Curating hope in chronocracy: TikTok creation and the offline lives of young men from Pakistan in Greece

Abstract

This article investigates the disparity between the everyday lives of young men from Pakistan living in Greece and the impressions created through their TikTok profiles. It asks how creating and curating TikTok content counters the multifarious temporal exclusions, or chronocracy, they experience as they work undocumented and attempt to stay under the radar of the authorities. By shedding light on these young men’s own explanations for their TikTok videos, I ultimately argue that TikTok offers a way for these young men to curate a hope that reflects the futures their families in Pakistan desired for their children, while also connecting them with other young men in similar situations. The article draws attention to how multifarious tensions and pressures can both be eased and played out in curating content online and suggests ethnography as a tool and temporality as an analytic in untangling these ambiguities.

Introduction

When I saw Tariq ¹ in 2018, he told me that he was leaving Greece to try and cross the border into Italy. He was hoping to sneak onto a lorry in the port of Patras, as many young men do each day (Balakjian, 2020; Papangeli, 2021). His aim was to reach his brother who lived and worked in France. Despite feeling that he’d had ‘acchi qismat’ or ‘good fortune’ in Urdu ² to have a space in the shelter for unaccompanied minors where he was staying when I met him, Tariq had been in trouble with shelter staff for constantly missing school since his arrival there and, when the police caught him selling illicit substances around the city, his place in the shelter was at risk. After his departure, rumours spread through the shelter: that he had got into Italy successfully, that he had had a terrible accident on route and that he was back in Athens. I searched on social media to check and suspected the worse when all I could find was a Facebook page with his name and photos which had lain unused since the time I had known him. Then, in 2021, I discovered his TikTok profile.

Between close-up clips of Tariq lip-syncing to popular Punjabi and Hindi songs, there were montages of selfies taken in front of different recognisably Greek backdrops: the Acropolis, the cityscape of Athens, the lake in Ioannina. In most photos, his hair was gelled back and he wore ripped jeans and a leather jacket, looking into the camera with a serious but pensive gaze. Given the circumstances in which he had left the shelter, my heart lifted when I saw how well he seemed to be doing and I reached out to him with a friend request. He replied almost immediately: ‘Hi my friend. How are you?’

Like many young Pakistani men who cross illegalised borders to reach Greece, Tariq was working in agriculture. Based in Ioannina in north-west Greece, he carried out all the manual labour in a large poultry farm where he brought up thousands of chickens, from the moment they hatched until they reached market weight. Before reaching Ioannina, however, Tariq had been unemployed and homeless as well as frequently arrested for selling ‘churs’/‘marijuana’. It quickly became clear that his TikTok profile had duped me into thinking his life was far rosier than it really was. Another young man from Pakistan called Bilal pointed out the potential misleading impression created on TikTok: ‘People in Pakistan think we are very relaxed here, that we enjoy, but we don’t enjoy, we get up very early here for work, work all day, but they see pictures on Tiktok . . . we work all month with maybe one day off, take one picture and upload it, after one month of hard work.’

I ask in this article what might motivate young men from Pakistan in Greece to create such impressions of success and style on social media which appear to radically depart from their offline experiences. This points to a broader question about the role of social media in contending with the various constraints affecting young people living in precarious situations. While my access to Tariq and others’ lives is also curated and I do not claim some privileged access to a ‘reality’ that is not my own, longitudinal ethnographic research with Tariq and a small number of other young men from Pakistan in Greece helped me to understand both what they experience living and working in Greece and the ways they think about what they produce for TikTok.

