Who decides that someone has made it?
In Pakistan, the answer used to be obvious enough that nobody had to say it out loud. Land. A government posting. A last name that opened doors before you knocked. Power had a texture you could see in the drawing rooms, the baradari connections, the official vehicles. The elite were not just wealthy. They were a specific kind of wealthy, tied to specific institutions, and everyone understood the system even if they could never enter it.
That is shifting now. And not in the direction anyone really predicted.
The new elite does not come from bureaucracy or feudal land. It comes from a ring light and a decent internet connection. From a GitHub profile that a client in Berlin found at two in the morning. From a startup pitch that landed funding from a venture capital firm that has never visited Karachi. Pakistan consistently ranks among the fastest-growing freelance markets in the world; IT exports crossed $2.6 billion in 2022–23. A developer earning $3,000 a month remotely, modest by US standards, takes home more in a year than many senior government officers do. The route to a stable, even comfortable life has quietly been rerouted.
And honestly? There is something genuinely exciting about that.
No sifarish required. No uncle making a call. No waiting for an institution that was never really built for you to finally notice you exist. Your taxes disappear into projects that exist mostly on paper, into salaries for offices that don’t function, into a state that has spent decades making it clear it is not particularly interested in you, and for the first time there is a way to quietly earn outside all of that. To build something the rupee cannot fully touch. That isn’t nothing. For a lot of people in Pakistan, that is everything.
But something is bothering me about the version of this story we keep celebrating.
Because what is the escape route, exactly? You leave the broken institution, and you enter something else. An algorithm that decides whether your work gets seen. A platform that can rewrite its rules tomorrow and take your income with it. A phone that is never really off because your livelihood depends on engagement and engagement never sleeps. We traded one set of dependencies for several quieter ones and called it freedom. The baradari network has been replaced by a follower count. The feudal patron has been replaced by a brand deal. The structure shifted. The logic underneath it did not.
And then there is the education thing. Which nobody says plainly but I will.
We are living in the most information-rich moment in history. Everything is one click away: courses, lectures, entire university curricula sitting there for free. And we are somehow less curious than we have ever been. Not because the knowledge is not available. Because we are not actually going to it. We are scrolling past it. We are getting the dopamine hit of feeling informed without doing the slow, uncomfortable work of actually learning something. University felt like a bureaucratic waste of time, so we skipped it. But what we replaced it with is mostly content. And content is not the same thing as knowledge. We know this and keep pretending we don’t.
The new elite is real. The freedom is real. But there is a version of this where we have built an entire economy on the surface of things: everything on the phone, everything fast, everything optimised for attention, and quietly let something slower and harder to monetise disappear. Education. Curiosity. The kind of thinking that does not produce output immediately.
I don’t know exactly what to do with that.
Maybe the honest thing is to hold both at once: the genuine relief of not needing the state to survive, and the genuine unease of what we are building in its place. Not every escape route leads somewhere new. Sometimes it just leads away from one thing and straight into another.
The suits are gone. The structure underneath them is still being figured out.