An Anatomy of Insertion and Inaudible Power: An Esoteric Reading of the 2025 Infrastructure Revelations
An Anatomy of Insertion and Inaudible Power: An Esoteric Reading of the 2025 Infrastructure Revelations
November 20, 2021
The sequence of images supplied—tabulated project sheets, social-media circulations, an Ombudsman press tableau, and a roster of alleged budget insertions—composes a provisional archive of civic knowledge: a forensic palimpsest where contractual numbers, contractor names, and percentages of accomplishment stand in for political intent. Read together, these artifacts narrate a progression: from administrative allocation through technocratic execution to public revelation and juridical response. This essay treats those images as evidence and as emblem—a conjuncture where aesthetics of disclosure meet the quiet violences of budgetary architecture. The tone sought here is surcease: to hold grief and exasperation at arm’s length, to attend instead to pattern, logics, and the institutional choreography that produces the sort of “deafening silence” civic life is so wont to create.
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I. On the Visual Logic of Accountability
The spreadsheets and photographed tables function as instruments of transparency. Rows and columns reduce complexity to legible units: GAA Title, GAA Amount, Contract ID, Contractor, Agency, Contract Amount, and % of Accomplishment. These are the constitutive variables of a fiscal grammar: they organize the public’s right to know into machinic readability. Yet the same grammar can obscure as effectively as it reveals. A 100 million peso appropriation becomes a transactional pulse when paired with a contract ID and a contractor’s corporate handle; in that alchemy, political decisions transmogrify into technical facts whose root causes—why this line rather than another, which lobby forged the clause—are effaced by tabular clarity.
The supplied pages exhibit both the promise and the limit of this clarity. They allow citizens to track progress on Commonwealth Avenue segments, Calaguas-Apurawan cross-country packages, flood mitigation works, and coastal slope protections. They make visible the corporate actors—M Construction Corporation, T.O. Hechanova Construction, Jorgil Builders, and others—whose services are commissioned under the rubric of public good. Yet alongside the transparency is an indexical silence: the taxonomy reveals “what” and “how much” but rarely “why,” and it certainly does not disclose the subterranean politics of insertion—who advocated, with what patronage networks, and to what electoral or private ends.
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II. The Aesthetics of Insertion: Budgetary Lines as Forms of Power
When an elected authority “inserts” projects into a national budget, the act is at once administrative and rhetorical. It appears as a technical correction—an added line within the national appropriation—but in practice it is a micro-politics of allocation. The images referencing an alleged P100 billion set of insertions (ascribed publicly to an instruction by the Executive, per the circulated post) exemplify how insertion acts as a sleek instrument of distributive power. Insertions bypass some of the deliberative friction of standard project pipelines; they materialize preferential treatment in plain sight.
This aesthetic of insertion performs a double operation: it aestheticizes patronage into spreadsheet form, and it naturalizes the presence of particular contractors in specific localities. The repeated appearance of certain contractors across disparate regions, or the clustering of large contract amounts under proximate contract IDs, forms a visual rhythm that signals systemic capture. What looks like mere accounting becomes an index of influence: repeated corporate names map onto political networks, while high percentages of accomplishment in some locales juxtapose with minimal progress in others, hinting at deployment strategies tailored not to need but to political return.
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III. The Temporality of Revelation and the Scale of Public Feeling
The progression represented by the images is temporal: insertion (the budgetary act) → execution (contract awards, percent accomplishment) → revelation (social-media disclosure, civic uproar) → juridical encounter (documents at the Ombudsman and court dockets). This temporal frame matters. Insertions may be slow, bureaucratic acts; revelations are sudden and affective. The PH Headlines post—designed as a viral provocation—compresses the administrative into a single moral claim: that these projects were instructed, centrally, and at scale. The post’s affective metrics (reactions in the tens of thousands) testify to a public appetite for denunciation.
Yet revelation does not equal resolution. The presence of Ombudsman-related documents in a photographed press conference gestures toward institutional pathways for accountability, but those pathways are themselves slow, legalistic, and often constrained by evidentiary thresholds and political will. The press tableau—an image of formal charges or filings—translates social fury into juridical motion. That translation is necessary, but it is also insufficient: law adjudicates culpability; it does not always uproot the systemic mechanisms that made insertion possible in the first place.
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IV. Institutional Theater and the Performance of Anti-Corruption
Public institutions—museums of the civic, in a sense—perform transparency through staged documents and press announcements. The man at the Ombudsman podium holding case files visually stages the state’s response. Such theatrics are not mere spectacle; they are acts of constitutional theater that reassert the narrative of rule-bound remedy. Yet this theater is ambivalent. On the one hand, the staging signals that state mechanisms are responsive; on the other, it can serve to manage dissent by offering the semblance of investigation without guaranteeing systemic reform.