Positionality and methodology

Over the course of a cumulative 2 years of fieldwork between 2019 and 2023 with young men from Pakistan in Greece, I was present during the extensive amount of time my interlocutors spent on ‘mobiles’, whether engaging in multiple conversations on messaging apps, watching films, playing games, speaking to family and, of course, curating and posting TikTok videos. My interlocutors were mostly young men from Pakistan between the ages of 18 and 25 years who arrived as ‘unaccompanied minors’, meaning they travelled to Greece without family when they were 18, and then remained in Greece to work. While this article reflects my ethnographic engagement with Tariq, Bilal, Shahram, Zain and Safi in particular, I have informally spoken to over 50 young people from Pakistan and my arguments reflect uses and understandings of social media among a wider pool of individuals. Most interlocutors came from Sialkot, Gujrat or Gujranwala in the Pakistani Punjab (all areas with high rates of illegal migration to Europe via people smugglers [Notezai and Butt, 2018]) and crossed illegalised borders through Iran and Turkey to reach Greece. My focus on young Pakistani men living in Greece was partly motivated by the comparative lack of research with this demographic, despite the huge numbers of Pakistani young people who travel to Europe each year and who were brought sharply into media attention in the summer of 2023 when hundreds of Pakistanis drowned as they tried to reach Europe during a shipwreck off the coast of Greece.

In light of my positionality as a white British female researcher in our ‘world of enduring and changing power inequalities’ (Clifford, 1986: 9), my methodological approach began with my desire to learn from my interlocutors. In practice, this involved physically following Tariq to Ioannina in northern Greece to spend time with him there (as well as following other young people to the various places they lived and worked), always following their lead in meeting where each person felt most comfortable and following conversation topics rather than leading them. I made a conscious effort to avoid recreating formal interview-like situations since most young Pakistani men in Greece had experienced several interviews of this nature with police, lawyers, non-governmental organisation (NGO) staff, outreach teams and social workers. Many young people have told me that they have found such situations stressful and certain tropes and stories tend to get reproduced in such settings ‘to perform the role expected of a refugee’ (Khosravi, 2010: 33). I constantly tried to ensure that consent was not a tick-box exercise but something I constantly returned to, asking interlocutors regularly if they were comfortably with me writing about something they have shared. To one of these questions, Bilal replied, ‘there is no need to ask in friendship’, making it clear that his trust in my use of his words sprang from the long-standing interlocutor–friend relationship we had built up over years.

Youth, TikTok and hope

Mains (2012) describes how youth and aspiration ‘are in some ways inseparable’ (p. 2) since the concept of being young holds within it the promise of growth. In contexts where youth face structural barriers to their aspirations, anthropologists have found recourse to concealment or deception, including Newell’s (2012) exposition of the concept of ‘bluffing’ among urban youth in Côte d’Ivoire, and Archambault’s (2017) exploration of phone-mediated pretence in intimate relationships in Mozambique. Attempts to understand strategies to garner respect in contexts of deprivation have a much longer history in youth studies, stretching back to Willis’ (1978) seminal study of working-class teenagers in Britain. When it comes to work in the anthropology of migration, the exploration of efforts to maintain an appearance of ‘success’ and its attendant pressures in relation to kinship have been well-explored in the context of those who leave Cameroon to work in Western countries (Alpes, 2017; Geschiere, 2020; Nyamnjoh, 2011), while literature on the lives of Pakistani migrant ³ men working in Europe (Ahmad, 2008, 2011; Kukreja, 2021a, 2021b) has highlighted the pressures of masculine ideals and structural inequality. This article contributes to this scholarship as well as studies of contemporary digital youth culture, particularly those that bridge online and offline lives (Gray, 2009; Lam, 2009; Wargo, 2017).

TikTok is now one of the biggest social media platforms in the world with over a billion users globally, as of 2023. Particularly popular with a younger demographic, TikTok is a ‘communicative environment composed of short video clips’ (Schellewald, 2021: 1451). Technological affordances of the app, such as the ‘duet’ feature and the potential for users to reuse the same soundtrack to create their own videos mean that every video holds ‘the potential to spur the creation of another’ (Vijay and Gekker, 2021: 715). Compared with the social media applications that came before it, TikTok relies heavily on its algorithm to dictate what an individual sees on their ‘For You’ page, and thus what serves as inspiration for their own content creation. This means that algorithmically developed networks of offline strangers have developed which media and communication studies scholars describe as ‘networked publics’ (Mendelson, 2023; Zulli and Zulli, 2022). boyd (2008) identified networked publics, as a subset of mediated publics, which are ‘bound together through technological networks’ (p. 8) with the features of persistence, searchability, replicability and invisible audiences (p. 9). TikTok and its networked publics have received little attention from anthropologists, meaning that the ‘emotional, affective and “non-rational” elements’ of the relationship between technology and its users (Nagy and Neff, 2015: 6) have often been neglected. I seek to make an important intervention in this understudied area by considering TikTok practices in light of the offline lives of those who create content.

