TikTok democracy

In Pakistan, people’s hopes for democracy are now clinging to TikTok. Who would have known, just a few years earlier, that someday an app everybody took to be meant for nonsense activities and non-serious work would become a place where people would go to find refuge from the craziness they find all around. That, however, is not the topic for today’s column. I am going to talk about a slightly different thing here.

The United States of America brought about a revolution against the tyrannical rule of the British empire and gained freedom. The unelected and prolonged rule of the kings and queens was rejected. The Americans decided that theirs would be a different kind of government where the ruler would be elected by the people and later on in their democratic evolution, they also added the 21^st amendment to their constitution. That amendment put a restriction on the number of times a president can rule over the country: two terms only. Regardless of the popularity of the leader or the rationale dictated by the circumstances, no president can serve more than twice.

If we look at Pakistan, while we have at times tried to be a mirror image of some of the best democracies around the world, I believe we have gotten too aggressive in our urge and fight against prolonged rule by any leader. We slipped over the American method of 8 years total and arrived at a method that suits our attention span. Ours is like a direct jump from test cricket to the T-20 format, skipping the one day format altogether. We don’t even allow the promised term. Ours is the TikTok of democracy.

The reason that short video platforms are so popular among the people around the world is because it provides short and quick videos for people to watch and skip over to the next one. There is hardly any lapse preventing people from getting bored. But the consumption of that app has also ensured that people would have a chronically short attention span. Perhaps they already had that tendency and that is the reason why the app got so popular. It is the chicken and egg story. Hard to tell the cause and effect.

I have seen friends who can’t even sit through a movie without looking at their cell phone every 3 minutes. Just like by consuming TikTok, we may watch a lot of videos but we cannot really claim to have watched one long video or a movie in full or even stuck to one topic in detail. The same is true for our democracy. We don’t keep a leader long enough for him to ensure the successful and meaningful execution of whatever reformist agenda he brings. We are like the hunter gatherers who enjoyed life but didn’t stay in one place long enough to call it home.

The truth is that we get bored very easily now. And when it comes to governments in charge, there is no reason to believe that we undo our characteristics on that front. We get bored of seeing the same face for a reasonably long time also. We are a nation that is ripe for a change in the face of the government every 2-3 years. Just as TikTok, we want to scroll away from this government to the next one, hoping we would be able to continue to ignore the harsh realities around us and stay entertained. It seems as though there is no urge for long-term goals and no desire for meaningful progress. We just want to be entertained. I do not have a way to prove this but my gut tells me that our biggest problem perhaps is just a tad more entertainment. If Nawaz Sharif or Bilawal Bhutto Zardari could succeed in keeping us entertained, then rest assured, we would forget the man uttering whose name has become the new sin in town.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 27^th, 2023.

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