One must be attentive here to the dual politics of image: the social-media post that accuses (and provokes reaction) and the legal portrait that promises investigation. The first inflames public consciousness; the second channels that heat into formal structures of adjudication. Both are necessary, and both are partial. The former threatens public order in its affective intensity; the latter can appear to do so in its temperate proceduralism. Together they are the modalities through which civic anger transduces into institutional process.
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V. Metrics, Merit, and the Question of Proportionality
The spreadsheets’ “% of Accomplishment” column is rhetorically potent. A 94% figure for a rural road and an 11% figure for a large access route like Imus-Bacoor register not just technical status but political prioritization. High accomplishment in a particular district can be read as evidence of effective governance—or as evidence of resource concentration under patronage networks. Low accomplishment on a major link road could indicate either logistical challenge or deliberate deprioritization.
Hence the metrics themselves require hermeneutic caution. Percentages are seductive because they promise objectivity; but they are produced metrics, contingent upon what is counted, when, and by whom. A project labeled 31% complete may be ostensibly underway but effectively stalled by bottlenecks in procurement, rights-of-way disputes, or subcontractor insolvency. Conversely, a 95% figure may represent cosmetic completion—surface treatments without durable infrastructure—if verification is lax. The political valence of percentages thus depends on the auditing modalities that underwrite them; absent rigorous, independent verification, they remain figures of contested credibility.
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VI. The Macropolitical Context: Investment, Confidence, and the Reputation Economy
Embedded among project tables and legal dossiers is a broader macroeconomic backdrop: a reported decline in foreign direct investment and public discourses about governance competence. The erosion of investor confidence functions as both consequence and symbol. When budgetary processes appear opaque or subject to discretionary insertion, external investors interpret such signals as risk factors: unpredictability of regulation, politicized contracting, and the specter of hidden liabilities.
That perception compounds domestic political effects. A polity that reads its public infrastructure as instrumentally allocated—rather than as equitably distributed public good—will rationally lose trust. The reputational economy thus operates reciprocally: governance choices affect investor sentiment; investor withdrawal amplifies economic strain, which in turn pressures fiscal decisions, potentially perpetuating cycles of insertion and ad hoc allocation. This is not merely economic determinism; it is the political logic of scarcity made to serve patronage.
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VII. Toward an Ethics of Disclosure and a Praxis of Repair
If we accept the images as both evidence and provocation, the question becomes: what forms of collective response can transform revelation into structural correction? First, disclosure must be coupled with robust public audit mechanisms—independent, well-resourced, and legally protected. Tabular transparency is insufficient when independent verification and community participation are absent. Second, civic forums must be institutionalized: township hearings, accessible procurement records, participatory budgeting processes that place local needs above political calculus. Third, juridical action must be prioritized without spectacle: the Ombudsman’s procedural momentum should be supported by timely, transparent reporting that demystifies legal timelines for the public without succumbing to performative virtue signaling.
Finally, there is an epistemic obligation. Civil society, media, and academia must collaborate to transform leaked or circulated spreadsheets from sensational images into analyzable datasets. Annotation, cross-referencing geospatial data, and longitudinal tracking of contractor performance would allow citizens to discern patterns beyond anecdote. Such infrastructures of knowledge production democratize the audit function, converting publics into capable co-investigators.
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VIII. Conclusion: Silence Reversed
The images disclose a composite story: budgetary insertion as a technique of distributive power; tabular transparency as both revelation and veil; social-media denunciation as catalytic but partial; and juridical processes as necessary but institutionally constrained. To say the moment is urgent is only to state the obvious; the deeper claim is that the instruments for redress exist but are underutilized or unevenly applied.
This is not a call to rhetorical outrage, but to calibrated, sustained civic craftsmanship. The surcease in tone here aims to foreground method over melodrama: to treat revelation as beginning rather than terminus; to move from indignation to institutional repair; to insist that transparency be retrofitted with independent verification, public participation, and juridical follow-through. In that collective work, the apparent silence of administrative papers is reversed: the spreadsheet ceases to be a mute ledger and becomes instead a ledger of accountability, a ledger that finally records not only expenditures but also the costs of impunity and the price of democratic vigilance.
Amiel Roldan’s curatorial writing practice exemplifies this path: transforming grief into infrastructure, evidence into agency, and memory into resistance. As the Philippines enters a new economic decade, such work is not peripheral—it is foundational.
If you like my concept research, writing explorations, and/or simple writings please support me by sending me a coffee treat at my paypal amielgeraldroldan.paypal.me
Amiel Gerald Roldan
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Amiel Gerald A. Roldan: a multidisciplinary Filipino artist, poet, researcher, and cultural worker whose practice spans painting, printmaking, photography, installation, academic writing, and trauma-informed mythmaking. He is deeply rooted in cultural memory, postcolonial critique, and speculative cosmology, and in bridging creative practice with scholarly infrastructure—building counter-archives, annotating speculative poetry like Southeast Asian manuscripts, and fostering regional solidarity through ethical collaboration.
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