I do this by taking up temporality in my analytic approach, building on a large body of literature in anthropology which attends to temporal complexity (including Bear, 2014; Hodges, 2008; Munn, 1992). I engage with the concept of chronocracy as developed by Kirtsoglou and Simpson (2020), which they define as ‘the discursive and practical ways in which temporal regimes are used in order to deny coevalness and thereby create deeply assymetrical relationships of exclusion and domination’ (p. 3). Fabian (1983) originally developed the notion of a denial of coevalness to indicate the way anthropologists confined those written about to a different ‘other’ time and indeed Çağlar (2016) has identified this denial of coevalness among anthropologists studying people who cross illegalised borders. For example, the overabundance of work on ‘waiting’ in contexts of migration (Andersson, 2014; Avramopoulou, 2020; Bendixsen and Eriksen, 2018; Jacobsen et al., 2021) could risk relegating those who cross illegalised borders to a distant temporal limbo (Rozakou, 2021: 25–26). By focusing on young men’s own attempts to exceed the chronocracy they experience in the second part of this article, I hope to at least party avoid this charge. There has been extensive anthropological research on hope in different contexts since the mid-2000s, from the passive paralysis-inducing hope of constantly waiting (Crapanzano, 2004) to entitled hope generated through relative privilege (Parla, 2019) to hope as a method among both interlocutors and social scientists (Miyazaki, 2004; Miyazaki and Swedberg, 2016). While maintaining the future-oriented approach in all of these conceptualisations of hope, my analysis uncovers a different sort of hope entirely.

In order to properly understand the discrepancy between what happens on and off TikTok, I first peek behind the scenes of TikTok. I begin by highlighting the ways both Greece and those from Pakistan in Greece are discursively positioned before considering how the tempo of life for these young people is structured by avoidance of the police and the ultimate threat of deportation as well as round-the-clock labour and bureaucratic rhythms. While my focus is temporal, attention to Greece and the streets and workplaces where TikTok videos are filmed denotes that ‘(i)n a lived world, spatial and temporal dimensions cannot be disentangled’ (Munn, 1992: 94). In Part 2, I describe some of these young men’s TikTok creations to show how these are perceived as an escape from the chronocratic processes acting upon them rather than an additional process of chronocratic labour in their lives. I also consider how and what these young men communicate to their networked public and to the potential audience of family in Pakistan. Finally, I argue that these TikTok creations are situated within the pressure to remain dignified and maintain hope among distant kin.

Part 1: behind the ‘TikTok’ scenes

‘It’s not really Europe’

After telling me that his asylum decision had been postponed by another month, 24-year-old Zain said: ‘well, Greece, we say that it’s not really Europe’. Zain’s words fit into a wider narrative discourse that highlights the ways Greece has been positioned as ‘behind’ the temporal rhythms of Europe (Cabot, 2014: 23–40) or, as Herzfeld (2002) puts it, ‘crypto-colonial’, meaning that it is excluded from ‘access to the globally dominant advantages of modernity’ (p. 921). Feelings of being caught within this chronocracy as ‘colonial political technology’ (Kirtsoglou, 2020: 174) were particularly exacerbated during the anti-austerity movement following Greece’s economic ‘crisis’ wherein an imagined glorious Hellenic past was constantly narrativised, itself embedded in hegemonic ideas of ‘Western’ progress (Theodossopoulos, 2014). In 2014, Greece’s former Minister of Public Order and Citizen Protection said that people from Pakistan and Bangladesh in Greece ‘belong to another culture . . . come from a different world than us’ (AFP, 2014). Such discourse temporally relegates people from Pakistan in Greece into an imagined pre-modern place which they cannot leave, even if they are physically in Greece, undergirding the idea that they are a potential threat to the hoped-for return of an idealised Greek past returning in the present. The crypto-colonial position of Greece coupled with the chronocratic discourse around Pakistanis in Greece suggests a doubled denial of coevalness to these young men.

