Talking about radicalisation is in vogue — a bit late, but now prevalent amongst the policy circles in Pakistan. Beyond the scope of my article today as it is, the debate around radicalisation in Pakistan revolves around the usual suspects: madrassas, mosques or foreign funding. Yet, in today's Pakistan, extremism doesn't always walk out of a seminary gate. Increasingly, it scrolls out of a phone screen. TikTok, YouTube and Encrypted Chat groups are quietly shaping ideological landscapes — not through overt terrorist propaganda, but through the logic of algorithms that prioritise engagement above all else.

How does that happen?

A teenager in Multan clicks on a religious lecture, and within weeks his feed can be awash with content that grows progressively harder, angrier and more exclusionary. He didn't go looking for militancy — the algorithm found him. But we have not really woken up to this possibility — how could we? We have not even figured out the recruitment drives of the past, way before the internet was the primary focus of extremist recruiters.

Unfortunately, there is little publicly available data about the physical recruitment drives of the 1990s; what happened, which demographic segments were affected most, why?

Of course there is abundance of rhetoric. Zia era, Afghan jihad, etc — all once upon a time stories, but almost no data. While universities and research institutions in the 'West' are wrestling with factors of extremism in multiple subnational theatres, we have not conducted a single authoritative study in the public domain, to find out what happened, and who exactly was affected.

Why should we, when we seem to be perfectly satisfied with conjecture? The universe of code and algorithms probably doesn't even exist in our radicalisation worldview, and even if it does, it is at........

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