ANOTHER Aug 14 has passed by with familiar proclamations about the evil designs of the proverbial ‘foreign hand’. As usual, outside conspirators are complemented by enemies inside our own borders. The list is long and comprised of absurdly opposed actors like retired spy chiefs and a women-led Baloch peace movement. Blanket categories like ‘digital terrorism’ are devised.
The now months-old ban on social media sites like X has been extended with the operationalisation of a long-touted digital security system (also known as a firewall). Leaving aside for a while the absurd notion that all of this makes us safer, let us focus on the economic fallout that has been triggered.
Pakistan is reportedly the fourth biggest gig economy in the world, with millions of (mostly young) people generating incomes through a host of digital platforms. There can be no romanticising the realities of platform capitalism; it is exploitative, has myriad gendered effects and is cause and consequence of the unprecedented commodification of social life. Yet beggars can’t be choosers in a country where land grabbing, khaki real estate schemes, hoarding, contraband trade, useless mega infrastructure projects and the like represent the dominant model of ‘economic development’.
Unlike most variants of Pakistani capitalism, the gig economy’s one saving grace is that it generates some employment opportunities for young, educated segments of the population, thus offsetting some of the demographic pressure that is culminating, with almost two million people joining the labour force annually.
Young working people are seeing their aspirations go up in smoke.
We have been here before. Temporary bans on YouTube, TikTok and other big social media sites have suffocated the livelihoods of those who have had more or less success monetising their content. Increasingly regular moves to suspend mobile data have badly affected precarious workers reliant on food delivery, ride-sharing and many other apps.
The current internet clampdown is affecting all this as well as call centres, software developers, digital marketing and many other sub-sectors. Even basic communications apps like WhatsApp have been crippled. A number of foreign companies — most prominently Fiverr — have suggested they will soon shift their operations away from Pakistan because their daily losses run into the millions. I care less about the profits of multinationals than I do about the call centre workers who are being deprived of even their meagre daily wages.
The latest hybrid regime started off exhorting the need for foreign investment, and has now succeeded in thwarting its own stated imperative. In 2022, digital freelancers brought in $500 million, which is at least as much concrete currency than we’ve actually see come into the country through the much-touted SIFC.
Our khaki-dominated ruling class is so consumed by palace intrigues and the windfall profits of big office that it is unable to see where it is taking what is already a sinking ship. When X and WhatsApp are deemed threats to ‘national security’ because urban middle class types from military and civilian backgrounds — previously the biggest defenders of the established order — are now using these platforms to criticise the incumbent regime, it is obvious that the establishment and its lackeys have lost the plot.
It is unsurprising that the powers are petrified by youth-led movements in the peripheries, including the women-led Baloch Yekjheti Committee. Such movements are anti-establishment, and represent a threat to all warring ruling class factions. But here too even a slightly competent ruling class with an eye for the future would realise the clamping down on social media to suppress the group’s reach is a double-edged sword because digital freelancing helps incorporate at least some young disaffected Baloch (as well as Pakhtun, Sindhi, Gilgit-Baltistani, Kashmiri, Seraiki) youth into the system.
But there is little competence here, only gimmicks like ‘Digital Pakistan’. Meanwhile young working people in the once-loyal Punjabi heartland are seeing their fragile middle class aspirations go up in smoke, which is, in turn, generating even more disaffection as evidenced not only through political opinions in digital spaces but also in the realms of art and culture. All of this can certainly be suppressed, but the economic pressure cooker cannot bubble over indefinitely.
Let me be clear: the decision to suffocate the digital economy mostly affects white-collar youth. The vast majority of our blue-collar working population has no outlet whatsoever, other than menial jobs and emigration by any means necessary. But they could care less, so we should expect more of the same to come. Without a meaningful, countrywide alternative to the game of the thrones, we will all be reduced to freelancers for ruin.
The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.
Published in Dawn, August 16th, 2024
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