Avoiding mamoo

Very few people in my research had ‘kaghazaat’/‘papers’ to live in Greece, making them particularly vulnerable to police checks. Since the launch of ‘Operation Xenios Zeus’ by the Greek government in 2012, which initiated the checking of documents on the basis of one’s racial profile, the targeting of those who cannot pass as white by the police has become a routine way for police officers to move people into detention centres. Following these random checks in the street and as people leave buses and metro stations, many young people I know have spent months on end in the large Amygdaleza detention centre near Athens. One of those people is 20-year-old Bilal who got released from ‘jail’, as he calls it, in the summer of 2023.

As I sat with Bilal in the room of a small basement flat he shared with three other Pakistani man, I foolishly began a question with ‘now you are free’, indicating his release from detention. He cut in: ‘abhi bhi azaad nahin hun’/‘Even now I am not free’. He continued: ‘the police can take me at any time. I need papers because otherwise the police will take me and deport me. I can never relax my mind’. Without papers, he could not legally work, open a bank account, rent property or comfortably walk the streets. The journeys to and from work were when Bilal was particularly aware of the presence of ‘mamoo’ (a slang term used for the police which literally means ‘Uncle’ in Urdu) and the potential for them to take him back into detention. He described trying to calculate the safest way to return each time, usually heading down the busy high street, sometimes ducking into a side street or even a shop if he spotted mamoo in vans, cars, motorbikes or, most dangerously, on foot and gathered together in a group with hand-held devices to check document numbers online.

To avoid detection, Bilal’s journeys to work took different routes and variable amounts of time. Phenomenologically, time was sped up or slowed down as he might panic, rush, dodge or, conversely, slow down, pause and hide while mamoo passed by. These strategies forced Bilal to live temporally apart from me, with the privilege of my white skin, as I regularly headed down this same street without even noticing the presence of the police. This practical pursuit of people with darker skin is a particularly insidious chronocratic practice as it enforces a temporal division between people who are and who are not white, emphasised by the racist slur of ‘mavros’, meaning ‘black’ in Greek, which Bilal and other interlocutors regularly got called. Without ‘kaghazaat’, these young people were not ‘azaad’/‘free’ even when they were not in detention for months on end. Being sent into a detention centre, as most of my interlocutors had been at one point, was perhaps the ultimate exercise in spatial and temporal foreclosure and strategies to avoid this, such as only leaving the house to work or taking routes home which took twice as long, suggest the ramifications of being vulnerable to this temporal and spatial power.

‘Wake up, work, come home, make food, go on mobile, sleep’

All the young men I met through my research worked ‘with their hands and feet’ as Safi put it: washing dishes, working in construction, cleaning boats, washing windows or going through bins to sell recycling. For 12 hours a day and without a weekend pause, Bilal repetitively washed cars. There was a sense of rhythm to the work, particularly during busy times as he wielded the pressure hose, sprayed on the snow foam ‘shampoo’, sponged the car’s body and, finally, moved around each vehicle with the drying machine. Other young men worked similarly long hours with Tariq pausing work only to sleep while 25-year-old Safi worked as a security guard all night before completing a full day’s service shift in a restaurant. The labour took a physical toll as Bilal, Safi and Tariq each became thinner and more angular over time. Such regimes of relentless physical labour are mainly experienced by people from Pakistan and Bangladesh in Greece. Without ‘kaghazaat’, the only sorts of jobs they can do are those where an employer accepts to pay them under the table in cash with the risk that they could face a fine. Their salaries are usually well below minimum wage, meaning that many young men resort to ‘do number kam’/‘illegal work’, such as selling drugs as Tariq did for several years. Zain found it almost funny when a Greek man began working in construction with him before giving up the job after a few days, asking: ‘he has papers, he is Greek, why would he do this work?’ This highlights the racialised and chronocratic expectation for only certain people to spend almost all their time in this poorly renumerated physical labour.

