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........

© The Friday Times