GOVERNMENTS VS ZOMBIES: THE FALL OF MADAGASCAR

MUMBAI: 

In Antananarivo, Madagascar, the power never returned not because the grid failed, but because the people stopped waiting for it. The city's concrete glows ghost-white under a relentless sun, while the air hums with the quiet desperation of millions of phones running on three per cent battery.

No manifesto toppled a president; a digital straw hat did. It wasn't the palm-frond hat worn by fishermen on the eastern coast. It was a pixelated pirate cap lifted from "One Piece", the anime hero chasing treasure across oceans. In Malagasy slang, "treasure meant electricity: a working fan, water that flowed without a queue". Citizens posted the hat beside their profile pictures, no speeches, no party cards just that emblem. Suddenly, thousands wore it.

The state utility had cut power to twelve hours a day, water taps dried up like old promises, onions cost two hundred rupees more than a day's wage for half the city. No hammers, no chants carved into wood. Instead, people filmed themselves washing tear-gas from their eyes with bottled water. A fifteen-second clip amassed two crore views overnight. The algorithm cared only about watch-time, feeding the clip to Paris, Chennai, Lagos people who'd never set foot in Madagascar but still remembered staring at a dead phone in the dark.

The government throttled Facebook, telecoms hesitated because their own ministers posted birthday wishes on the same platform. By the time the slowdown began, the movement had migrated: Telegram channels encrypted in Swahili-accented French. TikTok accounts running on VPNs like lifelines. A leaked cabinet note admitted: "The blackout order was technically obsolete within six hours".

Memes, not manifestos, became the revolution's language. Older Indians still linked revolutions to marches and speeches: Madagascar's children of cheap data skipped straight to the punch-line. A Japanese anime character wearing a straw pirate hat became the movement's unofficial logo. The hero's quest for hidden treasure mirrored the Malagasy desire for a working power line. The joke spread faster than any political tract, spawning short videos set to local hip-hop that TikTok's algorithm pushed to users who had never clicked on politics in their lives.

The format did two things simultaneously. It flattened complex grievances (corruption in the power utility, price of charcoal, joblessness) into a single emotion: "We are done being patient". At the same time, it offered an identity marker that cost nothing. You did not have to join a party, pay a subscription or even show your face; a straw hat emoji beside your profile picture was passport enough.

DÉJÀ VU IN FIVE OTHER COUNTRIES

Zoom out, and Madagascar looks like the latest station on a global metro line where the passengers are under 25 and the ticket is a data pack. Last year, Bangladeshi students brought down Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina after protests against a controversial civil service job quota went viral, forcing her from power and into exile.

In Nepal, a government ban on 26 social media platforms in September 2025 triggered massive Gen Z-led protests. Organized via Discord servers and Instagram, the demonstrations against corruption and elite privilege escalated after police killed at least 19 protesters, culminating in Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli's resignation and the storming of Parliament.

Morocco's parliament is currently negotiating with the "Gen 2 212" movement, whose young activists have used Discord servers to organize protests demanding social justice and an end to corruption. Peru and Indonesia have witnessed similar plot twists: a local grievance plus visual virality plus, crucially, the reaction of the security forces.

The commonalities should interest policymakers worldwide. Triggers are hyper-local a water bill in Antananarivo, a social media ban in Kathmandu but the emotional grammar is global: "Older elites feast while we fast". Platforms differ Discord servers in Kathmandu, Facebook in Dhaka but the choreography is identical: leaderless, meme-driven, impossible to decapitate because no one carries a title. Where the military stays cohesive, governments survive, sometimes bloodily (Peru). Where it cracks, regimes fall (Bangladesh, Madagascar). In Nepal, the state's violent crackdown backfired, intensifying the movement until Oli's resignation.

The Algorithm and Digital Colonialism

The uncomfortable truth platforms avoid in their glossy transparency reports is that their very architecture is built for amplification, not safety. The algorithms that govern our feeds are not neutral arbiters; they are precision-engineered to maximise watch-time and emotional engagement, not social harmony. A video of a policeman slapping a student triggers a primal response outrage, fear, a morbid fascination that keeps viewers glued to the screen far longer than a minister's staid promise of reform. The algorithm, a cold servant of commerce, learns this instantly. Therefore, the slap travels further, faster, and to a more volatile audience. During Madagascar's peak protest days, posts featuring the simple straw hat hashtag reached 14 times more users than the government's own carefully crafted updates. This is no conspiracy, it is code executing its core commercial imperative to harvest attention and sell it to the highest bidder.

This commercial imperative collides with a catastrophic vacuum of responsibility, especially in the Global South. Malagasy is spoken by 25 million people, yet at the time of the crisis, Facebook had exactly two native language reviewers for the entire island. This is not a simple resource gap it is a structural blind spot, a form of digital colonialism where platforms extract data and ad revenue from a region while investing minimally in its safety and stability.

As a result, highly specific local slang like mamono akato literally "kill the chicken," a common street code for attacking a politician sailed straight through automated filters designed for English-speaking contexts. The machines lacked the cultural and linguistic nuance to recognise a coded call to violence.

TikTok's position was even more precarious, with no public policy office for the Indian Ocean region. When violence erupted, the platforms were not just unequipped to intervene: their business models had actively promoted the fight. The referee wasn't watching another game: they were the arena owner selling tickets to the most brutal spectacle and taking a cut of the concessions. The platforms are not neutral town squares; they are gladiatorial arenas where the most inflammatory content is crowned champion, and the price of admission is social cohesion

LOOKING AHEAD: THREE TAKEAWAYS

1. Service delivery is now national security. Reliable electricity, clean water, honest bus fares these are firewalls against viral rage. Every extra hour of blackout is an unpaid internship for radicalisation.

2. The smartphone is the new town-square, but it is a square policed by robots who do not speak Indian languages very well. If regulators do not demand real-time transparency from Big Tech, they will keep waking up to morgues full of children whose last tweet was auto-promoted by an algorithm chasing ad dollars.

3. Gen Z does not want to join your party, it wants to edit the script. Offer a credible audition apprenticeships, cheaper data, vernacular fact-checking or watch them remix the narrative without you. Madagascar's president discovered that a cabinet reshuffle is useless against a meme.

Brijesh Singh is a senior IPS officer and an author (@brijesbbsingh on X). His latest book on ancient India, "The Cloud Chariot" (Penguin) is out on stands. Views are personal