FAQ

Anything to keep in mind?

Min Guhong Manufacturing hopes this FAQ will answer your questions about the company and the person who runs it. It brings together interviews, long and short, conducted since 2015, carefully compiled and then scattered into random order. Depending on when a question was asked, some facts may differ from those of today. Honorifics for people mentioned have also sometimes been omitted to suit the tone of the question. If you have read your way through the FAQ and still have questions, please tell us all about them at support@minguhongmfg.com. Min Guhong Manufacturing is ready to understand and acknowledge everything. Please look for a reply in the FAQ someday, though, rather than in your inbox.

We live in an age when social media alone can convey all the information we need—or, in Min Guhong Manufacturing’s terms, an ‘age of introductions.’ Is making a personal website still meaningful?

In terms of reach, nothing beats social media. But each platform has its own constraints, and those constraints limit users’ happiness. Twitter, for example, limits the length of posts, while Instagram requires an image or video even to post a single line of text. Hyperlinks in posts do not work, either. It is a strategy to keep users on Instagram forever.

The ‘like’ feature also places your life, your work, and ultimately yourself in a position to be judged by an unspecified public. Seeing the result as an adorable heart icon and a number of only a few hundred is not especially pleasant. Not everyone can have lots of likes, so someone may feel insignificant or come to reject their own work or life. Unless you use it on your own terms, you are bound to get swept along.

Meanwhile, services such as Cargo, used mainly in the design world, provide attractive templates for people unfamiliar with coding. They are certainly convenient, but the templates are detached from the content. You fit your content into a preexisting frame. In use, something inevitably feels not quite right, and changing one design element or another turns out to be difficult. The code gets messy, too. Making a website can come to be understood as simply modifying a template.

Learn a few computer languages, and you can control almost everything yourself. Building a website just for you from a blank slate is worth trying as ‘a liberal art for people today.’ Thinking about who you are, what you like and dislike, organizing those thoughts in writing, and considering how to give them a new order with computer languages is valuable. It also allows you to understand and use technology on your own terms.

Because of the pandemic, ‘death’ is a more familiar word than ever. Every morning we hear how many people died the day before. That makes us reflect on life all the more. Making a website for yourself may be no different from loving yourself profoundly. When you love yourself profoundly, you can love others profoundly, too. Love, and the happiness that follows it, spreads faster than an epidemic. Is there anything more important to do before we die?

I am a student at the University of Seoul. What is your goal in life?

With apologies to my parents, I believe I was born into this world by chance. Having that man and that woman as my parents, being born Korean, being born male, and even being named ‘Min Guhong’ are all coincidences from my perspective. How should I carry out and complete this project called ‘life,’ which began by chance? The more I think about it, the more endless it becomes. Thinking hard does not solve it, either. What matters is that, in any case, I have no choice but to choose something—from something as small as a typeface to something as broad as what to have for dinner after this lecture. In the broadest sense, my criterion is, above all, my own happiness.

Douglas Adams’s science-fiction novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy presents 42 as the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. I have a similar number.

I hear that the natural lifespan of the animal called a human is thirty-eight years. Before I knew it, I had lived those thirty-eight years and one more. Astonishingly, I will turn forty next year. I think of the rest of my life as simply ‘extra’—a bonus stage. Misunderstanding it that way puts my mind at ease. Whether something good or bad happens, I think, ‘So it goes…’ That is also a way to eliminate what Buddhism calls karma.

When introducing the company, Min Guhong Manufacturing says it ‘lives parasitically’ on Workroom. In other words, it is a company that lives on its operator’s workplace. Why choose parasitism as its way of operating?

Parasitism naturally became the company’s survival strategy. All kinds of ‘infected’ appear in The Last of Us series by the console game studio Naughty Dog. Like cordyceps, they invade human bodies and control their hosts. Without humans, they have no source of energy. Min Guhong Manufacturing is much the same. It makes up for its lack of courage and capital through a host. In exchange for labor and a measure of amusement, the operator receives a salary that covers the company’s running costs and uses the host’s movable and immovable property, such as computers, tables, and coffee machines. This also naturally resolves tax-related matters that I never want to understand. I am sometimes urged to leave the host, become independent, or obtain a business registration certificate. But doing so would be the same as filing notice that Min Guhong Manufacturing was closing. Even if I left Workroom to live parasitically on Google or Tesla, it is hard to imagine Min Guhong Manufacturing becoming independent. Despite this state of affairs, an intern who came from the Netherlands has recently been working here.