This article studies the narratives of counter-urbanization as presented in contemporary South Korean documentaries. In recent decades, there has been a surge of ethnographic media productions with a return-to-nature theme, highlighting urban-to-rural migration. What appears as a Thoreauesque pursuit of pastoral life in the woods reveals the traumatic aftereffects of the 1960s-80s rapid industrialization as well as the 1990s Asian Financial Crisis that resulted in layoffs, bankruptcies, homelessness, and migration. This article analyzes a selection of counter-urbanist documentaries through the dual lens of social class and masculinity, especially considering South Korea's hypermasculine industrialization and neoliberal ethos of survivalist individualism. It also examines cross-generational perspectives on counter-urbanization to recover human agency.

As artificial intelligence (AI) systems become more sophisticated and play a larger role in society, arguments that they should have some form of legal personality gain credence. The arguments are typically framed in instrumental terms, with comparisons to juridical persons such as corporations. Implicit in those arguments, or explicit in their illustrations and examples, is the idea that as AI systems approach the point of indistinguishability from humans they should be entitled to a status comparable to natural persons. This article contends that although most legal systems could create a novel category of legal persons, such arguments are insufficient to show that they should.