WITH every year that passes, there are fewer and fewer people who remember a time before social media. In those bygone days, gossip was largely transmitted via people. Busybodies would dish the dirt on one family for the benefit of another, and spools of speculation and wonder would be unrolled into tangled threads of truths and lies. I mention this only because the human penchant for judging the lives of others and comparing them, consciously or subconsciously, with one’s own has existed for just as long as humans have themselves.

It is precisely this human inclination for knowing about other people’s lives that has made social media the wildfire it has become. In the span of a decade or so, our darker traits, such as bragging and making an open exhibition of our lives, have been turned by us into an industry. Suddenly, everyone — from a housewife in Lahore to a teenager in Toronto — has become a curator of his or her own life and is addicted to sharing all the details.

In this sort of sharing, they reveal not only what they wish to show but also other information. Apps like Facebook and Instagram track not just what is visible to others, but also what is being watched, what is being commented on, what is shown only to a small circle, and what is being shown to everyone.

In this way, the human inclination to peer into the lives of others has been transformed into a business model, as all that data about what people do online can be mined to reveal far more about the person than what the individual himself knows.

The act of peering into other people’s lives has become inextricably tied to our own daily routines.

In this way, hundreds of millions of people around the world have been converted to social media addicts. Many of them wake up each day and check social media accounts before they check on their children or their spouse or before they brush their teeth or wash their face. Even as social media gets older, and the novelty of likes and dislikes wears off, people still tune in to see what is going on with friends, who is doing well or looking good, who is enjoying life, and who is silent (which, in the social media equation, simply suggests sadness).

In sum, social media has become a habit, and voyeurism, the act of peering into other people’s lives, has become inextricably tied to our own daily routines. For those who are more ardently addicted, the value of an event or an act is assessed not in terms of the event but the attention it promises to garner on social media and the envy or admiration it may arouse in others.

Naturally, as social media has grown, so have appetites, and it isn’t just enough to look at what your friend from college or your first cousin in Denmark is doing. Enter the professional content creators who have stepped in to fill the gap. Professional YouTubers and TikTokers now offer up their entire lives for public consumption. All of them are slaves to the mighty algorithm, that can serve their videos about what they shopped for and what they bought or how they fought with a friend and then how they made up, to thousands of viewers. These content creators broadcast their intimate lives in the hope that their lives will be interesting enough for the YouTube algorithm to serve them to an ever-larger number of viewers.

Becoming a YouTube or TikTok creator appeals to Pakistanis. This is not only because we are by nature a voyeuristic society, given to gossip and judgement as a means of social control. It is also because YouTube and TikTok allow even Pakistani creators to monetise their accounts and get paid in US dollars. The current high exchange rates mean that even though the payouts per view are just a few cents, they add up to be significant amounts in Pakistani currency. It is also unclear whether these creators report these amounts as income, and if they are being taxed as heavily as someone earning through conventional means. In a nutshell, becoming a content creator is a fruitful get-rich-quick scheme in the Pakistani context.

Unsurprisingly, many Pakistani celebrities and their progeny have got into the act. Nearly all of them broadcast their lives on some form of social media and cross-pollinate and collaborate with each other to maximise their views. All of them provide viewers, particularly very committed ones, the opportunity to comment on their daily productions. Before long, these content creators — whether or not they are celebrities — realise that they are enslaved to the algorithm that promotes them and the viewers who sometimes approve of the content but often criticise them.

One routine occurrence on nearly every YouTube vlog is the nervous breakdown that content creators have when they realise that getting rich quick comes at the cost of losing one’s privacy and throwing one’s intimate life and its content to the judgement of any viewer who cares to leave a comment. Then there are tears, allegations of unfairness, and the like.

Watching other people’s lives is entertainment for those who watch this content. Being other people’s entertainment is, understandably, not that entertaining. The whole equation is a chilling peek into the cerebral economies of the future, where humans are tempted to expose themselves and then left addicted to the number of views.

It is a strange and peculiar means of mind control, where both those that expose and those that judge appear to be unaware of their own status as puppets of algorithms. What begins as gossip and curiosity about the lives of others seeps slowly into controlling one’s own life and the assessment of whether it is worthy or valuable. The next time you log into someone else’s life to escape your own, it is worth mulling over the cost of participating in this economy of voyeurism.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, August 7th, 2024