Pakistan’s digital promise looks attractive on the surface. We hear the same confident language everywhere. Freelancing will lift incomes. Content creation will open doors. Digital skills will move Pakistan into the future. Young people in Lahore, Karachi and Peshawar are editing videos at night, tagging images for artificial intelligence in the morning and pitching to clients across borders. It feels like a new industrial revolution. But when I look at this landscape through a Marxist lens, I see a structure that is old in its logic even if new in its appearance.
The scale of what is happening is very large. Government reports and industry data suggest that over 2.3 million Pakistanis are active in freelancing and digital services today, ranking the country among the top freelancing markets globally. Experts say these workers could soon generate more than one billion dollars in annual earnings if current trends continue. This remittance and export income is becoming an important source of foreign exchange for Pakistan. Yet only a small portion of this labour is formalised through banking, contracts or legal protections. This is not just a statistic; it is a map of vulnerability.
Remittances from freelancers already make a visible impact. In the current fiscal year alone, Pakistan’s freelancers are estimated to bring in around $500 million in foreign exchange, with projections to grow further as more people join the digital economy. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s broader IT and IT‑enabled services exports, which include freelancing, have reached historic highs of over $4.6 billion, according to recent industry reporting. These figures matter, but they do not change the fact that most of this income depends on foreign platforms and foreign markets, not domestically owned technology firms or sovereign digital infrastructure.
When a Pakistani creates content, moderates a page, trains an algorithm or tags a dataset, they are producing value. That value is often captured by companies that are neither based in Pakistan nor accountable to Pakistani workers. Global platforms convert our clicks into advertising revenue, behavioural insights, predictive models and market intelligence. Our cultural expressions and routine behaviour become raw material for foreign profit. Scholars call this data colonialism, a system in which the data extracted from ordinary people becomes the basis for profit accumulation elsewhere, even as local workers remain invisible to the beneficiaries of that accumulation.
The platform is the new factory, the algorithm the new manager. The worker owns their laptop and phone, but never the conditions under which their income is determined, or the data they produce is used
This extraction creates new class lines inside Pakistan. A small digital elite with global English, international networks and stable contracts captures much of the high-value work. These people move into brand strategy, high-end software development and consultancy roles. Below them stands a massive workforce doing repetitive digital tasks: simple design, caption writing, tagging, editing and other online services that are easily outsourced and easily replaced. At the bottom of this structure is a growing group of content hopefuls who create engagement for platforms without ever earning a stable income or securing any rights.
Such divisions mirror classic Marxist categories of ownership and labour. The digital worker produces value but does not control the systems that determine earnings, visibility and market access. The platform is the new factory, the algorithm the new manager. The worker owns their laptop and phone, but never the conditions under which their income is determined, or the data they produce is used.
The celebration of freelancers and gig workers hides the absence of real economic planning and protection. The State Bank and policy documents now track digital export incomes, but there remain no clear legal pathways for freelancers to formalise earnings, obtain social security, access credit or protect their data. The absence of international payment gateways like PayPal in Pakistan remains a barrier that forces many to rely on third-party services instead of formal banking, leaving their contributions partly off the official economic grid.
Pakistan’s youth are among the world’s youngest populations, with a median age of 21 and a large share of working-age people. It is a demographic advantage that could be a foundation for strong digital production, but under current conditions, it risks becoming a raw reserve of surplus labour. Young people compete with each other across time zones, often for low pay, with little chance of upward mobility or collective bargaining power.
If Pakistan is serious about building a dignified and sovereign digital economy, it needs more than motivational speeches. It needs laws that protect digital labour, data rights frameworks that treat citizens as the owners of their own data, and oversight that forces transparency in how platforms operate inside the country. It needs support for local platforms, investment in technology research, and a vision that moves beyond simply training workers to survive in the global gig market.
Without these choices, our young people will continue to work extremely hard while capturing only a fraction of the value they produce. Their creativity will enrich others. Their data will strengthen foreign systems. Their labour will remain unrecognised. And the freedom they feel online will continue to mask a deeper form of control. Marx understood this logic long before the digital age. It is time we recognise it in Pakistan before it solidifies into permanent inequality.