The Story
Mashallah Bohot Zabardast captures some of the online life of Pakistan's country’s working class, a marginal and newly online community.
Apps like Bigo and TikTok have given the underrepresented underclass the ability to speak freely, archive their own histories, cultures, and subcultures through oral tradition, performance, and short videos. They've provide a form of online social capital that translates to the offline world too. However Bigo and other apps like TikTok and Grinder are censored & even banned in Pakistan.
From the app’s (Bigo) arrival in the country until about 2018, a narrow window of online expression was untouched by the scrutiny of the Pakistani state. Saad began archiving these online interactions, recording and taking screenshots to preserve the ephemeral moments he saw on Bigo, which he's collated into this fascinating book.
Read more about how working class people dominate an online space in countries like Pakistan here.