The million unpaid eyes
Yesterday, I watched a young Filipino vlogger (EliMoTour) ride a Honda Click 125 from Tagudin in Ilocos Sur to Tineg, Abra, and from there onward to Lubuagan, Kalinga, from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. He was alone, navigating an unfamiliar route through military checkpoints, narrow roads, muddy construction stretches, and increasingly deep darkness. He stopped to ask directions, filmed the magnificent landscape with his drone, ran low on gasoline, found a closed eatery in Balbalan, pressed on to the next town, Lubuaran, and eventually found lodging for the night.
To his viewers, it was an adventure. To me, as a motorcycle rider, it was also something else: a vicarious moving record of a part of the Philippines that most of us will never see. His camera captured people, roads, bridges, schools, barangay halls, settlements, markets, businesses, construction, and landscapes. His drone provided another perspective. He was not conducting an audit. He was making a vlog.
And that is precisely what makes the phenomenon so interesting. The Philippines may now have millions of unpaid eyes. They are on motorcycles, bicycles, tricycles, buses, boats, and cars. They carry smartphones, action cameras, and increasingly, drones. They photograph floods, landslides, raging rivers, damaged bridges, unfinished roads, forests, quarries, construction sites, and public buildings. They record because they want to tell a story, entertain an audience, earn money, promote tourism, or simply preserve a memory. But inadvertently, they are also producing something of enormous civic value: evidence of what the Philippines actually looks like.
And here is where Abra gives us a remarkable historical connection. Long before there were motovloggers, drones, or smartphones, Abra produced one of the country’s pioneering citizen-accountability movements: the Concerned Citizens of Abra for Good Government, or CCAGG.
Emerging from the province’s National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections volunteers in the aftermath of Edsa in 1986, CCAGG decided that watching the government should not end when an election ended. Under the leadership of Pura Sumangil, citizens began checking whether public works actually existed and whether they were being properly implemented. In 1987, the organization alerted national authorities to 20 supposedly completed projects that were incomplete and provided evidence that contributed to investigations of public officials. Over subsequent decades, CCAGG monitored hundreds of infrastructure projects, including roads, bridges, schools, irrigation, and flood control works.
The remarkable thing is that those citizens had none of today’s technology. They had their eyes. They had their feet. They had notebooks, documents, community networks, and the courage to ask questions. Today, the technology has changed dramatically. Imagine what CCAGG might have done with smartphones and drones.
A government project may exist in a spreadsheet. A contractor may have been paid. A completion certificate may have been issued. But somewhere, a Filipino may have ridden past it with a camera. And the camera may show something different. Perhaps the road is unfinished. Perhaps the bridge is damaged. Perhaps the drainage does not work. Perhaps the flood control structure exists but the community still floods. Perhaps the landscape around a project has changed dramatically.
The video does not, by itself, prove corruption. It may only raise a question. But that question can now be located, dated, compared with government records, checked against satellite imagery, and independently verified. That is where the little camera becomes unexpectedly powerful. It is not an accusation. It is a lead.
This is why I find the growing phenomenon of motorcycle and drone vloggers more consequential than it first appears. We tend to dismiss them as entertainers chasing views. Some undoubtedly are. Some take extraordinary risks because danger itself attracts an audience. But while they are chasing the next dramatic shot, they may also be creating a distributed visual archive of the country.
The possibilities are enormous. The challenge is to turn this torrent of images into citizen-generated data: dated, geolocated, and verified observations that communities, researchers, and government can use. Abra showed us four decades ago that citizens do not have to wait for the government to tell them what is happening in their own communities. Today, technology has multiplied their capacity to see.
Perhaps the next generation of anticorruption volunteers will be millions of ordinary Filipinos carrying cameras. For honest public officials, that can be an ally. For communities, it can be empowerment. For researchers, it can be a remarkable new source of knowledge.
But for those who still imagine that public money can disappear without leaving a trace, there is a sobering thought: There may already be a Filipino with a camera on the road behind you.
doyromero@gmail.com
