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

T his 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