the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Only twenty-five years ago, in 1980, the military rulers—who had run the country since 1962—had cracked down on pro-democracy demonstrators in the southwestern city of Gwangju, killing hundreds. This incident, eerily similar to the Tiananmen Square massacre in China only nine years later, went virtually unremarked in the local press, which was under strict government control, and was covered only by the foreign media.

After that, though, things changed quickly. In the late 1980s, restrictions against traveling overseas were lifted, and millions of citizens went abroad. Until then, South Koreans had difficulty attaining passports unless they were being dispatched abroad by a company or the government. Legacies of the long era of military rule disappeared one after another: Schoolchildren ceased being taught that North Koreans were devils with tails; artists and the media were allowed freedom of speech without fear of reprisal. The 1997 election of Kim Dae Jung, the longtime opposition leader who had nearly been assassinated by the country's military rulers, marked a crucial turning point: Kim stripped the Korean Central Intelligence Agency of its powers to intrude into people's personal lives, and the organization was reborn as an agency more akin to the FBI.

Then came the 1997 financial crisis. Instead of paralyzing the country, the destruction hastened the democratic process as well as a creative boom. After a couple of years, South Korea had bounced back, and the meltdown had left the country changed for the better: For one thing, the government decided to focus its attention on grooming South Korea's relatively nascent technology sector. By 2002, the country had become the world's most wired, with the highest broadband penetration rate, according to the International Telecommunication Union (recently, the nation slipped to number two, behind Iceland; the United States is ranked number sixteen).

South Korea's long-term goal is nothing less than a Jetsons-like world: In ten to fifteen years, the government has promised, every Korean will have a robot in the household, an intermediary between human beings and the fully wired society in which they will live. As the government improved the infrastructure, companies such as Samsung, Hyundai, and LG improved their products so much that they became status symbols themselves instead of cheap alternatives to Japanese and American brands. South Korea was becoming a definer of the modern consumer-oriented lifestyle.