Sociotechnical Scale| How Dreams Scale Up: Martial Law and the Living Dream of Democracy in South Korea

Abstract

Dreams of social change make people come together in collective movements. Often, statements like “I have a dream” assume that dreams can be possessed by an individual and that the individual’s dream can be “scaled up” to become a collective one. This article proposes an alternative approach to theorizing how dreams scale up by treating them like affects, drawing from Sara Ahmed’s theory of affective economies. I suggest that dreams do not reside in individuals, but circulate between signs and bodies, accumulating values through this circulation. I take the case of South Korean protests against the failed martial law attempt in December 2024 to demonstrate that this approach can help us understand how dreams connect the dead and the living, transform over time while preserving their past histories, and accumulate embodied experiences to scale up. I claim that this is how dreams create a collective and continue to live on.