Congratulations.
You have been selected, entirely by accident, to join the fastest-growing profession in Pakistan. No degree required. No internship. No boring years of “reading books” or “checking sources”. All you need is a phone, 40% battery, and the unshakeable confidence of a man who has never once been wrong in his life. at least according to himself.
Welcome to the world of Instant Expertise, where the distance between “I just saw a headline” and “Let me explain this to you” has shrunk to roughly the time it takes to unlock your screen.
Step One: Read the Headline. Never the Article.
In this profession, the headline is the appetiser, the main course, and the dessert. Reading the actual article is for people with too much free time or, worse, actual curiosity. The headline gives you everything you need: a name, a number, maybe a flag emoji. From this, a skilled practitioner can construct an entire worldview.
Did the influencer tax debate confuse you? Doesn’t matter. You saw the word “tax” and the word “influencer” in the same sentence, and that is a full policy briefing as far as your comment section is concerned. Type, “So basically the govt wants to tax people for existing,” and hit post. Fourteen likes by lunchtime. You are now, unofficially, an economist.
Step Two: Watch Half the Video, Then Explain the Whole Thing
Nobody has time to finish a nine-minute clip. That is unreasonable. What you do instead is watch the first 45 seconds, form an opinion strong enough to survive a family WhatsApp group argument, and then close the app before the context arrives.
Remember, context is what weak people use to slow you down.
This exact move played out beautifully during the recent anchor controversy that lit up cricket season timelines. Half the country had opinions on a clip before the full segment had even finished uploading. Screenshots of screenshots circulated faster than the original video did. Old clips got dug up, stitched together, and presented as a “pattern”, because nothing says rigorous analysis like connecting three unrelated moments with a red string and calling it a documentary.
Step Three: Selective Fact-Checking
This is the advanced technique, reserved for those who have truly mastered the craft. Selective fact-checking means you fact-check the things you already disagree with and take everything you already believe completely on faith. It is not hypocrisy. It is efficiency.
Somebody posts a statistic that supports your side? Screenshot it, no questions asked, case closed. Somebody posts the opposite number? Suddenly you are Sherlock Holmes, demanding sources, methodology, sample size, and the birth certificate of whoever conducted the survey. This one number, by the way, does not need context either, because context has already been banned in Step Two.
Step Four: Strategic Outrage
Outrage, when deployed correctly, is not really about the issue at all. It is about being seen being outraged, at the correct volume, at the correct time, before the algorithm moves on to the next thing. Miss the window and your anger is worthless. Comment three hours late on a controversy and you might as well be discussing the fall of the Mughal Empire; nobody is listening any more.
This is also why Pakistan’s ongoing back-and-forth over regulating social media, taxing platforms, deciding who counts as a journalist online, and now even debating age limits for children scrolling through their parents’ phones has become such fertile ground. Every announcement, every parliamentary resolution, every half-formed policy proposal is an invitation to a fresh round of confident, article-free commentary. Somebody, somewhere, is already explaining PECA amendments to a stranger using only vibes and a screenshot of a tweet from a journalist they have never actually followed.
Step Five: Quote Statistics Like a Magician Pulls Rabbits
Numbers make you sound serious. It does not matter where the number came from, whether it is current, or whether you understand what it measures. “Seventy-three per cent of people agree” sounds authoritative, whether it came from a rigorous national survey or from a poll your cousin ran on his Instagram story with nine responses, six of which were him voting from different accounts.
The Punchline Nobody Wants to Hear
Here is the uncomfortable part, buried under all the jokes. This is not really satire any more. It is closer to documentation. Every technique above has a real-life screenshot to match it, from newsroom Twitter spats treated like courtroom drama to a cricket broadcaster’s old clips resurrected as evidence in a trial nobody actually opened arguments for.
We have built an entire culture around the performance of knowing, rather than the discomfort of actually learning. Certainty has become the content. Curiosity, unfortunately, does not perform nearly as well in the metrics.
So, the next time you feel that familiar itch to explain a complicated national issue to a stranger using only a headline and pure conviction, maybe pause. Read one more paragraph. Watch one more minute. Or don’t. Five minutes is, after all, a whole career these days.