There is a peculiar arithmetic to governance in contemporary Pakistan, one that defies every textbook on public administration and reduces the grand edifice of the state to a crude calculus of views, shares, and retweets. A citizen may petition the local administration for months, file countless applications under the Right to Information, stage peaceful dharnas, and write letters that gather dust in the labyrinthine corridors of power — all to no avail.
But let a ten-second video of their grievance circulate on social media, let the algorithm smile upon their misfortune, and behold: the sleeping leviathan stirs. Officials who were incommunicado for weeks suddenly materialise. Ministers tweet condemnations. Task forces are constituted. FIRs are registered. Justice, it seems, is no longer the solemn mandate of the republic but the accidental by-product of virality.
This phenomenon, called viral governance, is not merely an administrative inconvenience. It is a symptom of institutional collapse so profound that the state has effectively outsourced its moral and legal obligations to the caprice of Silicon Valley algorithms. When governance becomes reactive rather than proactive, when the sine qua non of state attention is not the merit of a grievance but the decibel level of its digital echo, we are no longer speaking of a functioning democracy. We are describing something far more ominous: a post-institutional polity where the simulacrum of accountability has replaced accountability itself.
The French philosopher Guy Debord, writing in The Society of the Spectacle more than half a century ago, warned that modern life was becoming a colossal accumulation of spectacles, where authentic social relations were being supplanted by their mere representation.
One wonders what Debord would have made of a Pakistan where a district health officer dances to trending audio on TikTok while patients die of preventable infections in his jurisdiction; where a police constable with a ring-light and a green screen dispenses vigilante wisdom to thousands of followers while FIRs languish in thanas; where secretaries of state ministries compete for influencer status, as though governance were a side hustle and content creation the main affair. The spectacle is no longer separate from governance — it is governance.
“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” — Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967)
The elderly widow who does not own a smartphone, the labourer who cannot write a caption, the farmer in a connectivity shadow — these invisible citizens are systematically excluded from the new attention economy of grievance. The state, by abdicating its duty of proactive care, has created a grotesque marketplace of sorrow where only the most mediagenic misery commands action.
The examples are too numerous to catalogue exhaustively, yet a few illustrate the pathology with crystalline clarity. Reports gathered dust. But the moment grainy footage of a child sharing a hospital bed with a stray cat went viral, the Punjab Health Department sprang into theatrical action — suspensions, inquiries, press conferences. The cat, one might say, accomplished what official protocol could not.
The people of Pakistan do not need their Deputy Commissioners to be influencers; they need them to be competent
What renders this spectacle truly surreal, however, is not merely the public’s turn to social media as the court of last resort — it is the state’s own enthusiastic participation in the theatre. We have entered the age of the bureaucrat-influencer, a creature as conceptually incongruous as a vegetarian butcher, yet now ubiquitous in the Pakistani administrative landscape.
This trend represents something more insidious than mere unprofessionalism. It signals the final dissolution of Weberian bureaucratic rationality — that cool, impersonal, file-bound mode of governance that, for all its flaws, at least operated on principles rather than personalities. When a government officer spends their working hours scripting TikTok content, they are not merely wasting public time; they are reconstituting the state as a personality rather than an institution. The logic of influencer authenticity, relatability, and parasocial intimacy colonises the logic of administration, which ought to be impartiality, consistency, and rule-bound detachment.
The defenders of this arrangement — and there are many, particularly among the digital-native intelligentsia argue that social media has democratised accountability. The smartphone, they contend, has become the great equaliser, empowering the citizen against an opaque and indifferent state. This argument contains a kernel of truth, but mistakes the symptom for the cure. Yes, viral videos have exposed corruption, triggered investigations, and occasionally delivered justice. But a system where justice depends on virality is not democratised governance; it is roulette.
The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, in his monumental theory of the public sphere, distinguished between the lifeworld — the domain of authentic interpersonal communication and the system, the domain of institutional power, law, and administration. Healthy democracy, Habermas argued, requires a porous boundary between the two, where public deliberation can influence institutional decision-making.
What we observe in Pakistan is not this healthy permeability but a catastrophic collapse: the system has ceased to function independently and now responds only to shocks from the lifeworld, and only those shocks amplified by corporate algorithms designed to maximise engagement rather than equity.
Moreover, viral governance corrodes the very concept of rights. A right, properly understood, is an entitlement that does not require performance to activate. You do not earn your right to clean drinking water by producing compelling content; you possess it by virtue of citizenship and constitutional guarantee. When the state conditions its obligations on public pressure, it transforms rights into privileges and citizens into supplicants. The constitutional promise of Article 9, the right to life, becomes contingent on how skilfully one can package their deprivation for mass consumption.
The remedy, though difficult, is not mysterious. It requires the painstaking reconstruction of institutional credibility — investing in complaint mechanisms that actually resolve, establishing ombudspersons with teeth, creating transparent tracking systems for public petitions, and, above all, cultivating a bureaucratic culture where responsiveness is routine rather than exceptional. It requires political will to punish dereliction not merely when it is exposed on Twitter, but when it is documented in files that no camera ever reaches.
For the officer class, a measure of digital decorum is in order. There is no inherent contradiction between modern communication and administrative dignity. But when the pursuit of online celebrity eclipses the quiet, unglamorous work of governance, the state betrays its fundamental purpose. The people of Pakistan do not need their Deputy Commissioners to be influencers; they need them to be competent. They do not crave bureaucratic entertainment; they demand institutional reliability.
In Plato’s Republic, Socrates describes the democratic soul as one that chases after every shiny novelty, lacking the discipline to distinguish the important from the merely attractive. There is, one fears, something of this democratic soul in our present condition, a nation so captivated by the spectacle of governance that we have neglected the substance. The viral video is a cry for help, not a model of administration. Until we recognise this, we shall continue to live in a republic of ring-lights, where justice arrives not as a right, but as a reward for the most viral victim.