South Korea embraces technology like nowhere else.

This is Keith Kim, entrepreneur and tech blogger.

He's been witnessing firsthand the rapid changes happening here in Seoul.

I honestly believe that it's it is the future city of the world.

Korea has the fastest Internet in the world.

Number one number two.

We'll take it right.

The government invested into Internet infrastructure 20 years ago.

So now, because of that, we have all this infrastructure toe have the fastest WiFi.

In the late fifties, South Korea faced financial struggles.

They just come out of the Korean War that ended in 1953 and had quickly become one of the poorest countries in the world To turn things around.

In the eighties and nineties, the government pumped a lot of money into future proofing, spending billions of dollars building a fiber backbone to bring broadband to every school office.

In home.

Conditions were perfect to create a small ecosystem for tech to flourish, government backing with healthy competition, a dense urban population and a culture ready to engage with tech, making it near impossible for other countries to mimic that culture of Koreans being ingrained in technology has been around for well over like 25 years.

In less than a decade, it went from a 3% Internet penetration rate to more than 75%.

And in 2000 and 17 they hit the top spot with an average Internet speed of 28.6 megabytes per second.

Not to mention free WiFi.

Just about anywhere you go in Seoul, it's awesome.

You could connect anywhere on top of the mountain, inside caves and still connecting and still like superfast speeds.

Dazzlingly fast Internet speeds changed Korean culture.

Online gaming soon became a phenomenon.

PC banks or PC gaming rooms to you and I sprung up all over Seoul.

PC Bung is a place where you go and play games, right?

What I think it shows is that PC banks have been around when I was in middle school student, you know, and that that was in like 1999.

You'll go there.

You have the fastest computers, the fastest Internet.

It's fun.

It's fun place.

South Korea is now home to some 25.6 million gamers.

That's almost half the population, not to mention East board.

But Aled, this quick progression has come at a cost, according to state data.

On average, smartphone users of playing games tweeting or chatting for four hours a day.

Hoping to bring back some balance, the government has recently pivoted Focus two cultural spaces creating breakaway quiet havens around Seoul.

You know, because if you're staring at your phone for eight hours a day, there's yeah, it's gonna turn to mush.

This is definitely an effort, Thio be like, Hey, you know, slow down here.

Here's a book and you enrich yourself for a little bit.

The Star Field Library consists of over 40 ft tall giant bookshelves.

This is like one of the building blocks of the future.

You know, you have buildings like this, but they're gonna be popping up all over the place.

South Korea has managed to transform itself into one of the richest countries from less than a century ago, being one of the poorest, and it's not slowing down.

Modern day Koreans are still holding on to that concept of like, Okay, we gotta move forward.

We gotta move forward.

We've got to constantly improve.

We got to go get it.

This is just the beginning.