I am not one to celebrate silly special days like this but in honor of my cats who give me joy especially during the darkest days, I am now recognizing this day just for them.

Here I was, a screencap of our Zoom press conference last week with my cat, Kimchi, in her weird sleeping position. During the first Q&A my background was blurred but it looked so unnatural that I had to revert to normal background. And now I have a cat acting out in the background.

Meanwhile, I posted this on social media the other day at the height of my despair that may have something to do with Nas Daily’s exploitation of Filipino indigenous culture.

There is a lot of them out there. They make vlogs about the Philippines–from the fake “I love the Philippines”-type of content to exaggerated reaction videos of anything Filipino/Philippines to exploit the Filipinos’ hunger for validation from foreigners, especially the white ones, by doing Pinoy-clickbaiting.

This happens more often to Filipinos because majority of us are English-speaking compared to other nationalities in Asia, thus, we are very accessible and ripe for this type of click-bait content.

And this feeds into Nas Daily’s strategy. After the controversy with Nas Daily’s exploitation of Apo Whang-od (making a Kalinga tattoo course in Nas Academy), Nas Daily lost 500,000 subscribers. That’s how big his Filipino audience is, or that may just be a fraction of his overall Filipino audience.

Nas Academy also lost some content providers like Catriona Gray and Panlasang Pinoy.

As a half-assed academic, I wanted to write a paper about this phenomenon of commodification of culture by so-called influencers viewed through the lens of neo-Marxism. Like there is this conflict between social equality and freedom. In this context, Apo Whang-od has the freedom to monetize her skill (if indeed she fully understood the alleged agreement between her and Nas Daily) but it is not for Nas Daily to exploit because the designs, technique, tools, rituals, and traditions belong to the Butbut tribe of Kalinga (conflict between individual freedom and social equality). There is a governing body that protects all things concerning our indigenous peoples–to make sure that social equality is protected–that Nas Daily bypassed.

Let’s see how this controversy will turn the tide regarding the exploitative vloggers.