The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines

Vincente L. Rafael

This essay explores a set of telecommunicative fantasies among middle-class Filipinos in the context of a recent historical event: the civilian-backed coup that overthrew President Joseph Estrada in January 2001. It does so with reference to two distinct media, the cell phone and the crowd. Various accounts of what has come to be known as “People Power II” (distinguished from the populist coup that unseated Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos in 1986) reveal certain pervasive beliefs of the middle classes. They believed, for example, in the power of communication technologies to transmit messages at a distance and in their own ability to possess that power. In the same vein, they believed they could master their relationship to the masses of people with whom they regularly shared Manila’s crowded streets and utilize the power of crowds to speak to the state. Thus they imagined themselves able to communicate beyond the crowd, but also with it, transcending the sheer physical density of the masses through technology, while at the same time ordering its movements and using its energy to transmit middle-class demands. At its most utopian, the fetish of communication suggested the possibility of dissolving, however provisionally, existing class divisions. From this perspective, communication held the messianic promise of refashioning the heterogeneous crowd into a people addressing and addressed by the promise of justice. But as we will see, these telecommunicative fantasies were predicated on the putative “voicelessness” of the masses. For once heard, the masses called attention to the fragility of bourgeois claims to shape the transmission of messages about the proper practice of politics in the nation-state. In this context, media politics (understood in both senses of the phrase: the politics of media systems, but also the inescapable mediation of the political) reveal the unstable workings of Filipino middle-class sentiments. Unsettled in their relationship to social hierarchy, these sentiments at times redrew class divisions, anticipated their abolition, or called for their reinstatement and consolidation.1

Calling

Telephones were introduced in the Philippines as early as 1885, during the last decade and a half of Spanish colonial rule.2 Like telegraphy before it, telephony provoked fantasies of direct communication among the colonial bourgeoisie. They imagined that these new technologies would afford them access to colonial leaders, enabling them to hear and be heard directly by the state. We can see this telecommunicative ideal, for example, in a satirical piece written by Filipino national hero Jose Rizal in 1889. Entitled Por Telefono, it situates the narrator as an eavesdropper. He listens intently to the sounds and voices that travel between the Spanish friars in Manila—regarded as the real power in the colony—and their superiors in Madrid.3 The nationalist writer wiretaps his way, as it were, into the walls of the clerical residences, exposing their hypocrisy and excesses. In this sense, the telephone shares the capacity of that other telecommunicative technology, print, to reveal what was once hidden, to repeat what was meant to be secret, and to pass on messages intended for a particular circle.4 It is this history of tapping into and forwarding messages—often in the form of ironic commentaries, jokes, and rumors—that figured recently in the civilian-led coup known as “People Power II.” From 16 to 20 January 2001, more than one million people assembled at one of Metro Manila’s major highways, Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (commonly called Edsa), site of the original People Power revolt in 1986. A large cross section of Philippine society gathered there to demand the resignation of President Joseph “Erap” Estrada, after his impeachment trial was suddenly aborted by the eleven senators widely believed to be under his influence. The senators had refused to include key evidence that purportedly showed Estrada had amassed a fortune from illegal numbers games while in office. The impeachment proceedings were avidly followed on national TV and the radio. Most viewers and listeners were keenly aware of the evidence of corruption on the part of Estrada and his family; once the pro-Estrada senators put an abrupt end to the hearing, hundreds of thousands of viewers and listeners were moved to protest in the streets.5 Television and radio had kept them in their homes and offices to follow the court proceedings, but at a critical moment, these media also drew them away from their seats. Relinquishing their position as spectators, they now became part of a crowd that had formed around a common wish: the resignation of the president.

Aside from TV and radio, another communications medium was given credit for spurring the coup: the cell phone. Nearly all the accounts of People Power II available to us come from middle-class writers or by way of a middle-class-controlled media with strong nationalist sentiments. And nearly all point to the crucial importance of the cell phone in the rapid mobilization of demonstrators. “The phone is our weapon now,” we hear from an unemployed construction worker quoted in a newspaper article. A college student in Manila testified that “the power of our cell phones and computers were among the things which lit the fuse which set off the second uprising, or People Power Revolution II.” And a newspaper columnist advised “would-be foot-soldiers in any future revolution” that “as long as you[r cell phone] is not low on battery, you are in the groove, in a fighting mood.”6 A technological thing was thus idealized as an agent of change, invested with the power to bring forth new forms of sociality.