Bilal described his daily life as ‘wake up, work, come home, make food, go on mobile, sleep’ and Safi described his constant search for ‘kaghazaat’ using brokers as ‘I earn money, I try and get papers, I earn money again, I try and get papers again’. Both descriptions hint at a stuck-ness, a feeling of being in a repetitive time warp compared with the potential tempo of life if only one had ‘kaghazaat’. The constant cycle of waiting for Greece’s bureaucratic system to offer up possibilities, renewals, acceptances and denials, highlighted in the constant delay of Zain’s asylum decision (see also Guyer, 2007), further suggests this relegation to a monotonous rhythm. Within this repetitive drudgery, time spent creating TikTok videos while in the ‘go on mobile’ portion of the day seemed to be a comforting escapism to a wholly different timespace.

Part 2: TikTok time

A moment to ‘enjoy’

While Safi was working day and night, he found time during shifts to post on TikTok. In one video, Safi stands in the light of the restaurant bar’s purple glow and jolts a cocktail shaker from side to side, the slow-motion effect making both he and the shaker appear to sway. In another video taken in selfie mode, this time in the restaurant’s outdoor seating area, he holds an iced coffee in hand and intensely gazes into the camera as he confidently lip-syncs the lyrics to a Sidhu Moosewala Punjabi rap song. This space of toil and exhaustion is transformed into an attractive backdrop, leaving the potential for the viewer to assume this is his luxury home where Safi seems totally at ease, oozing an affect of comfort and affluence.

Bilal’s work being less photogenic than Safi’s, he preferred to film videos outside. On one occasion, I lent him the pit bull dog I was fostering for a video shoot in the streets near his house. Bilal had got changed into the clothes his mother had sent from Pakistan, a dark green salwar kameez with a bright blue waistcoat and leather Peshwari sandals, and instructed me to film him walking along the main road. His demeanour changed as he began sauntering, his stride confident, his gaze slightly off-camera, one arm outstretched, while the dog strained on the lead on the other. He seemed to exude a sense of ownership over this same road which he darted in and out of to avoid the police each day.

When working in the poultry farm, Tariq barely left work at all, both living and working in the same remote farmhouse. But on occasions when he did have a few days off and could travel to Ioannina, he took video after video in front of monuments, water features and along the bustling high street. As Bilal highlighted in his contrast between working hard all month and taking 1 day off, these fleeting moments of filming allowed one to ‘enjoy’. Indeed, even when he was homeless in Athens, Tariq told me he ‘enjoy’-ed when he took videos in front of the Acropolis with the friends he had made on the streets. Both spatially and temporally, Bilal, Safi and Tariq’s TikTok creations offer a marked contrast to their offline lives. Any concerns about papers, work, money, shelter or the police seemed to be totally obliterated, offering an escape from chronocracy, if just for a moment.

There are certain gendered tropes in many of these videos, including a confident, stereotypically masculine stance with hands in pockets, a slow swagger towards the camera and the wearing of sunglasses, leather jackets and tight jeans. There are parallels with the aesthetic choices of the ‘gulfan’, the man who has migrated from Kerala, South India, to the Gulf in Osella and Osella’s (2012) work. The aesthetic on display suggests that, as Elliot (2016) puts it: ‘emigration . . . is . . . a recognizable bodily attribute’ with signs of ‘the outside . . . in men’s eyes, posture and stride’ (p. 494). Such an aesthetic tells part of the story about what binds these men in a networked publics with others on TikTok. Yet it does not explain what motivates this carefully crafted impression of prosperity, ease and comfort in this ‘outside’ space which melts away the realities of chronocracy for those few seconds of video content. To understand this, we need to consider who these videos are for.

