The internet has a pattern. Someone gets exposed, receipts pile up, TikTok stitches roll in, and suddenly we all have a new villain of the week. Right now, one of the M2M is Claudine Co, a nepo baby flaunting a lifestyle that, on closer look, is tied to something much bigger: flood control projects under the DPWH, contracts worth billions, and a system of plunder so ordinary it barely shocks us anymore.
And that’s the trap.
We get distracted by the character. In this case, a filthy rich kid who became a symbol of excess instead of the machinery running in the background. Netizens loves a face, a storyline, someone to meme. But what about the paper trails? The officials signing off? The infrastructure that’s supposed to keep us dry but leaves us knee-deep in floodwater every year?
This is how corruption hides in plain sight. It banks on our short attention span. Personalities make headlines, systems do not. It’s easier to laugh at Claudine’s cringe posts than to parse through government procurement contracts. And by the time the noise fades, nothing changes.
We expose. We trend. We forget. And the floodwaters rise again.
But we don’t have to. The cycle can break if we keep the pressure alive. If we keep the story moving even when the algorithm has moved on. If we call out the rot not just in the characters but in the system that creates them.
So, let’s not wait for the next exposĂ©. Let’s not let this die down. Because corruption thrives in silence, and silence is the one thing we can’t afford.
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