Every few months a new figure is celebrated. IT and IT-enabled exports cross another billion-dollar threshold, ministers post the number, and a familiar story is retold: a young, connected generation has found a way out. Armed with a laptop and a skill, the Pakistani freelancer is said to bypass the landed estates, the cartelised industries and the bureaucratic gatekeepers who have strangled every other avenue of advancement: an economy that rewards merit rather than inheritance. It is a seductive account, and in its essentials a misreading of what has happened.
The freelance economy did not emerge from empowerment. It emerged from absence. It is what an educated youth bulge does when the formal economy cannot absorb it, when public-sector hiring is frozen and private industry is too concentrated and too rent-seeking to generate mass employment. This is not the triumph of opportunity over a broken system but a residue of that system, the thing left over when the doors elsewhere are closed. The boosters ask how to scale the miracle; they rarely ask whose risk this growth runs on, or who captures its gains.
Consider the structural position of these workers. They earn in dollars, which feels like leverage, but they sit at the bottom of a global value chain they do not control. The platform (Upwork, Fiverr, an overseas client portal) sets the terms, takes its cut, and can change either at will. They compete on price against a worldwide pool of labour, so the floor keeps sinking. There is no contract worth the name, no benefits, no pension, no recourse when a client disappears or an algorithm reclassifies an account overnight; one policy change in a foreign boardroom or one payment-gateway failure and the income evaporates. What is sold as entrepreneurship is closer to piecework, mediated by software and performed in isolation.
That isolation is not incidental to the model. The entrepreneurial ideology that surrounds this work – be your own boss, build your brand, hustle – is not merely motivational language; it does political work. It reframes a structural failure, the absence of jobs, as an individual opportunity, and in doing so it weakens the basis for collective grievance before it can form. A factory produces a workforce that can recognise a shared condition and act on it. A platform produces a scattered mass of competitors who experience their precarity as personal, a failure of grit rather than a feature of the arrangement, so that asking for protection comes to feel like an admission of weakness.
The state, for its part, has every reason to keep the language celebratory and the substance absent. A chronic balance-of-payments crisis makes any dollar inflow precious, and IT exports deliver foreign exchange without requiring the state to reform anything, build anything, or confront any entrenched interest. So it brands the sector enthusiastically while supplying almost none of its preconditions. Electricity remains unreliable, the internet is throttled and periodically severed in the name of security, and the payment infrastructure that would let workers actually receive what they earn has never been properly secured, leaving them to route money through informal and costly workarounds. Each of these failures is absorbed by the worker as a private cost while the dollars they generate flow into the national reserves: the gains pooled at the centre, the risk left at the margin.
This is a familiar pattern. It is the same logic that governed the handling of our public enterprises, where the losses stayed with the public and the prospective gains were routed to private hands; here it is applied to labour itself, with the macroeconomy stabilised on the earnings of workers who are told they are being empowered.
Nor does this economy escape the class structure it claims to transcend. The promise of meritocracy assumes everyone arrives at the platform equally equipped, and they do not. Fluent English, reliable electricity, a backup connection, a decent device, and, most decisively, a family able to absorb the unpaid months of building a profile before any stable income arrives: none of these is distributed by merit. They track existing hierarchies of class and geography fairly closely, so the level playing field tends to reproduce the privilege it was supposed to abolish. The difference is that the winners can now attribute their position to talent rather than inheritance, which makes the resulting inequality both easier to defend and harder to notice.
None of this means the income is fictional. Freelancing has delivered real and sometimes transformative earnings for many: women excluded from the formal workplace, graduates in towns the corporate economy never reaches. The dollars are not imaginary. What is misleading is the story told around them, a story that lets the state claim credit for the earnings while accepting responsibility for none of the conditions in which they are produced.
The corrective begins with naming the thing accurately: this is labour, and it should be treated as labour. That means public payment infrastructure built as a right rather than left to private patchwork and periodic failure. It means portable social protection (health cover, contributory pensions, income smoothing), designed for people who move between clients rather than holding a single job. It means treating reliable electricity and uncensored connectivity as the basic capital of a sector the state claims to prize rather than as discretionary favours. And it means reading the export figures with more suspicion, since a number that measures inflows tells us nothing about the conditions of the people generating them.
It also means resisting the atomisation the model encourages. The freelancer, the platform delivery rider and the informal worker in the bazaar look like separate worlds, but they share one condition: income without protection, work without bargaining power, risk carried alone. That shared condition runs across the ethnic and regional lines our politics is otherwise organised to exploit, which is why it could, in principle, anchor a politics organised around work rather than identity. Whether scattered, globally competing workers can actually be organised on that basis is far from certain. Everything about the model pulls them apart. But it is the fight worth having.
The boom is real and so are the dollars. What does not hold up is the claim that a laptop has dissolved the structures of Pakistani political economy. It has not. It has relocated the point of extraction offshore and handed the workers the bill, while teaching them to call it freedom.