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.