The Malakascene refers to the historical period in which technologically mediated civilisation became unusually favourable to the rise, circulation, self-preservation, and institutional consolidation of narcissists, bullies, demagogues, opportunists, grievance merchants, oligarchs, and psychologically volatile personalities. Distinguished from earlier eras of ordinary corruption or isolated tyranny, the Malakascene is characterised by communication systems that increasingly reward outrage, aggression, certainty, theatricality, and symbolic conflict over restraint, competence, reciprocity, or reflective intelligence. The brute ceases to be an unfortunate byproduct of power and becomes one of its primary adaptive forms.
One sees the pattern almost immediately once attention shifts from individuals to dynamics. The modern populist, nationalist, extremist, oligarch, or media demagogue does not merely exploit instability. Increasingly, they help manufacture it. The politician warning that society is collapsing often accelerates distrust and fragmentation until collapse becomes more probable. The culture warrior insisting coexistence is impossible behaves precisely in the manner most likely to make coexistence impossible. Entire political economies now operate like arsonists selling fire extinguishers. The fear comes first. The justification arrives afterwards wrapped in flags, slogans, podcasts, campaign merchandise, and strategic indignation.
The peculiar danger here is that modern communication systems reward this behaviour structurally. Social media platforms monetise outrage because outrage sustains engagement. News cycles reward volatility because volatility retains attention. Political parties increasingly rely upon emotional activation rather than coherent governance because perpetual agitation keeps coalitions psychologically consolidated. Calm competence rarely trends internationally before breakfast. But a screaming narcissist with a persecution complex, a podcast microphone, and an enemy list can become a global symbolic object by lunchtime. Under such conditions, aggression begins masquerading as authenticity, cruelty as honesty, domination as strength, and ignorance as freedom from institutional corruption.
Meanwhile, the wider world grows more visibly unstable. Wars proliferate. Housing costs detach from wages. Trust in institutions declines across much of the Western world. International systems fracture under geopolitical rivalry while climate disruption, migration pressures, economic anxiety, and technological acceleration combine into a kind of permanent atmospheric tension. Into this fog marches the modern brute: loud, certain, theatrical, emotionally incontinent, promising clarity through simplification while often deepening the very conditions that made populations desperate enough to listen in the first place. The performance becomes indistinguishable from governance. The spectacle becomes indistinguishable from reality. Politics slowly mutates into an attention economy populated by emotionally radioactive personalities who should probably not be left unattended near systems of significant consequence.
These periods come and go. History oscillates between seriousness and intoxication, coherence and spectacle, dignity and vulgarity. Yet the Malakascene feels distinct because the machinery itself has become recursive. The systems generating instability increasingly depend upon instability for their own continuation. Conflict sustains visibility. Visibility sustains funding. Funding sustains platforms. Platforms sustain outrage. Outrage sustains identity. And somewhere inside this recursive amplification loop sits the exhausted ordinary person staring into the illuminated surface of technological civilisation wondering why social reality increasingly feels theatrical, unstable, and emotionally uninhabitable.
Daedelus Kite 