The Algorithmic Radical: Rationalization, Obsolescence, and the Disaffection of the Surplus Generation

A generation rendered economically and socially surplus by hyper-rationalization, caught between a dying 1945 political order and an accelerating techno-political system that no longer needs them.

Recently, Türkiye was shaken by two tragic school shootings within twenty-eight hours. A former student attacked a vocational high school in Siverek, Şanlıurfa, and a teenager carried out a deadly assault at a secondary school in Kahramanmaraş. These did not appear to fit the conventional profile of terrorism, as Turkish officials have stressed. They were, by all accounts, deeply personal eruptions of violence carried out by young males who, according to preliminary reports, shared traits common to a growing demographic, social withdrawal, immersion in violent video games, and an online echo chamber that appears to have radicalized their despair. In a country where these types of attacks have historically been rare, the back-to-back nature of these tragedies demands more than ritual condemnation or tightened security protocols. It compels us to confront a structural crisis, the rationalization of society has left an entire generation, particularly young men, adrift in a world that no longer needs their labour, their ambition, or even their presence.

Hyper-Rationalization and Generational Obsolescence

The concept of rationalization, as Max Weber diagnosed over a century ago, describes the relentless advance of bureaucratic efficiency, calculability, and technological control that displaces traditional sources of meaning and community. What Weber could scarcely have foreseen is how digital technology has accelerated this process into hyper-rationalization. Convenience is its outward face. Algorithms curate our entertainment, optimize our commutes, and even draft our correspondence. Yet beneath the surface lies a profound reorganization of human activity. Work that once required physical presence, interpersonal negotiation, or creative judgment is now automated or offshored into code. For young men of Generation Z, those born roughly between 1997 and 2012, the result is not liberation but obsolescence. They graduate into economies that prize credentials over competence, only to discover that the entry-level white-collar positions once reserved for the ambitious have been colonized by artificial intelligence. The home becomes both refuge and prison, a space of infinite digital distraction and zero social obligation.

This is not idle speculation. Multiple analyses from institutions, including the World Bank and Stanford University, have documented the trajectory. Entry-level cognitive jobs, legal research, basic coding, financial modelling, content moderation, and even junior consulting are precisely the roles most vulnerable to large language models and generative AI. A young man entering the workforce today faces a labour market in which the traditional ladder of experience has been sawn off at the first rung. The psychological toll is immense. Stripped of purpose, many retreat into online subcultures that rationalize their marginalization as conspiracy or cosmic injustice. The incel and/or other types of new identities phenomenon, once confined to fringe forums in the West, has found fertile ground in Turkish digital spaces, blending with local grievances and the hyper-masculine aesthetics of first-person shooters. The attackers in Siverek and Kahramanmaraş fit this pattern with unsettling precision, asocial, game-obsessed, and apparently drawn to narratives of heroic retribution against a society that had already written them off.

Technology, we are incessantly told, brings ease. It does. Yet ease is not neutral. It redistributes agency. The same platforms that deliver food to our doors and entertainment to our screens also concentrate power in the hands of a tiny technocratic elite while rendering the rest of us surplus to requirements. For previous generations, industrial labour offered a brutal but legible path to dignity, a factory floor, a trade union, a pay packet that affirmed one’s contribution. Post-industrial society promised a shift to knowledge work, but AI has hollowed out even that promise. The result is a surplus population of educated, able-bodied young men who are neither needed nor integrated. Alienation follows as night follows day. Karl Marx described it as the worker’s estrangement from the product of his labour. Today’s version is estrangement from labour itself. When one’s very existence feels economically redundant, radicalization, whether ideological or nihilistic, becomes a perverse assertion of agency.

