Cayetano’s live show

Cayetano’s live show | Daily Tribune

Or to be specific about it, is Cayetano rebranding himself as an avatar of our increasingly toxic non-text-based post-literate age? One who’s taking advantage of our emerging era of post-literate, oral-based politics?

Cayetano’s rebranding is certainly there. He lately took to growing a beard, relieving us of his clean-shaven mestizo features, though not of his Bible-quoting parson analog persona.

Anyway, sporting a beard to compensate for his receding hairline or to accentuate his chubby talkative jowls typical of Filipino political dynasties isn’t important.

Instead, the puzzle is his recent pronounced turn to the short form video of Facebook’s livestreaming which raises the suspicion he somehow figured out how to exploit social media platforms in our screen-addled, distracted, and partisan-argumentative age.

Cayetano, however, isn’t the world’s first post-literate politician. The honor properly belongs to wacko US President Donald Trump.

But Cayetano or Trump won’t be the last post-literate politician — that is a politician thriving beyond a politics-based literate culture or a culture where people read.

The Atlantic magazine, for instance, recently reported that “political strategist David Plouffe, an architect of Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, recently argued that candidates should focus each day on content creation. He advised shrinking every idea into something short enough for screen-addled voters to concentrate on. ‘If it can’t be communicated in an Instagram post or 10-second TikTok, go back to the drawing board,’ Plouff wrote.”

So, it seems that wannabe populist Cayetano has something going for him, particularly in light of the fact that “social media, once mainly text-based, has been overrun with short-form videos. TikTok, YouTube shorts, and Instagram Reels dominate the attention economy, especially among young people.”

But while Cayetano is seemingly merely going with the flow, he nonetheless can’t shuck off perceptible political indiscretions a literate political audience has slapped him with.

In his videos, Cayetano obviously isn’t expecting his target audience to spot his contradictions, illogicalities, or recall his earlier wrongdoings — he only expects his target attention-deficit audience to quickly identify him as a “fiery” leader of the opposition.

But his alleged past indiscretions and perfidies are too noticeable for a literate audience to let pass; that despite his new communicative style most wonder if he somehow hasn’t realized that when he points an accusing finger at his detractors three of his own fingers point directly back to him.

A failure aptly illustrated recently when he snidely insinuated that Sen. Ping Lacson’s Statement of Liabilities and Net Worth Assets, had doubled. This prompted a riled Lacson to retort: “Unlike Senator Cayetano with P6.79 billion in budget insertions under the 2025 GAA, I don’t have a pork barrel. I don’t have 25-percent kickbacks; there are also ghost (projects) in Taguig.”

Interesting, too, is the unsettling prospect that Cayetano won’t, any time soon, directly address or account for his actual role in the shocking unanswered question about a private entity that organized the 2019 SEA Games to the tune of billions in government funds that remain unliquidated.