‘It’s like acting’

While these TikTok videos tend to insinuate glamour, leisure and confidence, a closer look at musical choice suggests a self-reflexivity and even an irony to these young men’s TikTok creations. Both Tariq and Bilal lip-sync to Punjabi artists AP Dhillon and Gurinder Gill’s ‘Insane’ which opens with ‘Eh Munde paagal ne sare, gallan vadi’am vade laare’/‘All these guys are insane, all talk and excuses’ (in Punjabi). Such lyrics imply their positionality as among these ‘insane’ guys, potentially even suggesting that others have found their ‘gallan’/‘talk’ of being in Europe hyperbolic. In another video, Safi smiles at the camera while reciting the lyrics to ‘Sikandar’ by Amar Sehmbi which are explicitly related to living and working abroad, even mentioning the inability to get time away from shifts (‘Shiftan de Vich Time ni Lagda’). Since these songs are shared again and again through ‘imitation publics’ (Zulli and Zulli, 2022), this ironic element to the TikTok content appears to be a form of communication and connection primarily to the other young men who live and work outside of Pakistan, who understand the realities of ‘shiftan’. This subtly conjoins them in solidarity with their networked public and reflects Lee et al.’s (2022) finding that TikTok affords an identification and sense of connection with similar others on the platform. If we are to understand a ‘public’ as sharing ‘a common understanding of the world, a shared identity’ (Livingstone, 2005: 9) then this awareness of both hardship and deception, as well as a shared aesthetic, joins these young men in a networked public with others who are similarly chronocratically positioned.

When consuming others’ content as well as when creating their own, all interlocutors were aware of the ways reality could be manipulated for TikTok. As Tariq said: ‘it’s like acting’. Yet this shared, ironic awareness of the ‘acting’ forged subtle, mediated connections. Some connections with others in the networked public were fleeting, such as Safi’s nod of recognition as a video appeared on his ‘For You’ page of another man packing strawberries on a production line while ‘Sikander’ played. Other connections were more sustained such as Tariq’s engagement with a user whose videos he often emulated and with whom he exchanged comments and emojis such as ‘nice bro’, a yellow face wearing sunglasses, a flame or a row of black hearts. TikTok mediated connections tended to be briefer, more tenuous and subtler than the intense entanglements of relationality within these men’s non-mediated publics, or, as my interlocutors would call them, ‘bhai’/‘brothers’, with whom they lived, worked, and often shared advice and support to survive in Greece. While one’s non-mediated network might facilitate a job offer, engender new contacts to navigate Greece’s asylum system or send phone top-ups when one was in detention, such relationality often revolved around practical concerns related to the navigation of chronocracy in Greece. As a result, many young man I knew felt beholden to someone who had helped them or, conversely, exploited by those who they had supported, often enjoining them into complex hierarchical relations. While there was slippage and overlap between networked publics and non-networked publics, the cheery, encouraging comments and likes as well as the shared ‘acting’ among the networked public on TikTok allowed for entry into a more straightforward, light-hearted and ‘fun’ relationality than with their more constrained and complex offline publics.

The TikTok algorithm likely prioritises certain content produced within this networked public, relegating the less aesthetically pleasing videos and boosting curations which better evoke affects of success and style. The pressure to create such videos, while dealing with homelessness, poverty or racism, could be described as yet another layer of chronocratic labour that these men must contend with. Despite my expectation that scrolling through a ‘For You’ page filled with impressions of prosperity could fuel feelings of inadequacy and temporal exclusion, I noticed how Tariq, Safi and Bilal would more usually become excited and upbeat when scrolling through others’ videos. Rather than the chronocratic exclusion which I often sensed in other areas of life, these men’s keen awareness of the ‘acting’ involved when watching the videos of other individuals in similar situations to their own was more likely to inspire creative ideas for how to approach their own content. I was also constantly struck by the way the men mentioned throughout this article appeared to be largely indifferent to the reception of their content. I never once heard expressions of disappointment or pride at how a post was received. Tariq’s focus always seemed to be on the process of creation as he uploaded at least one video a day, usually gained a handful of likes, and never mentioned pursuing a strategy to yield more likes or followers. Safi did once mention to me proudly that he had ‘a thousand’ followers but appeared indifferent when I asked which videos got the most likes, instead showing me his ‘favourite’ video: a comparably unpopular post of him lip-syncing a famous Bollywood quote. My lack of ethnographic evidence for the way TikTok functioned as chronocratic labour could be due to the comparative pressures of chronocracy in the space of Greece itself which meant time on TikTok, whether scrolling, interacting or creating, felt like a welcome break. Another contributing factor, I would argue, is due to the prism through which these men saw TikTok, as I explore in the following section, as ‘a kind of dignity’.