Introduced in the latter half of the 1990s, cell phones in the Philippines had become remarkably popular by 1999.7 There are a number of reasons for their ubiquity. First, there is the perennial difficulty and expense of acquiring land line phones in the Philippines, and the service provided by the Philippine Long Distance Company (PLDT) and the more recent, smaller Bayan Tel is erratic. Cell phones offered the promise of satisfying this need for connectivity. In addition, cell phones cost far less than personal computers, which are owned by less than 1 percent of the population (though a larger proportion has access through Internet cafes). By contrast, there are over 10 million cell phone users in a population of about 77 million. The vast majority of users buy prepaid phone cards that, combined with the relatively low cost of phones (as little as $50 in the open market and half this amount in secondary markets), make wireless communication more accessible and affordable than regular telephones or computers.

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Notes

My thanks to Pete Lacaba and the contributors to Plaridel, to RayVi Sunico, Tina Cuyugan, Lita Puyat, Karina Bolasco, Eduardo Calasanz, Jose Buenconsejo, and Jose and David Rafael for providing me with many insights into the nature of texting in the Philippines. I am also grateful to those who read and commented on different versions of this essay: Rosalind Morris, Michael Meeker, Chandra Mukerji, Robert Horwitz, Matt Ratto, Paula Chakrabarty, Teresa Caldeira, James Holston, Jean-Paul Dumont, Michael Silverstein, Mary Steedly, Dan Rosenberg, Clifford Kuhn, Susan Rogers, Bruce Morrill, Carol Dahl, and members of the editorial committee of Public Culture.

1. The link between telecommunication technologies and the politics of belief that I pursue here is indebted to the work of Jacques Derrida, especially in such writings as “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” trans. Samuel Weber, in Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002); “Signature Event Context,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); and The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997).
2. See the bundle entitled “Telefonos, 1885–1891” at the Philippine National Archives, Manila, for sketches of a plan to install a telephone system in the city as early as November 1885. By December 1885 an office of Telephone Communication had been established, and the first telephone station at Santa Lucia, Manila, was operational.
3. Jose Rizal, “Por Telefono” (Barcelona, 1889); reprinted in Miscellaneous Writings (Manila: R. Martinez and Sons, 1959) and in various other anthologies of Rizal’s writings. For a more extended discussion of telegraphy and the formation of a wish for a lingua franca among the first generation of nationalists, see Vicente L. Rafael, “Translation and Revenge: Castilian and the Origins of Nationalism in the Philippines,” in The Places of History: Regionalism Revisited in Latin America, ed. Doris Sommer (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999).
4. For an elaboration of other modalities of these telecommunicative fantasies and their role in shaping nationalist consciousness, see Vicente L. Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Philippines History (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), especially chapters 4 and 8 on rumor and gossip as populist modes of communication in Philippine history.
5. For a useful collection of documents and newspaper articles relating to the corruption case against Estrada, see Sheila Coronel, ed., Investigating Estrada: Millions, Mansions and Mistresses (Metro Manila: Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, 2000).
6. The quotations above come, respectively, from Uli Schmetzer, “Cell Phones Spurred Filipinos’ Coup,” Chicago Tribune, 22 January 2001; Ederic Penaflor Eder, “Tinig ng Generation Txt” [Voice of Generation Txt], Pinoy Times, 8 February 2001; and Malou Mangahas, “Text Messaging Comes of Age in the Philippines,” Reuters Technology News, 28 January 2001.
7. Much of the information that follows was gathered from Wayne Arnold, “Manila’s Talk of the Town Isn’t Talk at All,” New York Times, 5 July 2000, C1; “Text Generation,” special issue of I: The Investigative Reporting Magazine 8, no. 2 (April–June 2002), especially 14–21, 28–32; and Elvira Mata, The Ultimate Text Book (Quezon City: Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, 2000), which is especially good for examples of the more common text messages that circulate among Filipino users.