26/02/2026
As the sun sets on the 40th anniversary of People Power, I’m still marinating in the memories, the arguments, the tributes, the debates.
But it was the comments that really got me.
Ah, the comments section. The holy grail of digital sentiment. The online barometer of where we really are as a people; and today, it was something else.
I’ve spent a good chunk of the day reading them all. The ones from people who were there, people who walked to Camp Crame in the dark, who heard the news on Radio Veritas, who felt the moment Marcos left. And the ones from people still waiting for the country those people fought for. All of it. I’ve been sitting with all of it.
This morning I wrote my love letter to the Philippines and why I choose to stay; because forty years on, I still believe the dream is worth finishing.
I meant every word.
And today showed me I wasn’t alone in feeling it. The sheer volume of you who showed up, in person, online, in the comments, in memory, was its own kind of people power.
But it’s evening now. The shrine is emptying. The highlights are posted. The arguments are winding down. And there’s something else I’ve been sitting with all day that I haven’t said yet.
We are very good at identifying tyranny when it wears a uniform.
We know what that looks like. We lived it. Our parents stood on a highway to end it. The tanks, the curfews, the censorship; that tyranny had a face and an address and we marched to it. That’s the version of oppression we teach in schools, commemorate on this day every year, and recognize instantly.
And we should be proud of that. Forty years of keeping that memory alive is a powerful thing.
What we are not good at identifying is the tyranny we invited in ourselves.
A writer named Neil Postman once drew a distinction between two kinds of dystopia: two different ways a society can lose its freedom. He was building on the work of two novelists you may have heard of but whose warnings we choose to ignore: George Orwell, who wrote 1984, and Aldous Huxley, who wrote Brave New World.
Orwell imagined a government that would control us through pain. Surveillance. Censorship. Disappearances. A boot on the neck. Sound familiar?
Huxley imagined something far more efficient: a system that controls us through pleasure. Who needs surveillance when people will document their own lives voluntarily? There’s no need to suppress the truth when you can simply drown it in a sea of irrelevance until nobody can find it anymore. No need for a dictator when distraction will do the job just as well.
“In 1984, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.”
Marcos needed soldiers. The algorithm doesn’t need anything. It just needs thirty more seconds of your time. And then thirty more. And it has learned, with a precision no dictator ever achieved, exactly how to get them.
It doesn’t care whether you’re laughing or furious. Outrage and entertainment are the same currency to an algorithm. It just needs you engaged.
This is what is commonly referred to as the pleasure trap.
It’s not dramatic. It doesn’t announce itself with tanks on the street. It announces itself as entertainment, as connection, as the warm satisfaction of finding your tribe online, people who see what you see, feel what you feel, and confirm every morning that you are right and the other side is lost. It feels like freedom. But it’s the most sophisticated cage ever built.
Because we all walked in voluntarily. We’re still walking in, every time we open the app.
The generation that stood on EDSA had no feed to scroll. No algorithm curating their reality. No notification pulling them back every time they tried to think. They stood in the dark, together, with no guarantee it would work; and they chose the harder thing anyway.
So what is the harder thing in 2026?
Perhaps it’s being willing to be bored long enough for an original thought to arrive.
EDSA didn’t just give us freedom from a dictator. It gave us the responsibility of deciding what to do with that freedom every single day after.
This morning I asked a question that comes up every year: whether EDSA was worth it. My answer was yes; conditionally, impatiently, hopefully yes.
Tonight, as we reflect on those forty years, my question is different.
How do we remain worthy of it?
The people who showed up that day were simply, completely present. That was their superpower. Not weapons. Not wealth. Just a million people who showed up, body, mind, and soul, and refused to be anywhere else.
It was a movement built by people who were completely, fully present at the moment it mattered most.
Ironically, we have never been more connected. Yet we have never been more absent.
The revolution isn’t over. It just moved to a battlefield nobody saw coming; and the new weapon being used against us is our own attention.
Guard it like they guarded that highway.
Happy EDSA, Philippines. 🇵🇭