‘A kind of dignity’

23-year-old Shahram told me: ‘I cannot show my old friends in Pakistan that I am in a bad situation, otherwise it will be bad for my parents, they will say ‘“you sent your son for this situation?” It’s a kind of dignity’. This reveals the presence of family as a potential additional imagined audience ⁴ to anything posted on TikTok, apart from yet linked to their networked public. Family could view content directly or, more likely, they might hear about or get an impression of their sons’ online selves via ‘old friends’ or young people who remained in Pakistan and followed my interlocutors’ profiles. As Bilal and I scrolled through his TikTok profile over shisha in a bar in Athens, he said: ‘our family sacrificed so much for us to be in Europe, think how much they paid? We don’t want them to know how bura’/‘bad’ our lives are here, we want them to be happy’. This reasoning alludes to a moral duty to maintain deception to protect one’s family both from the gossip of other young people in Pakistan and from the emotional turmoil kin might feel if they knew of the struggles their sons really faced. Indeed, all my interlocutors’ families used their savings, sold land and sometimes went into a lot of debt to pay people smugglers for their child to reach Greece. With huge sacrifices made by family in the hope that their son would then become the successful breadwinner, these young men wanted to ensure that any public impression they created online would ensure their family remained unaware of their ‘bad situation’, so that their family could be ‘happy’.

If TikTok profiles were ‘successful’ in concealing their ‘bad situation’ from family members then there could be a disparity between impressions of affluence created and the money many of these young men could afford to send back to their family. When I was sitting in that same shisha bar with Bilal, his phone screen lit up. ‘My sister’, he said. ‘I cannot answer, she will just ask me for more money’. Despite his fondness for her, Bilal told me he struggled with the pressure put on him to send money each month, on top of sending money to their parents. On another occasion, Zain’s brother called and convinced him to send extra money home. ‘Why did I post those photos in the Christmas market?’ said Zain regretfully, referring to a polished montage of photos he had just posted. He continued: ‘how can I get my papers if I send all my money home? I can never save money’. These exchanges highlight the ways phone calls from kin can be hazardous as well as comforting (see also Geschiere, 2020: 346) and the ways the impressions one makes on TikTok can become entangled in these relationships over distance, potentially increasing one’s vulnerability to money-seeking kin.

Curating hope

After Bilal watched back the video of him walking down the street wearing the salwar kameez his mother had sent, he said: ‘meri ammi xus hogi’/‘my Mum will be happy’. Even if his mum was not looking directly at this post, her potential gaze was palpably present. As denoted in Shahram’s desire to avoid making his parents feel guilty about sending him into difficulty, TikTok offers a platform where one can purify one’s life of the ‘bura’ or ‘bad’ to remain morally upstanding vis-a-vis kin. There is a parallel here with an interlocutor from Sierra Leone in London, mentioned in Jackson’s (2020) ethnographic work, who cannot drink alcohol in the same room as the picture of his father. While all these individuals are physically far from kin, they feel an ethical obligation to perform in a certain expected way under their gaze. It is as though a ‘past’ time of kinship enters in, imposing expectations on the present. What all these distant kin had, in making the sacrifices that Zain reminds us of, was an idea that something better would come in future. Sacrifice, as Bloch and Adorno (1988) point out, leaves a gap or something missing which gets filled with hope.

