High-tech stupidity

The government wants every peso, contract, phantom bridge, every gold-plated pothole on blockchain — unhackable and permanent. And public. Brilliant. If only humans weren’t involved.

The Senate passed the CADENA Act. The President called it “urgent.” Agencies must upload everything — budgets, contracts, allocations, material costs. Rationale: people cheat less when they know everyone is watching. Peer pressure, transparency, and public scrutiny certainly can be stronger than laws. 

We already had transparency. FoI. Seals. PDFs. Nobody read them because they were boring and useless. So now the genius move is to upload the same nonsense thousands of times. Can’t tamper with one without touching all. At least in theory. Crooks? CADENA promises no polite warnings. Criminal and administrative penalties. Ignore it, you’re toast. 

Citizen Access and Disclosure of Expenditures for National Accountability. Try reading it aloud and you accidentally summon a migraine. Read the title thrice and you’re not sure if it’s a bill or a prescription for insomnia.

If CADENA becomes law, everyone can fact-check the government. Everyone becomes an instant auditor. Citizens will stare at thousands of files, millions of peso allocations like, “OK, who’s cheating today?”

Democracy at work! Give them a haystack, tell them to find the crook and suddenly everyone is a frustrated robot. Everyone sees everything, no one understands anything. Democracy works when people understand what’s actually happening. Transparency with no context is just torture. And ironically just anesthesia.

And how often will penalties be actually enforced in practice? What will stop officials from claiming excuses? “System downtime,” “technical glitches,” “forgot the password.” What if you upload the wrong data? Genuinely forget to file? Is that criminal or administrative? Could CADENA punish honest mistakes more than actual corruption?

Scope? Who knows. Executive agencies, maybe. LGUs, maybe not. Contractors, maybe, maybe not. Politicians will still funnel money through back channels. 

Blockchain is honest but it’s people. Brilliant at storing lies too. The same geniuses who let billions vanish are now going to type it all into a computer for the world to see. Total genius. We can’t wait.

A crooked official uploads a “completed bridge” that’s really just a pile of sand. Blockchain says “paid in full.” Congratulations! You now have cheating — but shiny, blockchain-certified cheating.

And if, indeed, a crooked official types a lie or mislabels a ghost project, isn’t CADENA just permanently locking the lie in? Garbage in, garbage forever — is that, what? Transparency. But misinformation transparency. That’s the trick. The deal happens in the dark, the money changes hands, and then they upload a perfect story.

Two agencies disagree on a project — who’s right? Which government office actually verifies that the uploads are accurate and complete? Who audits the auditors? 

Ultimately, if CADENA existed before the DPWH scandal, would the floods still have happened? Yes, you’d still be bailing water out of your kitchen; yes, there will be a permanent digital record proving someone got paid handsomely for it. Yes, CADENA is brilliant if your goal is a very transparent cheating.