Social media and how it has sustained a totalitarian way of governance

We invariably live in an information age. Gone are the days, when a coup was reported the other day through the morning newspapers. Now any coup, a complete take over or a hybrid one is played live, rather livestreaming on the networks, social media blogs and other forms of news dissemination. However, that abundance of information has not created the type of awareness which can be the vehicle for social change or for that matter awareness which can precipitate a societal magna carta, the overthrow of the status quo or a new political culture. A closer look reveals that the system in place seems to strengthen in a manner that the prime recipient in the society, the younger generation or generally referred to as Generation Z is manipulated, used, discarded and the end result is a change of faces while the system more or less remains the same. Above all it is deliberately led to allays where it confronts more confusion than a clarity of vision needed to precipitate a social change.

The reasons behind that state of affair emanate from the dominance of the social media, its intelligent usage by the power groups, the deep state, international, regional and national in manner that the real questions remain buried in the rubble of social and creative trash. To understand it further, we need to understand the mechanisms of asymmetrical warfare in today’s world. In military domain, it is not the war of this ICBM against the other ICBM, it is now the swarm of drones, of various sizes and configurations which are unleashed on the enemy.

Readers may remember in April and may 2025, when Indian Drones broke the international border many times near Lahore and Karachi during the so called Sindoor operation; Iranian drones similarly fired in swarms during the two wars of June 2025 and March 2026; the philosophy of the military strategy has been to storm the target with so many warheads in order to confuse the air defences. These drones were hard to detect and countering them was not as cost effective as stopping an ICBM. The US arsenal shortage after the March/April bout between US and Iran indicates towards the hard fact the US Army Air Defence was simply incapable to confront the swarms and reacted without much sense.

In a society highly dependent on information economy and multiple means of information, it is always easy for the deep state, the state itself and the other stakeholders to sway the opinion away from the issues in hand, and take the people towards trivial issues. In today world, the best thing to browbeat the seriousness of the geo political developments, the political uncertainty and other systemic contradictions is to create a psychological mist for the common man perception through the private lives of the creative art people. For a man on the street, from the deep state point of view; it is not important to know how he is being fleeced through the façade of subsidy, while he is being looted of his saving in the name of undeclared duties and surcharges, however it is important for him to know which drama production house serial is featuring a well to do wife eloping with vegetable vendor. The next step is the gossip either associated with the concerned actors of such production house art forms, or there can be separate entities, whose social media presence is the matter of gossip promoted by the media groups with a sinister aim to engage the generation Z towards issues, which do not merit deep thinking.

The ‘key words’ for such stories, which are given importance by the news blogs are usually like that ‘so and so entity has sparked social media debate’. Many Pakistani websites not dealing with hard news, but developed as a conduit of secondary news republished with the intent of adding new angle usually engage into the ‘sparking debate’ race of who has been able to add more stories for the common viewer attention.

The end result is that a section of society which has the potential to hit the nail and identify the lack of clothing of an old story proverbial monarch are caught up in useless gossip. In that context the intellectual figures like Egyptian Syed Qutb, Iranian Jalal Al Ahmad and many from Pakistan and Iran can be pointed out as the people who days back in the 60s read through and saw a link between the growth of totalitarian systems of government; the lack of interests of the people in their own affairs and the promotion of a culture which generates non seriousness to grave systemic contradiction. It goes without pinpointing the many national TV comedians of 70 and 80s, especially the one during the Zia years, who were purposefully sprouting out humor not to pin point rather to infuse a general non seriousness in the public discourse. It was like a clown of the old age monarchies’, who would try to make people laugh but restrain them from thinking what is going wrong around them.

Today; in the absence of any intellectual debate; other than the national or official discourse, there is little room for a constructive debate in the younger generation. The political movements; again, built on the premise to ‘appeal to the national validation’ fail to develop the intellectual basis for the debate. Rather, they rely on the small slogans, bordering on abuse; which in turn does not creates a firm ideological basis for opposing the established order, rather it looks like a periodic outburst.

The political systems or the systems of government reminiscent of the Turkey under Kemalist generals, the armed to teeth military units of the defunct Shah of Iran or the current dispensations in Jordan, Morrocco egg on fake modernity to engage the minds of the restive generation Z in a manner that the system is saved from the intellectual threat; because, it is the rebellion of values which precedes the physical rebellion of the generation. If that is tapped, an established order can sustain itself, despite the fact that it is rotten from inside.

Conclusively, societies like Pakistan can sustain structured changes like the Gen Z inspired one in Bangladesh; where not much has changed but a change of faces. Any future date, when the system is ready to implode like the the pressure cooker; the proverbial one is about to explode; such a series of events might make the onlooker feel that the ‘dawn has arrived’, but in most probability it will be an ‘Elusive Dawn’ referred to by late Faiz Sahib.