The state took them, but the state will not take their memory. What you see here cannot be indexed, searched, or weaponized. The text here is held in shapes machines cannot read, in forms no algorithm can harvest. This is protection after they are gone.
There are no more public spaces for people to gather, let alone for people to grieve.
This project begins from that loss and refuses it. Monuments for the Masses creates digital memorials for community leaders in the Philippines who have been targeted by state violence and spin-doctored into justifiable killings. Red-tagging — the labeling of civilians as communist sympathizers or terrorists — has become the bureaucratic language of extrajudicial killing. This has grown rampant after the creation of the NTF-ELCAC in 2018 under human rights violator, Rodrigo Duterte. Once tagged, a life becomes a talking point. The death becomes a footnote. The memory becomes material for black propaganda by the Philippine government against anyone who is critical of it.
This site exists to disrupt that process.
Each memorial holds an ASCII portrait rendered in Braille unicode — a form that looks like a face but cannot be read by facial recognition software, cannot be reverse-searched, cannot be harvested by the same surveillance infrastructure that made these people targets. The image is present but illegible to the machine. Names exist only as ASCII letterforms that carry the shape of a name without surrendering it to search. There is no author. There are no full names. The person is protected in death.
What remains is the outline of a person. The weight of a face in dots and space. A name in the geometry of letters. Enough to know someone was here. Not enough to hunt them further.
Monuments for the Masses is part of a longer practice of reclaiming the internet as a sacred, personal third space — a place where communities can build what governments destroy: memory, dignity, witness. In a climate of impunity, where killings are justified by accusation, documentation becomes a weapon against the documented. The act of remembering must also be an act of protection.
These are not martyrs made abstract. They were organizers, farmers, fisherfolk, parents, neighbors, and more. They were doing ordinary, necessary work that uplifted communities when they were taken. We hold their names carefully. We do not give the enemy more than they already have.
They will not be forgotten, and we will continue to resist.
Rodrigo Duterte created NTF-ELCAC in 2018, presented as a modern solution to one of the country's longest-running conflicts: the communist opposition led by the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People's Army. The government described it as a "whole-of-nation approach," promising that roads, schools, healthcare, and jobs would succeed where decades of war had failed. It claimed that development, not just military force, would bring peace.
But for many Filipinos, NTF-ELCAC quickly came to represent something very different.
Rather than becoming a trusted peacebuilding institution, the task force became widely associated with red-tagging: the practice of publicly accusing activists, journalists, labor organizers, Indigenous leaders, church workers, students, and opposition voices of communist ties without due process. In a country where such accusations can carry life-threatening consequences, critics argued that these labels placed civilians in danger and narrowed democratic space. Human rights groups repeatedly warned that anti-insurgency language was being used to silence dissent and normalize fear.
NTF-ELCAC also reflected the broader political climate of the Duterte years, when the language of security often overshadowed civil liberties. During the same presidency, thousands were killed in the so-called war on drugs, drawing condemnation from international watchdogs and legal bodies. Duterte is now in The Hague facing proceedings before the International Criminal Court over alleged crimes against humanity tied to those killings, a historic moment that has reshaped how his administration is remembered.
Seen in that context, NTF-ELCAC was not merely an anti-rebel task force. To supporters, it was a determined state response to insurgency. To critics, it was one of the clearest symbols of democratic erosion: a structure that fused development spending, military influence, and political messaging while treating criticism as subversion.
Today, NTF-ELCAC remains a contested legacy of the Duterte era. What was marketed as peacebuilding is, for many, remembered as part of a larger machinery of intimidation and authoritarian rule.