“That things are ‘status quo’ is the catastrophe. It is not an ever-present possibility but what in each case is given. Thus hell is not something that awaits us, but this life here and now.” — Walter Benjamin

TALK of crisis in Pakistan is cheap. If the economy is not tanking, then endless palace intrigues and abuse of power make politics into a perpetual game of thrones. And now we have to contend with the daily reality of ecological crises, from terrifying flash floods to suffocating smog.

Arguably the biggest social crises are least spoken about; consider the 30 million landless people in rural areas and the intensifying incidences of dispossession everywhere, the more than 25m children out of school, the daily injustices meted out by the thana, katcheri and patwari, and the epidemic of sexual violence against girls, women, boys and trans persons.

Every once so often, an episode of oppression, violence or neglect generates a fit of outrage on digital platforms. But within a day or two the news cycle moves on, and the underlying crisis is never seriously interrogated, let alone redressed.

There have certainly been big victories for pro-people forces in our history. Most notably, three long martial laws have eventually been toppled by popular movements. In more recent times, many have openly confronted the establishment’s political engineering and economic empire, the barely disguised interventions of imperialist forces, and the brutalisation of the peripheries.

The current dystopic reality has no precedent in Pakistan’s history.

But all of the courageous voices and movements that are taking on the current hybrid regime and its propagandists now face an emergent, dystopic reality that has no precedent in Pakistan’s history. Recent disclosures have confirmed that the state has established a vast digital surveillance network with the assistance of various foreign companies. There have been murmurs for some time about the setting up of a giant firewall to regulate social media. Instead, we are now dealing with something closer to the proverbial panopticon.

The truth is that all of the world’s states are heading in a similar, dark direction. We have known for some years now that the biggest social media platforms, including Google and Facebook, routinely log their users’ data, and then sell it off to advertisers and governments alike. The only question was the extent to which the rapid growth of the digital surveillance regime would be held back by progressive forces around the world.

As it turns out, the apparatus being gradually installed in Pakistan is ahead of most other countries insofar as all presumed norms of accountability have been bypassed, including judicial oversight. One should not really be surprised. We live in a world where a genocide is being live-streamed, making a mockery of the so-called liberal rules-based order. Even autocratic kingdoms like Qatar find themselves being bombed by Zionists now. Meanwhile, Pakistani statecraft, steeped in its colonial inheritance, has always had a greater affinity for legal instruments that subjugate rather than those that guarantee the people’s freedoms.

All of which begs the question: how do we build a substantive politics to displace the dystopic present? Too many of our otherwise noble energies are expended running around like headless chickens trying to expose one injustice after another. But fits of digital outrage do not amount to a meaningful political challenge to the panopticon.

Think about the floods which have barely made a dent in the political and intellectual mainstream, despite evidence that the ruling class itself presides over the production of disaster. Consi­der the Baloch women protesters whose pleas to be heard have only led to being cordoned off in the federal capital for almost two mon­ths. All avenues for pro-people and peaceful politics in Balochistan are being foreclosed.

If we do not attend to the task of forging a transformative and ideological politics, the status quo will engender more ecological breakdown events, brazen class war and violent state repression. All of this will be normalised through the digital surveillance regime. There is enough reason to believe that AI in the hands of oligarchs will become the means through which human freedom is crushed. It would be naïve to pretend that the dramatic effects of AI will not extend to politics.

Debate and consensus on the emergent digital surveillance regime is necessary amongst all progressives. Only then will it be possible to outline alternative modes of politics in the short, medium and long term. The convulsions in Nepal confirm that young people are deeply attached to social media. We need to convince them that their freedoms require a politics to socialise both the means of production and the means of information.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, September 12th, 2025