The Ossification of Post-1945 Political Structures

Compounding this crisis is the ossification of political structures. Across the democratic world, governance remains trapped in the institutional architecture of 1945, mass parties, parliamentary theatre, and welfare bureaucracies designed for an industrial age of full employment and demographic expansion. The politicians and senior bureaucrats who steer these systems are, almost without exception, products of the pre-digital era. Their mental models were forged in an age when television shaped public opinion, unions mediated class conflict, and economic growth could plausibly absorb each new cohort of school-leavers. They speak the language of “youth engagement” and “digital skills initiatives” while presiding over systems that systematically exclude the very generation they claim to serve. The average age of parliamentarians in most Western democracies hovers well above fifty. In Türkiye, it is scarcely lower. This geriatric stranglehold is not merely a demographic accident. It reflects a deeper refusal to acknowledge that the operating system of politics has been superseded.

Here we arrive at the most consequential insight. Contemporary societies now function with two superimposed layers of authority. The superficial layer is the conventional 1945-style political system, elected assemblies, regulatory agencies, and national media cycles, that still claims legitimacy and dispenses patronage. Beneath it, however, operates a techno-political system, the infrastructure of platforms, payment rails, surveillance algorithms, and data monopolies that increasingly governs daily life. This second layer is populated and understood primarily by the digital natives it serves. Young people navigate it instinctively. They build communities, currencies of attention, and even parallel economies within them. The state can regulate, censor, or subsidise the surface institutions, but it cannot fully control the underlying code. The result is a profound misalignment. The formal political system promises representation and accountability. The techno-political system delivers immediacy, virality, and unaccountable power. When young men sense that the former has nothing to offer them except sermons on resilience while the latter has already rendered them economically superfluous, the gap becomes explosive.

Figures such as Peter Thiel have long perceived this fracture. In works like Zero to One and in his public interventions, Thiel has argued that technological stagnation and political sclerosis are two sides of the same coin. He has criticized the complacency of democratic institutions that prioritize process over progress, and he has openly questioned whether unlimited democracy is compatible with the bold risk-taking required for genuine innovation. For this, he is routinely denounced as anti-democratic or elitist. Yet such accusations miss the deeper point. Thiel and those who share his intellectual orientation are diagnosing obsolescence. They propose acceleration as the deliberate intensification of technological development paired with new institutional forms, charter cities, competitive governance experiments, and a willingness to let markets and code displace failing bureaucracies. In an age when AI can already outperform most human bureaucrats on routine tasks, clinging to 1945 models is performative nostalgia.

Acceleration and the Redesign of Governance

The current context renders this diagnosis particularly acute. A rapidly urbanising, digitally connected society with a youthful population bulge, Türkiye sits at the intersection of traditional patriarchal expectations and hyper-modern technological disruption. Young men are still socialized to see themselves as providers and protectors, yet the economy increasingly has no use for their provision. The state’s response to the recent shootings, swift social-media crackdowns, mass detentions for “misinformation,” and vows of enhanced school security illustrate the limits of the old paradigm. It treats symptoms (online speech, weapon access) while ignoring the underlying pathology, a generation dispossessed by rationalization itself. More surveillance will not restore meaning. More regulation will not create jobs that AI has already automated.

What, then, is to be done? The answer cannot be a retreat into Luddism or nostalgia for industrial labour. Technology is not reversible, nor should it be. The challenge is to redesign the interface between the techno-political substrate and the formal political order so that young men are not mere consumers of digital distraction but architects of their own futures. This might entail radical experiments, decentralized credentialing systems that bypass sclerotic universities, incentive structures that reward physical and creative labour alongside code, and governance models that allow communities to opt out of national bureaucracies when those bureaucracies demonstrably fail them. It will require politicians, younger ones, digitally literate ones, to admit that the post-1945 settlement has reached its expiry date. Acceleration, in this sense, becomes an evolution from the theatre of representation to the engineering of possibility.

The latest incidents are not aberrations. They are early warnings from a generation that has been rationalized out of existence. If we continue to govern as though the 20th-century toolkit remains sufficient, we should expect more such tragedies, not only in Turkish provinces but across any society that has embraced technological abundance without reforming the institutions that distribute its fruits. The young men at home, scrolling through infinite feeds while their skills atrophy and their dignity erodes, are not choosing despair. Despair has been engineered into the system. Recognising that truth is the first, indispensable step toward building something that might once again give them reason to live within society rather than rage against it.