Paper short abstract:

WhatsApp groups are the infrastructure of Pakistan’s speculative real estate market. I explore the relationship between liquidity and WhatsApp’s sociotechnical features. Contrary to the scholarly emphasis on expertise, I show how liquidity is created through the ignorance afforded by social media.

Paper long abstract:

With an estimated valuation of US$1 trillion, real estate is the most common form of investment in Pakistan and described by critics and proponents alike as the backbone of the country’s economy. At the same time, foreign investment firms are wholly absent in Pakistan due to an entrenched national reputation for political and economic instability. Instead, Pakistan’s real estate market is what I term a “diasporic market” made up of migrant workers living across the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and North America. Subject to temporary work visa regimes, state surveillance, and racialized discrimination, overseas Pakistanis invest their money in the local real estate market in anticipation of an inevitable return home. These remittance transfers are part of a transnational economy that is five times greater than FDA and ODA combined, forming a booming diasporic market that transcends national and global investment.

This paper draws on four years of ethnographic fieldwork in a WhatsApp group for overseas Pakistanis to examine the role of social media in mediating foreign investment. In the absence of foreign firms, WhatsApp’s ubiquity and user-friendliness promise to distribute information and produce consensus about the market. However, the constant stream of data and segmented chains of information found on the app make shared understanding all but impossible. I explore the relationship between liquidity in Pakistan’s real estate market and WhatsApp’s sociotechnical features. Contrary to the scholarly emphasis on expertise, I show how liquidity is created not through knowledge, but the ignorance, obscurity, and manipulation afforded by social media.