In Bloch’s (1986) The Principle of Hope, he describes how it is only by moving away from ‘the closed static concept of being’ that ‘the real dimension of hope opens’ (p. 18). In the case of these young men, statis would mean an acceptance of chronocracy and a lack of coevalness. Whether it is Safi shaking a cocktail shaker from side to side in a restaurant he barely leaves, Tariq lip-syncing in front of the lake in Ioannina on his rare days off from work or Bilal sauntering down a street where he fears arrest, I have argued that these moments of creating for TikTok allow a momentary freedom from the exclusionary temporality that ordinarily prevails. These moments of filming are ‘bounded activities that provide escapism from the realities of the everyday through “tasters” of how things could be otherwise’ (Bryant and Knight, 2019: 155). They illuminate how an ‘otherwise’ or a ‘not-yet’ might look; owning a dog, having leisure time to explore tourist sites or simply enjoying the freedom of walking with confidence. Given the chronocracy these young men contend with, such imaginings of a future ‘not yet’ that ‘will never follow the present’ (Nielsen, 2014: 178) convey a temporal incongruity that Miyazaki (2004: 108) argues is central to the production of hope.

Given the attempts to retain dignity in front of kin, I argue that this TikTok content reflects the hopes for the future that these young men imagine their kin in Pakistan to have. While, in its everyday sense in social media creation, curation refers to the careful arrangement and presentation of different items to create a desired effect, in this context, these young men are curating images and videos in the present to reflect others’ imagined futures. In a way these hopes for the future have travelled with them as they crossed Iran and Turkey and they remain unfulfilled now, years later. These TikTok creations are an attempt to reflect the hopes that their kin had of their sons’ success, affluence and comfort in Europe. What we see played out on TikTok is hope ‘once removed’, an imagination of another’s hope or a reflection of a reflection. These young men are curating hope in an active, continual process to keep hope among kin alive, despite the increase in pressure that curating in this way can create.

Conclusion

While they contend with chronocracy offline, I have highlighted these young men’s use of TikTok to protect family from nefarious talk in relation to their ‘bad’ lives in Greece as well as to connect them in subtle, ironic and light-hearted relationality with other young men in similar positions to themselves. I suggested the darker side of this presentation of a life of ‘dignity’ online in the increased pressure to financially provide for kin in a way which reflects the impression created. Despite this, I have argued that creating TikTok videos momentarily melts away discursive, racialised, bureaucratic and work-related denials of coevalness, incongruously bringing an idea of the future into the present. Rather than specifically telling us about these young men’s future hopes, however, I have shown how TikTok affords curations of the future that family in Pakistan had hoped for their sons. I have thus conceptualised this as a process of ‘curating hope’.

This article reveals the tension played out on TikTok wherein these young men try ‘to be something other than their constraints’ (Di Nunzio, 2019: 27), contend with such constraints and identify with others experiencing such constraints. The ideals of masculinity undergirding such constraints, however, merit further examination, particularly indicated through the macho elements of these TikTok videos, the unwillingness to share hardship with family and the pressure to be breadwinners.

Overall, this article draws attention to ‘the generative capacity of the technological implements in relation to the social projects in which they are embedded’ (Sneath et al., 2009: 18) and sheds light on the importance of thinking about hope, not as an individual matter, but as bound up within ‘social engagement and implication’ (Crapanzano, 2004: 123). This points to the huge scope for ethnographic research to better understand the ways in which various users use and understand social media to imagine life ‘otherwise’. A question which demands further research is the reception of such TikTok profiles among TikTok users in Pakistan and among the kin before whom these young men are attempting to remain dignified. Is Bilal right in saying that people in Pakistan believe that young men in Europe only ‘relax’ and ‘enjoy’ or is there a wider awareness of the curation and concealment involved in social media? How are the lives of those in Pakistan impacted by these repeated narratives of an affluence in migration that is, for these young men at least, not realised in practice? Considering that the hundreds who died in an overloaded fishing trawler on 14 June 2023 likely travelled with similar hopes and pressures to Tariq, Bilal, Zain, Shahram and Safi, the question of social media’s role in deception, enjoyment and hope is more vital than ever.